Ending my Macau entry with two of the city's most famous places. At left, the ruins of St Paul's. Built in the 15oo's, it was destroyed by a typhoon in the 1800's. Once the largest Catholic Church in China, it's now undeniably Macau's most famous sight. But 99% of visitors come for the ugly dump on the right, the Casino Lisboa. The entire gambling industry was owned by Stanley Ho for decades, making him one of Asia's richest men. His casinos were strictly for gambling, dimly lit, ugly places packed with gamblers looking absolutely miserable. But Stanley lost his total grip after the Chinese takeover, and there are now new entrants lining up from Las Vegas to bring the Las Vegas style casino entertainment to the Chinese. It's not clear whether they want it, but it will be interesting to see if this seedy little island is transformed into a glitzy Vegas wannabe.

Here are a couple of other sights connected by long treks through urban blight. On the left is a colonial building on Rua de Praia Grande, which is a long road where many Portuguese built their mansions. A few were turned into hotels, which look like nice places to stay. Of course, the great majority of the people are Chinese, not Portuguese, although most of the older Chinese still speak Portuguese. At right is a major Chinese temple, I think called A Ma temple, which is used by fishermen. Macau has its own distinctive cuisine, a blend of Portuguese and Chinese naturally, which is quite popular. A number of the old Portuguese families run restaurants serving classical Portuguese food, which is where we went for lunch because I worked in Lisbon for three years and it brought back memories.

This is some of the ugly cement stuff I refer to in my above journal entry. It's like all big messy Chinese cities, it's got lots of local street life and you'll see lots of strange things as you walk along, but the streets are pretty ugly. The buildings above are from the main square in Macau, where the colonial Senate met up until the handover. That's the best concentration of old buildings, connected by a funky wavy pavement which is actually used all over Lisbon as well.

To quote from my journal, "The trip over, via a 2 hour boat ride, was fun, better than Macau itself. The boat was full of Chinese gamblers, and we watched a Chinese movie about gang wars. Funny that, because Macau was in the midst of one of its periodic gang war phases, which kept most visitors away. The gangs are always fighting about control over various gambling dens, and lots of people get killed, though mostly its gang killing gang. Macau is famous for two things, Portuguese colonial architecture and gambling and the two don't mix. It's hard to do both because you have to do a lot of walking in the suffocatingly hot weather among the ugly modern cement city to find the old architectural sights, which makes you so sweaty you can't even get into the casino. Definitely overrated."

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.