Macau-HK Trip: Day 1

For the past few days (March 5-8, 2010), I was traveling around Macau and Hong Kong with Jessica and Pey Jiuan.

Day 1

I woke up very early on the departure day and took a LRT to KL Central at around 9am. Then, I took the latest KLIA Transit to LCCT, which cost RM12.50 for one way. My experience with this service was good. The train arrived on time and immediately after I got out of the Salak Tinggi station, the AirAsia bus was already there. From KL Central to LCCT, it took around an hour.

For more information, you may refer to:
http://www.kliaekspres.com/erlsb/LCCT/LCCTSchedule/tabid/214/Default.aspx

I reached LCCT at around 11am and met up with Jess and PJ at McD, LCCT. Prior to my arrival, Jess had already informed me that our Toastmasters club member, Uthaya Kumar was also there, waiting for a domestic flight. I haven’t seen Kumar since I left Penang almost 2 years ago. He has now lost some weight.

Around 12pm, we moved over to Old Town for lunch, a bad choice indeed. The service there was slow. After waited for around half an hour, Jess asked one of the waitresses if the food can be served fast as we need to catch a flight. The waitress did not seem to bother and asked us to leave if we cannot wait. When we were about to leave, our food arrived. We ran over to the departure hall after a fast meal.

The journey from the departure hall to the plane was long and hot. The plane was almost full but the seats were not too bad. The air stewards and stewardess were helpful. There was a slight delay and the flight departed at around 1.15pm.

We reached Macau at around 5pm and the sky was getting dark. The weather was cooling, around 23-24 Celcius. We took a cab to Metropark Hotel, which is located in the heart of Macau. The journey was approximately 15 minutes. The cab including the charges for the 3 baggage cost 76 HKD! Expensive! According to the cab driver, before Macau returned to China, there was only 1 casino in Macau, which is Lisboa. Many of the hotels here come with casino.

There were a number of guests at the hotel lobby, queuing for check-in as we arrived. Unbelievably, they were still using manual filling for their records (Note: This is a 4 star hotel). The receptionist’s English was not very good and I had difficulty understanding some of the messages that she was trying to convey. I tried to speak to her in Cantonese to make our life easier but she replied with English. Argh… just let it be. The whole check-in took quite some time.

Feeling hungry, we walked across a few streets and had dinner at a small restaurant opposite Rio Casino. Jess took the meal combo which includes a meal and a drink at 20 HKD. I ordered crab porridge, which is one of the famous local dishes. The porridge was very smooth, with a faint taste of the crab. They gave me the whole crab and surprisingly, the shell of the crab was so soft and crunchy that I can just eat it without using my hands to take off the shell. This cost 48 HKD.

After dinner, we went for casino tour. Our first stop was Lisboa, where we snapped a few photos before departing to Wynn for the fountain show. Wynn is not as flashy as the other casinos. It does not have very bright lightings, but the interior design was really nice. The theme really blends well. Shows in casinos are free. The fountain and prosperity tree show in Wynn amazed me in different ways.

There are free shuttle buses from major casinos and if you want to get free transport around Macau, just hop on one of them. We hopped into one of the buses from Wynn to Macau Ferry Terminal. It was a nice short journey which gave us an overview of Macau. We wanted to catch our hotel bus back. Unfortunately, after much waiting, the bus did not come as per scheduled. Feeling disappointed and tired, we took a shuttle bas to Grand Lisboa, which is near to our hotel.

The crowd in Grand Lisboa was much more than Wynn. There were people at almost every corner in the casino. The workers there were generally older. The interior design looks really grand and flashy. Their customers, surprisingly consists of a number of youngsters, who were in their 20s.

After some tour around the hotel, we finally understood why there were more customers here than Wynn. The shows here seemed to appeal more to the customers – the free show here includes dances by sexy ladies in bikini suits.

On the contrary, the decos in Grand Lisboa did not seem to blend well. But, a lot of the decos are worth photographing. According to Jess, it maybe due to “feng shui” reasons that they were having such decos.

We took a scroll back to our hotel and along the way back, we were surprised that many of the shops were still open as it was already near midnight.

p/s: HKD is widely accepted in Macau. The rate is almost the same as its local currency MOP. For example, if the price of a good is 20 MOP, you can pay as 20 HKD.