Is One Day Enough to Explore Macau?

First of all, is Macau an interesting place? What is worth seeing there? Some people say “nothing”, some say “casinos only” and others say “Portugal architecture and buildings styles, glamorous shopping centres and amazing nightlife”. It is true that Macau is mostly famous for its casinos and it’s also true that apart from it, there is nothing special to do unless you are a shopping freak. Theoretically, you would need to spend there a half of a day if you don’t plan to do casinos. I spent a whole day in Macau but I spent some time inside casinos gambling for fun, just to see how it feels like and it was pretty good. At the end, I lost less than $10 which was a success (I’m usually unlucky). You can easily get casino shuttle regularly going from the ferry station/ airport to various casinos for free so moving around Macau (Taipa, Coloane) is very comfortable and you can save a lot of time this way.

How to get from Hong Kong to Macau?

I lived in Hong Kong Kowloon. I had to take the subway to the Tsim Sha Tsui and find China Ferry Terminal. It’s easy to get the tickets which cost HK$150 each way, the ferry departures every hour or so and it takes 1h 20 minutes to get to Macau. The ferry operator from Kowloon is caller First Ferry. More info here: www.nwff.com.hk/english/schedule/route.asp. There is also the Turbojet service operating more frequently than the one I took.

 Where to eat?

We had our lunch and dinner in one of the casinos called Grand Emperor. We ordered some sushi, a bowl of fruits and some beers and don’t know exactly how much it was in total, but it was super cheap. There is not much food being sold on the streets, but you can find many restaurants around.

Some advice

Don’t forget to take your passport, Macau will earn you the next stamp in it (no visa is required though, most nationalities get at least 30 days visa free stay). Moreover, the currency in Macau is the Pataca (MOP), but Hong Kong Dollars are accepted everywhere. You can see the price tags both in MOP and HKD.

My stay in Macau

I started my day from having a breakfast in one of HK restaurants with Stone- the guy I met on Couch Surfing (CS). We ate lots of different food I have never tried before (unfortunately can’t remember the proper names).  Stone is a very friendly and nice Chinese lad living in Hong Kong since he was 5.

The food we had. So delicious and not expensive at all!

Even Cez enjoyed it a lot which does not happen a lot.

After the breakfast we took the ferry to Macau. We arrived there at 1pm and stayed there till 9pm. We firstly took the bus shuttle to the city centre, had a walk around and went to Grand Emperor Casino where we played some slot machines and lost some money.

We went to a few other casinos to see what they looked like and they were amazing

After a few hours and dinner we decided to get back to Hong Kong as we were pretty bored (I hate shopping and spending too much money on gambling). In general, Macau is an impressive place with nice food and glamorous hotels. It all looked so posh for me. What I like the most was free shuttle transportation so it was convenient to explore the majority of places within a few hours. I was not impressed by the Portuguese style though. There were more modern buildings and skyscrapers around so I guess I couldn’t spot it anywhere.

We ended up in Hong Kong taking some photos of magnificent night scenery.

The very next day, we said goodbye to our French friends and headed back to China to cross the China/Vietnam border to start our cycling adventure across Vietnam.

Bye Bye Hong Kong!