Macau, also known as Las Vegas of East is not quite there, yet! But it will soon be, if you have to believe what locals say and see it with your own eyes - the amount of construction happening in Macau. Super luxury hotels, casinos, neon lights, amazing shows and beautiful people - Macau has it all! plus it also has charm of an old Portuguese colony. But we will come to that later.
We took the Kingfisher flight from Mumbai 11:30 PM and landed at the beautiful and huge HK airport in the morning 8:00 AM. We had planned to go straight to Macau from the Airport. There is a ferry port right at the airport itself to take you to Macau or HK island or Mainland China.
We took the turbojet ferry (www.turbojet.com.hk). The first ferry to Macau was at 10:00 AM and our luggage was directly checked-in to the ferry. i.e., we did not collect our checked-in baggage at the airport. When we bought the ferry ticket at the ferry ticketing counter, we simply showed our flight checked-in baggage tickets to them which they took and issued us new check-in baggage tickets for the ferry. The baggage was directly transferred from the flight to the ferry.
The ferry reached Macau at 11:00 AM and after immigration, we collected our baggage.
We had booked into Hotel Venetian (http://www.venetianmacao.com/en/). This is a must stay if you are going to Macau. Venetian has airport and ferry pickups and drops. There was a Venetian bus waiting to pick the guests arriving by ferry. The bus took 10 mins to reach the hotel.
The check-in time at Venetian is 3 PM and we reached at 12:00 noon. But the staff was very courteous. They requested us to wait for at least 1:00 PM for check-in as room cleaning was in progress. In the meanwhile they told us to visit the Grand Canal Shopping area. Grand Canal Shopping area has been built on lines of Venice, the city of Canals in Italy, hence the name of hotel as Venetian. The staff took care of our luggage and we went ahead to visit the shopping area. Few pictures of the shopping area will give you an idea as to what I mean:
Venetian as the name suggests is a hotel based on the theme of the city of Venice in Italy. There are canals made and a fantastic shopping, activity and eat out area designed along the canals. You can even take Gondola rides in the canals.
Of course Venetian is famous for its Casino and you must play a little to experience the thrill... but only a little because very few people end up winning and if you are winning, move on, collect your money and get out fast.
You dont need to worry about food in Venetian. It has a fantastic food court which serves variety of cuisines.. from Chinese to Italian to Fast food and even Indian. You can also get plenty of vegetarian options. For those of you who are health conscious there are a couple of options as well. So the food court is well covered and serves everyone.
Useful Tip: The Four Seasons hotel and Venetian are interconnected and the Four Seasons is less expensive than the Venetian. So you can stay at the Four Seasons and yet take all the advantages of the Ventian.
Next up... Hong Kong!
