Macau - Sunday, October 17

Sunday represents the adventure part of the title of the previous post, though it wasn’t the crazy, rollicking, danger-filled sort, replete with black humor amid scads of gore. That was at Pacific Place, when I shot the mall up and dressed myself in Hermes and Burberry, remember? Man, I shot the shit out of that mall.

I woke on time – sort of – and dragged my ass a little bit. If one has no granola, putting Cheerios in one’s yogurt works just fine, in case you were wondering. I always want something salty, though, even at breakfast – after a bowl of cereal and a Cheerio-laden container of yogurt, I still had to stop myself from making a plate of cheese and crackers or even cooking up some soup. Perhaps I’m diabetic after all. Or maybe I just love food.

After packing a bag for Macau (a task that, as you know, was drunkenly started the night before, when I continued to ride the Carnival party train to the cleaners, department store, and my apartment), I walked over to the ferry terminal and bought a ticket in Super Class. I just wanted to see what Super Class was all about, and I knew I would be riding in economy class for the trip home, and I discovered that there’s not much difference save for the food (you get none in economy, unless you wanna purchase it) and the fact that you get to disembark first. Whoop-de-fuckin’ doo. Glad I paid double. Actually, it was kind of cool – more leg room, and you are seated up in the front of the boat, which is a huge tri-foil (like a trimaran hydrofoil) that rises up out of the water once it gets going. The boat is a lot like an airplane, down to the sound of the huge engines powering up as we sat at the dock – there’s a seat belt, tray table, evacuation instruction card, and barf bag. The snack consisted of a couple half-sammies (one tuna and one salami and cheese), a freaky cake-type thing, two huge red grapes, a single cherry tomato, and this strange, gelatinous, opaque, neon lime green pudding – some bizarre blend of pudding and gelatin, I don’t know – that tasted like…I’m not sure. I think this is what Hello Kitty would taste like if you could taste the essence of Hello Kitty. Or like dessert on a spaceship in the future, or on one of the Matrix ships or something.

Ok, so back to the jetfoil thing. We slowly cruised out of the harbor and then opened it up. Once this thing gets going (about 60km/hr), it destroys everything else on the water. Really moves. On the way home, we passed another one of the same type going the opposite direction, and they look pretty cool, all up out of the water and skimming along on the three keels, tearing a wake through the relatively calm seas. To our right – er, starboard – we saw green, rock-strewn islands ringed with huge, blond boulders. It reminded me a little of the West in the USA. A resort or two popped up along the way, but for the most part the islands looked completely uninhabited.

The trip takes about an hour, give or take a few minutes, and you enter Macau Harbor under a huge, modern suspension bridge. Once there, you zip through customs and the ever-present temperature screening zone with the workers all masked up, and head to the bus and taxi area. I was immediately hounded by pedicab dudes who wanted to take me somewhere, and I briefly considered getting in one and saying, “Hac Sa Beach” just to see the look on his face (Hac Sa is a long freakin’ pedicab ride from the ferry terminal. Let’s just say that it might have taken until sunset and killed the guy anyway). I walked over to the cab stand and grabbed one to Hac Sa (“black sand”) Beach, hoping to get in some good sunning time on the beach. Dig – the taxi doors open and close automatically via this little mechanism that the driver operates. It’s not that amazing, but it was kind of cool for a slightly crappy car. I was looking for the handle and boom! - the door closed on me.

During the drive over, I saw the ancient buildings and mansions and all that, the casinos, the tower, the two huge bridges that connect Macau (the main island) with Taipa and Coloane (the two smaller islands that make up the rest of Macau), and the vast harbor leading out to the South China Sea. We drove along a beautifully manicured and landscaped causeway that had huge statues of the various animals of the Chinese Zodiac – leastways that’s what I thought they were. Dog, bull, monkey, ram, you get the picture. They were mostly carved of some sort of whitish stone and were about twenty feet tall. The merging of the two cultures – Portuguese and Chinese – was evident everywhere, from the architecture and landscape to the food and customs. The signs are all in both languages, with a periodic nod to English here and there, and traffic circles abound.

We reached the beach in about 15-20 minutes and the ride cost me 80 bucks – about ten dollars US including tip. Much more expensive than the bus, but what the hell. The same ride in the five boroughs would have been about 30 or 40 bucks. Shit is so cheap over here. I walked down to the beach and discovered a beautiful little inlet, about a half-mile wide or so, with a row of cute, identical homes to the right and a huge Westin resort off to the left in the distance. Families were playing in the surf, laughing as the waves rolled in and splashed their rolled-up pants and shorts, though no one was actually swimming (the red flags were out, signaling dangerous conditions, though it looked fine to me. Perhaps there was a real bad undertow or something). The interesting thing about this scene – well, there were two interesting things: first, everyone was having a really good time just splashing in the surf, which seemed odd to me since it’s just a flirtation with the ocean as opposed to a full-on make-out session; second, people ovah heah don’t really wear beach clothes to the beach. They wear jeans and dress slacks and dress shirts, and the most casual outfit is comprised of shorts and a t-shirt. No bare chests, no bathing suits except for one or two toddlers. And I’m serious about the dress slacks – older cats were just out in the surf with honest-to-God polyester dress slacks rolled above their knees. I slugged some water, shed my shoes, and joined them in the strange reverie. It was nice to dig my toes into the sand and make contact with the ocean, however minimal; it reminded me of swimming in Thailand and thinking to myself, “Damn, I’m now swimming in an ocean on the other side of the world.”

The sand here is not all silvery black, like the northern beaches of Maui; rather, it’s a blend of tan sand and black sand, interwoven like the way a black-and-tan pint looks when poured properly, the colors slowly shredding each other into a sort of tiger-stripe pattern as the two beers mix. Oddly enough, the sand at the water’s edge is very fine, while the sand farther up the beach is a) quite grainy and b) all tan. I think it has to do with land reclamation or something, since that’s how it is in Miami Beach and those beaches were built back up using dredges back in 1980 or so. At this end of Hac Sa, the pine trees shade most of the beach except for a small strip near the surf break, so I decided to walk down toward the Westin where the beach was more expansive, laid bare to the sun’s rays. I saw all sorts of children at play, climbing and exploring among the rocks that formed the seawalls and steps, making sand castles and little estuaries, shit like that. I reached a remote area upon which to display my white tubby glory and set up my little towel. I sunned myself like Jub-Jub at Troy McClure’s pool for about an hour or so and just listened to the surf crashing on the shore. Nice. I was a little too lazy to put on sunscreen, but I managed not to burn myself. There were a couple gnats here and there, but other than that, everything was perfect. Except, of course, for the unavoidable yet quite manageable fact that I was alone. I mean, that part was slightly wack, but only slightly.

After getting my sun on for a while, it was time to check out Fernando’s, a restaurant which came highly recommended by my colleagues and gets rave reviews on the web. People be talkin’ like it’s the best restaurant in Asia, so you know I had to find out whether it was better than the burgers and fries and shakes at Wanna’s Place on Ao Nang beach. Ha ha. Seriously though, people cannot get enough of this little shack of Portuguese culinary love, and it was a big reason for my journey to Macau.

The restaurant consists of two breezy indoor dining rooms with wood tables, checkered tablecloths, and wrought-iron lighting, separated by the kitchen. The kitchen is bordered by a garden of sorts on one side and a large outdoor dining/bar area on the other. There are a couple foosball tables set up in a breezeway.

I walked to the back, where most of the action was, and took a corner table. The clientele consisted mostly of tourists, and there was even a table with a black transvestite. Tons of silver jewelry, huge hoop earrings, a long skirt and long yellow headscarf, a black leotard top, sunglasses that never came off, and these traditional shoes that curl up at the toes, like a Mongol-type shoe. You don’t see many black folks out this way, and certainly few who rock it like that.

The menu is only in Portuguese, but I figured my way around. It’s not that hard to figure out fish, shrimp, pork, veggies, and so on. They only serve one kind of beer, but the wine selection is extensive (not listed in printed form, however; you can peruse the shelf for something interesting or have the waitress recommend something. Portuguese wines only).

I ordered the Portuguese salad, a simple salad consisting of lettuce, onions, huge beefsteak tomatoes, and a simple vinaigrette. The tomatoes were a rich red color and tasted like heaven – and I don’t even like tomatoes. Take that, single cherry tomato on the boat! Hiii-yaaa! I also ordered the prawns with garlic sauce – huge prawns sautéed whole in tons and tons of garlic, served over some greens. Delightful, wonderful, truly heavenly. The bread, baked on the premises, was warm and soft inside with a nice crispy crust – perfect for dipping into the salad dressing and the garlic sludge. I ate it all, including all the bread. I couldn’t stop myself. I was too deep in the throes of gastronomic ecstasy to feel lonely at that point – I had the lovely prawns to keep me company, though their numbers dwindled fast. Insert appropriate Homer drooling onomatopoeia here.

After dinner, I decided to just grab a can to the ferry and head home. I considered checking out one or two of the other sights, like the Church of St. Paul or one of the forts or museums, but you reach a point at which the more stuff you do alone, the more you actually court loneliness, and I needed none of that. Moms wants to check out Macau, and we’ll get a chance to go all those places when she comes to visit this week. I had accomplished the primary goals of the beach and Fernando’s anyway.

The ride back in the taxi was swift, this time over the other huge bridge, and I made it back in time for the 5.05pm ferry. I settled into my seat, threw on some Harder They Come at nap volume, and drifted off into a nice little nap as soon as the boat left the harbor. I woke at one point to the sudden rise and fall of the boat, something that hadn’t happened on the way out – the seas looked calm, but perhaps we traveled over the wake of a ship or something. The boat was lurching by several feet, creating the sensation of a rapidly dropping elevator or a plane in turbulence. Most folks found it more fun than scary or annoying, and it was kind of a funny way to wake up. I still felt like I was halfway in the zone of Morpheus (the real one, the god of sleep, not the dude with the blue pill and the red pill); it’s such a pleasant, delicious place to be. I love sleep, and so do may others, but you don’t enjoy it when you’re actually unconscious. It’s the half-awake state, that moment of falling into or emergence from the depths, that one finds so wonderful. Freakin’ sweet-ass sweet.

I made it home by 6.30 and proceeded to get into some pure victorlicious chilling (no alcohol, thank you, just the pure flow). Took some Macau notes for this blog, did some ironing…just the random Sunday evening crap. Oh! I forgot one random thing from the end of the trip. As we’re disembarking, this little kid who isn’t paying attention to the swinging glass doors just takes one of the doors to the face. BAM! He immediately starts bawling, and I thought he had cut himself or at least bloodied his nose, since his mom had a cloth to his face when I walked past – but as I rode the escalator (something you do a LOT in Hong Kong), I looked down into the crowd and he was thankfully fine. I think it was just a minor head –smash. It was a little comical, though. I kind of wish the door had made that “duhduhduhduhduh” sound like in the cartoons.

Anyway, that’s it. I highly recommend checking out Macau if you are ever over this way – it’s beautiful, clean, and cheap, and the beaches are better than most you will find in or around Hong Kong. The trip over is only an hour long and costs about 17 bucks in economy class. Can’t beat it. I’m sure I will have more to say and describe when I go with moms and check out the old parts of the city center, the churches and temples, and all that other stuff I skipped.

More later,
Chucky