Day 26 -- Hong Kong and Macau

We had breakfast at the hotel today. Not much there that I could eat, so we’ll call it a carb-loading day—lots of bread and pastries. We extended our reservations for another night before heading out. Left the hotel at 11:00am and took a cab down to the ferry terminal. We got there about a half later and went through customs and the health checkpoint before leaving for Macau. The ferry took just under an hour and a half. Went through customs and another health checkpoint upon arrival in Macau. Hit the ATM for some Macau Patacas and stopped by a tour center to see what they had to offer. Had we opted to do it, it would have been a reasonable price and we would have seen a lot of interesting places, but it also would have meant a lot of riding around and less than two hours of free time after the tour. We hit the city on our own and mostly walked around. The signs are mostly in Chinese and Portuguese, but there were some in English as well. At least we could kind of read the Portuguese to figure out things if there wasn’t any English. We found a café for lunch and briefly checked out the shopping center it was in to see what was there. We decided we should do a geocache while in Macau, so we found one that seemed interesting and meandered to figure out how to get on top of the highest hill in Macau. It took a walk through the city, a ride up in a cable car, and some meandering around the paths. The cache was relatively easy to find. Not a big chance of it being plundered or taken away by people cleaning up the area because the park seemed to have plenty of garbage laying around just off the pathway. We continued on and walked through the city a bit more. The Macau Tower is an attraction that can be seen in much of the city. It’s really just a landmark and place to view the city like the Seattle Space Needle, or the Shanghai Pearl Tower. We made our way over to it and headed up to the top. For some reason, there were two white tigers near the lower level elevators. I guess it’s just some sort of exhibit, but it was just them in a glass room. Cool to see them, but perplexing nonetheless. Up the elevator to visit three different lookout levels. There were some other attractions here at the tower, but I was too big of a wuss to do them. They had a skywalk (walk around the outer rim, 233 meters up (732 feet), outside with no railing, tethered in a harnesss), a less intense skywalk (same as before except with rails), a mast climb (with harnesses, you can climb to the top of the mast atop the tower 338 meters high (1109 feet)), and a skyjump (walk out on a platform, in a harness, rapidly lowered to the ground from 233 meters up by a cable with two stabilizing cables beside you—kind of like a more controlled skydiving or a bungee jump without the recoil). It looked fun, but also cold and I tend to get a little dizzy when I’m up high without a REALLY good sense of security. There were also some bouldering and climbing walls at the base of the tower and a zip line. Grabbed some sodas and water before heading down. We stopped at the Toys ‘R’ Us store on the ground floor of the tower. Bought some pretty inconsequential stuff like Legos and a 20 Questions electronic game. Took a cab back to the ferry terminal, changed our leftover Patacas into Hong Kong Dollars, then managed to switch to the earlier 7:30pm return ferry instead of waiting until 8:30pm. We only had a few minutes, so we had to hustle to get through customs and get to our ferry. I showed Mom and Dad the 20 Questions game and they thought it was pretty cool. We’ll try to look for some for them to give a few people as gifts (cheap entertainment) before we leave Hong Kong. Got back to Hong Kong/ Kowloon just before 10:00pm. We walked to the Hard Rock Café for dinner. The food was good and the entertainment was better (a Filipino cover band). After dinner we walked back to the shuttle pick up in TST and went back to the hotel. It only took me a few minutes to fall asleep while I was flipping through the channels on the TV.