Have Tiara, Will Travel: 2025

Wednesday, 31 December 2025

30 December Macau

Early start this morning as we are picked up at 7.30 to start our full day tour of Macau. We are bused to the ferry terminal and meet up with the other 40 people in our group.

The fast ferry ride is an hour long and smooth. Once through immigration we meet our guide for the day,Cisco. Our first views leaving the terminal is of the headstones covered hillside of the cemetery.

Our first stop for the day is at the statue dedicated to Kum Iam, the goddess of Mercy. It is 20 metres tall and made of bronze. It is quite controversial in that the Feng Shui is all wrong, it cost a fortune of tax payers money and is for a religion not universally accepted.

We head towards the casino precinct which is huge and extravagant.

We have an early buffet lunch at one of the hotels. the hotel is rated 4 star but the buffet was average at best. Their idea of cheesecake bears no resemblance to mine!

After lunch we head to the ruins of St Paul's and then wander through the area to board our coach again. Lots of people everywhere and apparently this is not a busy day!

Back on the coach and we now head to a viewing spot of the Macau Tower. It is 338 metres high and ranked 11th highest in the world. China is in the background

We are now in our way to the A-Ma temple (Ma Kok Mui). The temple is one of the 3 oldest temple and most floods temple in Macau. Built in 1488, it is dedicated to the Goddess of seafarers and fishermen Metsu.

Incense was burning everywhere and the larger or more of the sticks you burnt, perhaps the more devout you are? We had a wander around the nearby street and time to get back on the coach for our next stop at a casino.

We have about 45 minutes to look through the Venetian casino which is the largest casino here, and promotes itself as even larger than the Las Vegas one. People everywhere and the shops are all luxury brands. Minimum bet on the table is something like $500 Hong Kong which is about$100 Australian.

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Back on the coach and our final stop was a photo op of a couple more casinos. Time to head now to the bus terminal where we will be going on the Hong Kong Zhuhai Macao Bridge. the bridge is the world's longest sea crossing bridge tunnel system. It is 55km long and took about 45 minutes to travel. The public buses depart every 2 minutes, 24 hours a day.

Impossible to get a photo of it so you just have to take my word for it that it really is impressive. We get back to Hong Kong and then have to go through Immigration again. They're are very long queues, but because we are seniors we go through a much shorter and quicker line! We then have about 40 minutes to wait for the rest of our group to get through!. We then get on a car with 2 other couples for our hotel drop off. the bridge terminal is near the airport and it takes about 50 minutes to get to our hotel. Traffic became really heavy. We had hoped to be back at our hotel before 7.30 for badly hour but we walked into the hotel foyer at 7.31! A quick trip to put room to do off our bags and then to the middle room bar to be very pleasantly surprised that happy hour goes to 8pm. We are quick to order our 2 for 1 wines. We are a bit hungry so order fried rice and chicken satay sticks to share. A lovely way to end our lovely day of exploring Macau.