The Road to Macau

Unlike most stories on this site, this one is true. I am currently in Macau while on a recruitment trip for work—a quick stopover between mainland China and Mongolia. Macau is kind of like the little brother of Hong Kong just across the bay. It was a Portuguese territory and was returned to China in 1999, just two years after the UK gave Hong Kong back.

My trip here started when I left Guangzhou by high-speed train. It was a little over an hour of flying backwards through the Chinese countryside (all the seats on the train faced backwards) until we reached Zhuhai, the city just north of Macau. Even though Macau (like Hong Kong) is owned by China, there is no direct way to get there because they are still treated like foreign countries.

I got off the train and looked around for the entrance to Macau. There were no signs, even in Chinese (Macau in Chinese is 澳門, pronounced Ao-men). I walked down a little way and finally spotted it, mostly by the throngs of people moving through partitioned walkways into a huge building.

The first step was to leave mainland China. We lined up and I had a nice conversation with a Chinese American man behind me before I stepped up and the guard inspected my passport and visa. My visa is in my old passport, so I had to pull that out, too. Then I went through customs (nothing to declare) and entered the limbo between the two areas.

The next step was to actually enter Macau. We had to go through a security checkpoint, just like in an airport, even though we were simply walking from one side of a line to the other. The woman flagged my bottle of strawberry Coke and I was sad they were going to confiscate it, but she just tested it for explosives (thankfully for everyone it was negative) and I was okay.

Suddenly all the signs changed from simplified Chinese characters to traditional characters. There was also Portuguese under them all. I lined up and went through the immigration checkpoint again, this time to enter Macau. They didn’t stamp my passport, just put a slip of paper inside it (which I promptly lost, as I realized later). Then it was off to yet another customs checkpoint (still nothing to declare) and I was finally 100% in Macau.

The next challenge was finding a taxi. I had read online that it was hard to get a taxi and there was some debate whether they took credit cards or not. Despite the fact that there were money exchange booths approximately every 8 centimeters on the way through the border area, I had no cash to exchange except for $7 USD, which probably wouldn’t have gotten me far. I waited at the tourist information center for ten minutes to see if they could help but when no one came, I just headed out to the taxi stand.

I found out quickly that they did not take credit cards. I did have WeChat pay set up on my phone, but I wasn’t confident it would work, since it hadn’t worked the last time I’d tried it. The guide at the taxi stand suggested getting cash and pointed me towards where I could find an ATM. I headed that way, not feeling confident. The fact is, it is often hard to find a machine that accepts my debit card when I’m overseas. I have gone down a line of ATMs before, getting error after error before finally wrangling cash out of the last one. Also, I had forgotten to tell my bank that I was traveling, so there was that.

I went through all the prompts and then heard that blessed whirring noise that means cash is being prepared. Since the only denomination of money in the machine was 500-pataca bills (the currency in Macau), which was worth about $40, I got out one 500-pataca bill and headed back to the taxi stand.

Macau is made up of two parts: a mainland peninsula and an island south of it. We headed south, crossing over one of the bridges until we got to my hotel near the northern end of the island. The whole trip cost about 110 patacas and when I handed—well, tried to hand the 500-pataca bill to the driver, he got an alarmed look and said he couldn’t break anything that big.

“Okay,” I said. “Let me go into the hotel lobby and get them to make change and then I’ll come back.”

I went to the door and found out it was the casino entrance (I didn’t realize there was a casino in my hotel although Macau is the Las Vegas of China, so it makes sense). I then went back and told the taxi driver to come down a bit and I walked down to the hotel entrance. It was about this time that I realized I had left both my suitcases in the taxi and if he decided to take off and sell all my stuff (worth more than the $12 dollar taxi ride, undoubtedly), there was nothing I could do to get it back. I told the attendants at the front door that the taxi had all my stuff and to keep an eye on it. I was just going to go in and get change. I went inside to the lobby. There was no lobby.

“The lobby is on the top floor,” the attendant said. “You can take the elevator up to it.”

The top floor turned out to be the 38th floor. I couldn’t help laughing all the way up at the sheer absurdity of it. (Incidentally, there is a mall in Asuncion, Paraguay that I swore was designed by someone high on magic mushrooms. I’m not sure that this hotel wasn’t designed by the same person; the impression was strengthened when I later tried to go to the restaurant on the 5th floor only to find there was nothing on the 5th floor and that you really had to go down two more floors to the entirely empty restaurant on the 3rd floor.)

The desk clerk was very nice, and I left my passport with him to get me checked in after he gave me change. Then I sprinted back to the elevator and down to the first floor. The taxi driver was just hanging out and had not absconded with all my worldly possessions, so that was a plus. I tried to give him a big tip for all the trouble, but he just looked distressed and gave me back exact change.

That adventure over with, I went back up to the 38th floor (114 floors traversed in about 3 minutes, for anyone keeping score) and got checked in. They told me there was another elevator to go down to my room on the 30th floor. I assumed there was some secret interior elevator only for guests to get down to the ground floor, but nope. What a silly idea. To go down to the ground floor, I had to go back up to the 38th floor, walk across the lobby and use the other elevator to go down to the ground floor.

Despite all that architectural insanity, it is a lovely hotel. Macau is a beautiful place too, although I mostly hung out in the historic area, not the casino region. It has a great mix of Asian and European that reminds me of the old quarter in Hanoi. Cars all stop instantly for anyone even looking like they might cross the road. I still might get run over here though since they drive on the left, and I keep looking the wrong way before I step into the street.