Macau

[Bamboo Grove]

The plan is to visit Kunming, Dali and Lijiang and if there's enough time Jinghong. I will start to make reservations this coming week.

[Bamboo Grove]

Friday was a school picnic day and we visited the Panda Park, almost just opposite the school. Plenty of other schools there as well, looks like it was a general school picnic day in Macau.

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There were also other animals, like red pandas.

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After the school day I went to the southern most part of Macau, it's in Coloane, like our school. There are two of the beaches of Macau and I walked a costal nature trail, which was nice and totally different kind of Macau. I ended up the walk on the bigger beach, called Hac Sa Beach (Beach of black sand).

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With a rock called Apeman's head, you can see why the name.

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[Big Boy]

What causes the black sand. I know when I lived in the North East of England, it was coal dust. Is it the same there?

[Bamboo Grove]

What causes the black sand.

I wouldn't have had an idea but the all wise wikipedia tells this:

The dark colour comes from the minerals in the water which is lighter than other volcanic beaches like those in Hawaii.

[Big Boy]

Thank you, so same, same but different.

[Bamboo Grove]

My brother and sister-in-law were here so I took them for a sigh-seeing tour.

First we went to the A-Ma -temple, which was built sometimes in the 15th century. When the Portuguese arrived early in the 16th century, according to the legend, they arrived in front of this area with their ships. When they asked where they were, the answer was A Ma cau (bay of A Ma) and so the place got its name.

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Next to the temple is a navigation museum, mainly dedicated to the local navigation history. Some very interesting models there.

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From there we went to the Macau Tower, which is 334 meters high and is also popular place for bungee jumps. It's highest commercial place for these jumps in the world. We actually saw one jump from the windows when high up there, well, for the nano-second, it took for the jumper to go down past the windows. Some ladies obviously thought, it was a suicide jump as there was a loud scream behind me.

Nice views but a very grey day so not good for photos.

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Macau on the right, Zhuhai, China on the left of the river.

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I've placed photos of the rest of the places we went to earlier post; the Handover gifts museum and the Cotai strip casinos and old Taipa, so won't repeat them.

Tomorrow I'm heading to south-west of China, Yunnan (Kunming, Dali and Lijiang) for my winter vacation. More of that later. The nights are quite cold here at the moment, around 10 C and will go down close to 0 C in Yunnan so I will be experiencing Buksida's Japan trip kind of temperatures.

[buksida]

So where is the immigration, on either side of those bridges?

[Bamboo Grove]

So where is the immigration, on either side of those bridges?

There are 3 or 4. I'm not sure where the buses and cars coming from Hong Kong-Macau-Zhuhai bridge cross the border. One is a short ferry trip up the river you see in the photo. Two that you can walk through. The Portas de Cerco - Gongbei immigration is in the northern point of Macau. It took me around two hours to go through that when I first crossed the border. The other one is in Coloane, called Hengqin border crossing. That took me only half an hour last time and I'm going there tomorrow. Then you need to take a train (20 minutes) or a bus (45 minutes) to the Zhuhai train station.

[Bamboo Grove]

In Finland it is common to have a pre-Christmas party in work places so we had one here as well. We went to a place called Sky 21. It gets its name because it's located on the 21st floor of the building. Nice place and a nice view. In Macau standards it wasn't too expensive; I had four beers and we all shared food, which was a plentiful portion of small hamburgers, pizzas, tacos, chicken etc. Around 500 MOP and the food was 214 MOP each.

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[Bamboo Grove]

+6 C and raining this morning. Feels like Finland in November. Should slowly start getting warmer now.

[Bamboo Grove]

We have presidential elections in Finland and so I went to Hong Kong to vote. After voting, I took the MTR to the Chinese border at Lok Ma Chau. This was said to be a quicker one to cross the border than the old Lo Wu crossing. It was quite good as it only took about 20 minutes for me to cross the checkpoint to Shenzhen.

The main point of my coming here was to see the lanterns in the Chinese Folk Village. The lantern festival ends the Chinese New Year or the Spring Festival celebrations but these lanterns have been on show since December.

I went there after dark and in my opinion, the lanterns were really impressive. Also the village is worth another visit as it exhibits the different minorities living in China. There are 56 minorities. I just walked around the area and took photos of the lanterns.

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The next day I went to have a look at a book shop, which claims to be the biggest in the world. I don't know if this is true but it surely was a big one. Bought two books and before returning to Macau I also had a look at the big electronics market in Shenzhen. As I wasn't planning to buy anything and most of the things they had, had no prices, I didn't stay there for long. An exception to not having prices where the drones, which started from something like 30€ up.

Again during these two days, I had been walking quite a lot so I decided to go back home. Took the metro to the harbour and a ferry back to Macau. On the way we went under one of the world's longest, if not the longest bridges, the Hong Kong - Macau - Zhuhai bridge, which is 55 km long.

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Shenzhen still has quite a few places I want to see and as it is only one hour ferry ride from Macau, I will surely visit it again.

[Big Boy]

Very colourful, thank you.

[Lost]

All looks amazing BG. Very jealous. Glad you've settled into your new life well.

[buksida]

The lantern festival looks great, I bet there will be a lot to photograph over New Year.

[buksida]

Whats the weather like in late May, or early June? Searches say rainy season, same as Taiwan.