9. Macau, July '98

As I was scanning the photos for this trip, I couldn't remember much about Macau. As you probably know, it was a Portuguese colony for about 500 years before being handed over to China a couple years before the much more famous handover of Hong Kong by Britain. It's a small island off the southern coast of China, reached by hydrofoil from HK. I was living in Hong Kong at the time, so I think this was just a day trip. And as I looked at the photos, I was thinking that it looked pretty cool, with a lot of colonial charm. So I was quite surprised when I read my writeup in my travel diary. I bought the book about a year after the trip, so what I wrote wasn't contemporaneous with the trip, but since the memory was only a year old, it was probably fairly accurate.