I sent this postcard to my paternal grandma one month after I moved to Hong Kong for my junior year abroad.
This was my first of two trips to Macau, both just for the day and both on my own (the second trip was in 1994, after I had moved back to Hong Kong).
Macau is now the glitzy Vegas of Asia, but back in the 90s, it resembled the old downtown Vegas: seedy, retro, and sleepy.
My (maternal) grandparents and uncle visited Macau in the 60s and 70s and I imagined it hadn’t changed much when I first went in 1990.
“There was an overnight steamer,” my uncle told me, “and a 3 hour ferry.”
When I went to Macau, I took either the 1.5 hour hydrofoil or the 1 hour jetfoil, which I chose over the 3 hour slow ferry. I don’t remember hearing of an overnight steamer.
“We traveled to Macau without passports,” my (maternal) grandma said of her trip there in the 60s. (I used my Hong Kong ID card instead of a passport, but if I hadn’t been a Hong Kong resident, I would have needed a passport to enter Macau when I went there.)
“Yes, and when we got off the hydrofoil in Hong Kong,” my uncle added, “nurses greeted passengers from Macau to give them smallpox vaccinations if they didn’t already have them.”
Okay, so things had changed in 30 years.
My ferry ride was in the 1980s. So it would not have ended by the typhoon in 1971. Vanessa has good memory about Fat Shan ferry that was sunk by the typhoon. Landing in Maucau around 6 a.m. sounds right too. The ferry had a lot of people and many just take it slow. I slept on the ship and it was quite comfortable. So many years ago…
the ferry that sank was the fat shan in 1971, a schoolmate’s father was the captain who perished. after that, no more sailing in typhoon 8.
there was a brill market that set up nightly in the car park in front of the old immigration shacks, dubbed poor-man’s night market. it had fortune tellers, food stalls, chinese opera singers, snakes, all … See Morekinds of fake goods etc. when that closed around midnight you could go onto the ferry where you could carry on the night’s entertainment even have a flutter on the slot machines (illegal in hk) in readiness for the serious gaming experience of the tables in macau. i did this once but found it too tiring. not sure what time the ferry set sail but it arrived in macau about 6am. in 1977/8 the fare was hkd20 for a seat in second class as opposed to the 35 dollars for the hydrofoil or 40 for the jetfoil.