Too busy!

Hong Kong (and Macau)

Online information said the fast boat to Macau left every 15 minutes but we arrived at the ferry terminal to discover it's only every hour. Unfortunately it was very overcast so that even though we had window seats for the hour trip across the bay visibility was poor.

On arrival we took the free shuttle bus to the Grand Lisboa casino and walked to Senado Square.

From there we headed to the famous façade of St Paul's church. It was incredible how many people were there, we think most of them would have been Chinese mainlanders. The streets were cobblestone like Portugal, there were a lot of shops, many of them selling beef jerky which seemed to be incredibly popular. 

The crowds were overwhelming so we headed back to the Grand Lisboa to get another shuttle, our goal being to visit one of the larger casinos on Taipa Island, about 30 minutes away. It wasn't clear where we should catch the shuttle from, after asking for assistance we discovered that to get a free shuttle ticket back to the port you had to enter the casino part of the complex, take the escalators down to the basement, go to the opposite back corner and collect your ticket, after which you need to fight your way back through the crowds, go around to the side of the building,  join the queue and wait for a bus. Talk about making it difficult!

Once back at the port we took another free shuttle to the Venetian. The casinos are heavily modelled on the Las Vegas ones, including a replica of the Eiffel Tower at the Parisian, and a copy of Big Ben and the houses of Parliament at The Londoner. The Venetian was also like what we'd seen in Las Vegas with a fake blue sky painted on the ceiling, and an indoor river with gondoliers. 

We had ended up in what was pretty much a massive shopping mall full of designer shops. Quickly we decided we'd had enough of the crowds and the commercialism and found our way back out to head for the ferry terminal. We had hoped to make the 6pm boat but the earliest tickets available were for 7pm.    

We finally made it back to our hotel, we practically made it all the way from the ferry terminal on HK Island to our hotel in Kowloon travelling by train and walking underground without needing to go outside, exposed only for the last 20 metres or so when we had to cross a road to get to our hotel!