Macau: The Las Vegas of Asia (Part 1)

On my second day in Hong Kong (July 5), Jason and I decided to take advantage of the fact that we didn't need to get a visa to go visit Macau and we boarded the ferry. My last blog post show a few pictures from our walk through the harbor and a couple aboard the ferry.  The TurboJet is really something to behold. I don't know how fast it actually goes, but it's a hydrofoil ferry and it's max speed is 45 knots (thank you, Wikipedia, for helping me get my "facts").  Forty-five knots is approximately 50 mph (thank you, Google, for your easy conversions. I think that paints the picture that this is not what most of us picture as a typical ferry. 

The trip across the Pearl River Delta is really wonderful. There's a lot to look at in terms of island scenery and skylines.  What has struck me most about looking around at the scenery in Hong Kong is this:  Hong Kong is crazy densely populated, but the land is not all developed.  I probably could have read about this in preparation for my trip, but let's be real, that's not how I roll. I don't have a source for this except to say that our camp director who spends about six months per year here in HK said that only 60% of the land is developed. Looking across the islands, that seems to be a reasonable estimation. The pictures below are not from our trip to Macau, but it gives and idea of what HK looks like. In my opinion, there's an absolutely beautiful balance between the mountains, sea, and city life. 

Sunrise view from my residence hall room on the 27th floor

Basically the same picture

The night time view out of my room

Basically the same, but in the upper right corner you can see a tall, lit up building. That's the IFC (International Financial Center), the tallest building on Hong Kong Island. There is apparently a laser light show down in the harbor, which I can't see from my room, but I can definitely see the scrolling lights and words across the IFC. It was funny the first time I noticed because all of a sudden there was a huge smiley face traveling up the building followed by a notification of the time of night. 

This picture was taken from the lounge on my residence hall floor, which is basically the back view from the 27th floor .  So, here you can see how the mountains and greenery are really integrated, or rather, the city is integrated into the mountains and greenery.

This, of course, is not phenomenal photograph, but just a view from the lounge.

My plan was to write all about our trip to Macau in this post, but I'm out of time and need to go to work. We'll just have to call this Macau, part one.