17th July 2025

Yay! I started off on my “Around the World in 40 Days” adventure today.  While I have certainly been blessed to say that I have pretty much travelled the world throughout my adult life, I realised as I was planning this trip that I have never actually travelled around the world.  That is, I have never circumnavigated it!  My initial plan was to do New Zealand, but when I saw that the travel time there eastwards is pretty much the same amount as the travel time westwards, I thought that when I got there I might as well just keep on going around the world until I got back to London again!  And thus my travel plans for the summer of 2025 were hatched!

The first flight on this epic adventure was one from London Gatwick to Dubai, and then a transfer onto another one from there to Hong Kong.  Emirates flights are just amazing, there are so many different nationalities of both passengers and crew, it seems like an airline which really does connect the whole world.  I had a back row seat on both flights, my favourite as there is no-one behind me that would potentially irritate me, and I settled back into watching “LOTR: The Fellowship of the Ring” to prepare me for my time in New Zealand, and “Moana” to prepare me for my time in the South Pacific.  In fact, the excellent Moana soundtrack pretty much became the soundtrack theme for this whole trip.

While I have already visited Hong Kong, back in 2007, I was planning this time to visit nearby Macau, another Special Administrative Region (SAR) of China.  Though rather than having been part of the British Empire from 1841 to 1997, Macau was instead part of the Portuguese Empire from way back as far as 1557 until more recently 1999.  Thus, the Portuguese-influence in this tiny little territory of only 13 square miles (Hong Kong is incidentally 428 square miles while Singapore is 284 square miles) is very much evident today, as I was to discover.

Upon arrival in Hong Kong International, I headed for the very interesting bus connection from there directly to Macau.  A ferry connection is also an option, but running only once a day it didn’t match my flight times.  I found out on the way there that you can only import 19 cigarettes, and read that there are severe penalties for going over the limit (I must add here that I am a very casual smoker, only at weekends, with company, and while I travel).  I was carrying 59 in the backpack that I had checked in, so this was on my mind a lot for much of the journey there.

I bought my bus ticket from a counter in the HK terminal – the staff there then collect your checked-in bag for you and deposit it in another terminal from where the bus leaves, whereupon you collect if yourself and board the bus.  In the meantime, they told me Hong Kong immigration also check your bag, so I was quietly having kittens about the cigarettes.

The bus was just amazing, over the longest sea and land bridge in the world – the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge (or HZMB) at a whopping 34 miles long.  I had a choice front seat with excellent views all the way, and could really see how tiny Macau was, surrounded by the sprawling Chinese city and skyscrapers of Zhuhai – I was convinced they were there to remind tiny little Macau who is now really the boss.  I got my passport checked, and then headed to immigration where I went through the “Goods to Declare” lane for the first time in my life.  To my great relief, the customs officers were very friendly and supportive, and firstly seemed surprised that I had declared my 59 cigarettes, and then seemed as relieved as I was when they found and showed me an Internet page with translation saying I could take in up to €200 of goods – they must have found this loophole for me!  I beamed, and was happily on my way again.

Taking a taxi from the bus terminal at rush hour meant it took a whopping 40 minutes through horrendous traffic for the five- mile journey to my hotel.  The taxi driver was super-friendly, but spoke absolutely no English, and neither did he understand my smattering of Mandarin that I had learned, nor of course any Portuguese – the people there are mainly Cantonese-speaking.  We got there in the end!

Now normally I travel alone, but since meeting a fellow solo traveller and world adventurer in Australia last year, we have since been able to do a smattering of travelling together.  David lives and works in China, and thus we arranged to meet up on my world adventure for these four nights in Macau, and we had a lovely time.  After catching up again in the hotel, a lovely boutique place on a rather grubby central city street, we had dinner at the local McDonald’s, and a vodka and lime drink back at the hotel, before a very welcome bed and horizontal position for the first time in 22 hours – yay!

Gosh it’s hot here!  34 degrees on my first full day, with the tropical sun and the humidity.  After a late start, we left the hotel and stopped off at a nearby bakery to enjoy a pastel de nata each, or a custard tart in English – these are perhaps Portugal’s most famous sweet treat, and it was so cool seeing them here in this little Portuguese corner of China!

We spent the next four hours exploring the gorgeous Old City of Macau, while trying to remain in the shade at all times!  Top sights included the Largo do Senado square, which with its beautiful Portuguese cobblestones and the occasional azulejo decoration here and there, felt like someone had lifted it straight out of the streets of Lisbon and plonked it here in the sweltering tropics.  Nearby was the 16^th century Igreja de São Domingo, which had a special place inside “Reserved for Catholics” away from the bustling conveyor belt of visitors where we sought refuge from the crowds.  After a while I got told off by a security guy though for stopping my prayer and looking at my phone to check the route to our next destination – the guy told me “you must pray!”, which I found hilarious!  We then continued up a hot and sweaty climb for awesome views from the early 17^th century Monte de Forte, over not only the Portuguese Old Town below, but on to the gleaming, enticing buildings and skyscrapers of the casino district beyond which we were to explore later.  Up there was the small and interesting, but also packed, Museu de Macau, with the territory’s history and Portuguese connection explained well.  We were accosted there by a super-friendly group of Chinese students who wanted to practise their English with us – David says it happens a lot in China.  It cheered us both up!

The absolute highlight of our visit to the Old Town just had to be the ruined façade of the Church of São Paulo, also dating back to the early 17^th century, the structure that often features on typical tourist pictures of Macau.  While it was hard to get a good photo position without the crowds, and while it was also boiling out there in the heat without any shade, it was a really beautiful sight to behold, and this iconic image of the place really reminded me that I was on the road, travelling again!  After a delicious lunch at a Spanish place that David saw earlier: chicken curry, Portuguese rice, tomatoes and goat’s cheese, and two Portuguese beers each, we headed back to the hotel for some seriously-needed rest, recuperation and air-conditioning until the evening.

That night we were hitting the tiles!  Or rather, the casinos of Macau.  There seemed to be two main casino hotel areas in town – one there on the Macau Peninsula on which we were staying, and one across a bridge and onto the artificially built-up island of Taipa-Coloane.  We went to the latter on this evening, and it was amazing!  It was just like Las Vegas which I’d visited just three months prior, though without the shows and swimming pools.  There were certainly as many casinos though, and just as much glitz, glam and excess.  The Chinese are notoriously a gambling nation, and here they were bussed in from the neighbouring Chinese city of Zhuhai and beyond in their thousands – over 100,000 per day apparently!  The gambling tables were full and seriously buzzing, and when there was a win there was a huge cheer – it felt quite different to the more quiet, cool and collected concentration on the games that seemed to be happening in Las Vegas.  We visited Macau’s very own versions of Vegas’s Venetian and Parisian, but also its Londoner which doesn’t exist back in Vegas.  This was the English-themed place, and it had its very own Big Ben and Houses of Parliament outside, red phone boxes, tube replicas, a statue of a bobby on the beat, and even an Eros Statue from Piccadilly Circus.  I loved this place, and felt quite at home!

We had dinner in the Food Court of the Grand Canal in the Venetian, with the same fabricated dusk-sky above confusing one’s circadian rhythm as it does back in Vegas.  I had ramen, David had chicken and rice, washed down with beer and a very powerful local spirit called bai jiao, which was well into the 50s in alcohol percentage, and very much fuelled our conversation!  We took a taxi back to the hotel to call it a (rather late!) evening!

The next morning, excited after the casino hotel excess of the day before, we were eager to explore more, so this time we took a bus to the other casino hotel area on the Macau Peninsula, which seemed like the older, original one.  This area was centred around the grand old dame of the Grand Lisboa, Macau’s most iconic building to my mind, as the tall skyscraper seems to just sprout up out of the Macanese streets below like a giant tropical bamboo shoot.  We had brunch there, before exploring the casino hotels nearby.  First up was Treasure Island, but sadly with no pirate ship in sight like its Vegas counterpart.  We then headed to the Wynn, with its musical fountain show every half-an-hour like Vegas’s Bellagio – the first one we saw was to the tune of Goldeneye, the second a Chinese pop song which many local people seemed to know.  Finally we visited the MGM, noting again that there is very little there by way of shows or pools, as we were hoping to hole up somewhere and chill for the day by a pool.  We agreed that it must be due to Macau catering more to its Chinese clientele who just like to gamble and eat.  Instead we took a taxi back to the hotel again for an afternoon rest.

Our final visit for the day, later in the evening, was to the southern end of town in Coloane, and we found that there was a bus heading there from just outside our hotel which made the hour-long journey to the other side of the territory.  David had found a Michelin-listed restaurant right in front of the old Portuguese church there, and we both agreed that we absolutely loved the area upon arrival.  It seemed very much like Macau must have been back in the day, during colonial times, without the glitz and glam of the casino.  The buildings were old enough to tell stories, while the lapping of the sea shore in the distance added greatly to the ambience.  Our restaurant was empty, while the restaurant opposite was positively thriving and filled with expats.  This was not my scene at all, and there was a really snobby attitude there when we asked if anyone knew where our restaurant was.  Once found, we settled down and had the place to ourselves.  We had the signature duck dish, along with crispy beef noodles and a tomato-egg dish which is apparently really popular in China, washed down with two beers each and the same 50-something per cent spirit again.  I’m seriously going to have to look into that next time I’m in China!  It was a lovely way to spend our last evening in Macau together.

The next day David and I bade farewell and parted ways, until our travelling paths were to meet up again once more.  David was heading to the airport to fly back to China, while I took a taxi back to the Macau Port again, heading back to Hong Kong International Airport to continue my adventures around the world with my next flight on to Auckland, New Zealand!

I will write about that in my next one!  Suffice it to say here, I was considerably excited!