The Bacalhau

There are good and bad places to wake up. An overbooked Chinese overnight bus is nowhere near the top. On the other hand, by the time you wake up the bigger part of the journey is most likely over, and you can take some comfort in the hope that you will soon be leaving this tin can and enter a more congenial environment. So at seven in the morning we found our drowsy selves in the middle of a nondescript parking lot in Zhuhai. I learned later that Zhuhai is at the center of a region called the Chinese Riviera. To me it looked more like the Chinese Freeway Gas Station, but maybe I didn't see it in the right light.

Eventually we found a cab and got to the border, where our identities were checked and our passports stamped a couple of times, even though we were not technically leaving China. The last few days of our journey would be spent in the Special Administrative Regions of the People's Republic of China, two small quasi-countries that, although part of China, are not exactly Chinese. Both have their own laws, currencies and passports, are very cosmopolitan, and extremely interesting.

The first of these, Macau, is unusual in nearly every way. Being both the first and last European colony in Asia, it was administered by the Portuguese for four hundred years. Its cuisine and culture show an improbable blend of Cantonese and Portuguese influences, best sampled in the Portuguese restaurant A Lorcha where we had dinner. The old town is full of cross-cultural statuary, like the Statue of Guan Yin, which depicts a Holy Mary who apparently converted to Buddhism. Barely half as big as the island of Manhattan, the territory is divided between a peninsula and two main islands. The remotest of these, Coloane, looks like a lost part of Europe's mediterranean coast, gentle hills dotted with small fishing villages almost cut off from the outside world. The peninsula, in contrast, is a solid mass of high-rise housing that barely accommodate Macau's population, the world's densest.

No presentation of Macau would be complete without mentioning gambling. The Portuguese legalized the practice in 1850, and it's been growing enthusiastically ever since. For most of the last half-century, the entire gambling industry was the legal monopoly of Stanley Ho, a self-made billionaire of prodigious business acumen and, judging from the art collection showcased in the lobby of his flagship casino, spectacularly bad taste. In recent years the monopoly has been broken and many local and international investors have joined the table, first building around the many small casinos in the old town, and more recently reclaiming five square kilometers of land that are currently being transformed into Macau's version of the Las Vegas Strip.

We checked in at the Wynn, mostly because we had fond memories of its namesake in Vegas, and vaguely snoozed in our room for about two hours, fully engrossed in the task of adjusting to our new-found comfort. For me the excitement of traveling comes mostly from contrasting circumstances, and for us our arrival in Macau certainly qualified as a discontinuity. A couple of hours after spending the night in a bouncy smelly bunk 40 centimeters too short, we were in a hotel where they give you a map when you check in and you can sit on a white marble bench while taking a shower.

Eventually we went out, and wiled away the afternoon doing nothing much. As you'd expect from Las Vegas' de facto sister city, Macau used to be run largely by the mob. During the 90's, Macau's triads had such a reputation for ruthlessness that mob bosses in Chicago and Naples told stories about them to their children to get them to eat their veggies. As in Vegas there eventually was a severe crackdown on all this, and the little country has since experienced truly phenomenal growth — at 15% in 2008 it is growing almost twice as fast as mainland China.

The one trade that has survived this transition to orderliness is prostitution, which is so obvious and in-your-face it makes even Bangkok seem prudish. At one point, while cruising the five-star Hotel Lisboa, we found a corridor that was lined with chic boutiques and continuously paced by a dozen very tall, very slim young women wearing very little. It was fairly obvious what they were there for, although we did wonder what protocol should be followed to start a transaction. We never saw anyone talk to a girl or any girl do anything but avert her gaze and walk on indifferently — until she reached the end of the corridor and walked back… There was an official-looking guard at one end, although he didn't seem to take any interest in us or the girls. Anyway, I don't think we fitted their market segment. Caucasians may be seen as walking wallets in most of Asia, but certainly not in Macau.

More than once I was surprised at how much, even in this fully Westernized decor, the town retained a distinctly Asian atmosphere. We sticked out just as much as we had in Datong. The Venetian Macau might be an almost exact copy of its namesake in Las Vegas, but that doesn't mean many Westerners ever stay there, and Macau seems to like it that way. It's not there to attract Westerners, but to be the playground of the very rich of Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore… possibly Shanghai. Observing the patrons is quite telling. In Europe, casinos seem mostly a social obligation. The upper class goes there because that's what they're supposed to do. In the US, while there are a few pathological cases of gambling addiction, many people seem to actually enjoy gambling. They come to Vegas for the weekend simply because it's fun, and tend to bet relatively low. Not so in Macau. People here take gambling seriously. It's a competition. They concentrate deeply and seem intent on winning — even at skill-less games like roulette. I felt even more out-of-place than I usually do in gambling halls. Yet over two days we found a couple friendly tables with cheerful, sometimes english-speaking, patrons. It always remained more tense than Vegas ever is, but we had a good time. Anyway, that's Macau in a nutshell: an Asian Sin City with four hundred years of history as a cultural crossroads. See, I told you it was interesting.