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| the entrance of the ferry terminal |
2nd December 2012 ~ As planned, we started our journey early and from the train station, we had to walk to the ferry terminal. There were actually two terminals for two different ferry companies that could take you to Macau from Hong Kong. We had to pay HKD170.00 for a one way ticket trip as we did not want to wait another one hour for the next trip. The tickets at the counter had sold out so we had to buy from this some sort of black market ticket seller but it was only HKD7.00 extra from the original price so it was alright.
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| the terminal in Hong Kong |
I must say this was the biggest ferry I had ever been on, much bigger than the ferry we had in Langkawi or Tioman. There were a lot of people on that Sunday morning, I wondered whether everybody wanted to go and gamble at the casinos on that particular weekend. However, from a conversation with a group of Malaysians whom we met while queuing up at the immigration counter, these people were actually going to other parts of China through Macau.
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| enjoying the ferry ride |
The trip on the ferry was comfortable. In fact, the seats were more spacious than the economy class seats on any aeroplanes.
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| the jetty in Macau |
The journey across the ocean took about an hour. I saw no one vomitting so everything was okay.
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| taking photo was not allowed here but I did that *OOPS* |
When I thought it was a smooth sailing trip, then only the problem began. There was a LARGE crowd at the immigration checkpoint going into Macau that everything was in a chaos. Too many people, too few counters. We didn't know where the queue should start or were there two lines for each counter or were the people in the line moving or not. We were stuck there for more than an hour. And the most irritating part was people simply jumped queue. At one moment, Shafiq was beside me but after sometime, we were suddenly separated. I didn't know whether this scenario would happen every Sunday or we were just the unlucky ones.
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| outside the terminal |
It was a big relief to be able to clear the immigration and seriously, the authority had to do something about that. There seemed not to be any officers to instruct people to line up properly, or perhaps there were just too many visitors and they couldn't do anything about it.
In order to get to the historical site in Macau, from the ferry terminal, we just crossed the road. At the bus station opposite the ferry terminal, there were many buses waiting for passengers but most of the buses belonged to the hotels and casinos in town fetching perhaps their regular visitors. After asking around, we were told that we could take the green bus which belonged to Grand Lisboa Hotel/Casino and the ride to and fro was free of charge. Unbelievable! I guess the hotel was doing some sort of community service by offering free shuttle bus rides to everybody.
T O B E C O N T I N U E D ...
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Queue jumping is a culture among the Chinese.
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