China; Saturday, 04 April, 2026

I ended up sleeping all the way through until nearly 9am and woke up feeling refreshed and as if my body clock matched the local time zone, which is always for the best. A quick breakfast in the hotel restaurant and then back up to my room to repack the small amount of stuff I’d taken out of my bag before I quickly booked my tickets for the fast ferry over to Macau.

After checking out of the hotel I walked the short distance to the nearby metro station, with one eye on the sky as the weather was not looking good, though it was difficult to tell if the slight drizzle in the air was actually the start of a forecast thunderstorm, or if it was just an effect of the humidity being so high that it was almost forcing water out of the air.

Thankfully the metro was beautifully airconditioned and it was all undercover from the station into the ferry terminal, these days housed inside a shopping and office complex. The ferry company recommended a minimum of 30 minutes to clear immigration procedures and online lots of posts recommended an hour or more. Given the weather was due to break and that I wasn’t in any rush I ended up getting to the terminal an hour before my departure and was through to the gates in under 10 minutes.

Whilst I had to hang around for some time, the spectacular thunderstorm that ripped around the city for a good few minutes, accompanied by what the weather apps happily described as penetrating soaking rain, made me feel like I’d made the correct call.

The journey over to Macau was pretty uneventful, even if we did set off into the tail end of the storm, which meant most of the departure from Hong Kong was in almost zero visibility, and it wasn’t until we reached the outer islands that it was possible to see things again.

The arrival process in Macau was very swift with me over the border within a couple of minutes of the ship docking and then onto a bus round to the hotel. The Octopus card I’d purchased was one that would also work in Macau (and 300+ cities in mainland China), but can’t be topped up outside of Hong Kong, so I’d made sure to put $300 on it when I got to the metro station. The bus fare to the hotel was $6, I realised I’d probably gone a little overboard with the top-up!

I checked in to the hotel, to find that I’d been upgraded to a Prestige Suite with a corner room overlooking both the Inner harbour and the city, accompanied by a bathroom that was bigger than some whole hotel rooms I’ve stayed in and all ridiculously over the top for a solo traveller, but I wasn’t complaining.

I’d managed to time my arrival perfectly as an afternoon thunderstorm passed through the city, so I decided to wait it out in my room for a little while before eventually heading out and catching the bus down to the Cotai Strip. This area is the centre of modern Macau and, even before its collapse in visitor numbers from 2025 onwards, was already bigger, in terms of both size and takings, than Las Vegas – and in lots of ways a direct copy with the Parisian and Venetian (along with the more recently added, and not in Vegas, Londoner) being just the first couple of resorts you come across.

I spent a good couple of hours wandering around the three resorts taking in the spectacularly over the top creations and the sometimes less than authentic interpretations of the three cities geography and history, with the main advantage being it was all indoors to avoid some not particularly great weather. My visit coincided with sunset, so I was able to see the sites both in the daylight and at night, with them looking substantially more impressive once lit up at night.

I decided to leave looking at any of the other resorts for another evening and instead caught the bus back into the centre of town to grab a late bite to eat before heading back to my room and to spend a good 10 minutes switching off lights and drawing curtains before I could turn in for the night.