Macau in one night or two

One night gives you a different place entirely. The coaches leave in the late afternoon, the old town empties, the lanes behind the main street go quiet, and you eat dinner in a Portuguese restaurant that has been in the same family for forty years while nobody at all photographs it.

So our position is simple. Macau is worth a night. Two nights is comfortable if you want both halves of it. A day trip wastes the ferry time and misses the town at the hour it is best.

What Macau actually is

Three things at once, which is the confusing part.

A Portuguese colonial town. Portugal administered Macau from the sixteenth century until 1999, which is longer than any other European presence in Asia. What survives is not a museum quarter but a working town built in the Portuguese manner: pastel churches, black and white calçada pavements, baroque facades, azulejo tiles, squares with fountains in them, and street signs in Portuguese and Chinese.

A Cantonese city. The overwhelming majority of the population is Chinese, the temples predate the churches, and the daily texture of the place is southern Chinese with a Portuguese overlay rather than the other way round.

The largest casino district in the world. The Cotai strip on reclaimed land between Taipa and Coloane, with resorts modelled on Venice and Paris and London, generating gambling revenue that dwarfs Las Vegas. It sits four miles (about 6 km) from the old town and feels like another continent.

The trick to enjoying Macau is deciding which of the three you came for. Most of our travellers come for the first, tolerate the third, and are surprised by how much they like the second.

Getting there

By ferry. From the Hong Kong Macau Ferry Terminal in Sheung Wan or from Kowloon, roughly one hour, with departures through the day and into the night. The most pleasant way to arrive.

By bus across the sea bridge. The Hong Kong Zhuhai Macau Bridge carries buses in around forty minutes plus border formalities at each end. Faster in theory, and the immigration halls can absorb the difference.

From the airport. There is a direct ferry service from Hong Kong International Airport for passengers in transit, which is useful if Macau is the start of the trip rather than the middle of it.

The border. Macau is a separate jurisdiction from both Hong Kong and mainland China, with its own immigration and its own currency. For most Western passports it is visa-free, and Hong Kong to Macau and back counts as two more crossings in your passport. We confirm the current rule for your nationality and dates in writing rather than assuming.

The currency is the pataca, pegged to the Hong Kong dollar, and Hong Kong dollars are accepted almost everywhere at par. Cards work in hotels and larger restaurants. Carry cash for the small places.

One night, done properly

The version we build most often, and it starts later than people expect.

Arrive after lunch. There is no advantage to being in the old town at eleven in the morning, competing with every day tripper who caught the nine o’clock ferry. Take a mid afternoon ferry, check in, and start walking at four when the light is better and the streets are emptying.

The old town on foot, late afternoon. Senado Square with its wave-patterned pavement, the Church of St Dominic, the lanes climbing up to the ruins of St Paul’s. The facade of St Paul’s is genuinely striking and it is also the single most photographed object in Macau, so see it at six rather than at noon. Behind and around it, the streets nobody walks: St Lazarus with its restored houses and design shops, the fortress on the hill, the Moorish barracks, the A-Ma temple at the southern end which is older than the Portuguese arrival and gave the territory its name.

Dinner, which is the point. Macanese food is one of the world’s first fusion cuisines and it exists almost nowhere else. African chicken, which came by way of Goa and Mozambique, in a sauce of coconut, chilli and peanut. Minchi, minced beef or pork with potato and a fried egg, which is a home dish more than a restaurant one. Bacalhau, salt cod, prepared in several ways. Pork chop bun, a whole chop in a crusty roll, sold from windows. Serradura, a sawdust pudding of cream and crushed biscuit. And Portuguese wine, which is priced sensibly here in a way it is not in Hong Kong.

We book the restaurants that matter and tell you which of the famous ones has become a queue rather than a meal.

The casinos, if you want them. A taxi to Cotai takes fifteen minutes. The resorts are free to walk through, extravagant in a way that has to be seen once, and there is no obligation to gamble. Some of our travellers spend an hour and leave. Some stay until two. We do not have a view either way.

The next morning. Egg tarts for breakfast, the Portuguese kind with the caramelised top, at one of the two shops that made them famous. Then the ferry back before lunch.

Two nights, and what the second buys

The second night buys the villages, and it changes the trip.

Taipa village. A few streets of pastel houses, the Taipa Houses museum on the waterfront, small restaurants that are not aimed at the day tripper, and a food street that is a real food street rather than a themed one.

Coloane. The southern island, still green, with a village square that looks like a small town in the Algarve, a chapel, a black sand beach at Hac Sa, and the original bakery that invented the Macau egg tart in the 1980s. Coloane on a weekday morning is one of the quietest places within an hour of Hong Kong.

The walking. Coloane has a proper trail system across its hills, and Guia Hill in the peninsula gives you a lighthouse, a chapel with sixteenth century frescoes and a view over the whole territory.

A proper long lunch, which the one night version never quite allows.

Two nights is what we build into romantic Hong Kong and Macau in 5 days, and it is the version people write to us about afterwards.

Where to stay

Three distinct choices, and they are not the same trip.

The old town, on the peninsula. Small hotels and a couple of grand old ones, walkable to everything historic, and the right choice if the Portuguese town is why you came.

Cotai. The big resorts, large rooms at rates that are frequently lower than Hong Kong for double the floor space, pools, and a shuttle bus system that runs everywhere. A good practical choice with children, and a fifteen minute taxi from the old town.

Taipa village. The quiet middle option, near enough to both.

Rates move sharply with the calendar. Macau fills at weekends, during mainland public holidays and around the Grand Prix in November, and a Tuesday can cost half what a Saturday costs. We price your actual dates.

When to go

The same calendar as Hong Kong, with one useful difference. Macau is the least seasonal part of a Hong Kong trip, because the old town is walkable in most weather and the museums, churches and resorts are all interiors. If your dates fall in the spring fog or in high summer, Macau is the part of the week that suffers least, which is a genuine argument for putting it in the middle of a bad-weather trip. The detail on the wider calendar is in Hong Kong month by month.

Typhoon signals affect the ferries. From May to November we keep the Macau leg flexible and our partner team reworks it if the harbour closes.

The honest paragraph

Macau is not Hong Kong’s equal and we would not build a trip around it alone. The old town is small and you can walk the whole of it in an afternoon. The casino district is impressive and hollow. Parts of the peninsula are traffic-choked and unlovely.

What it is: a genuinely distinct place, an hour away, with a food culture that exists nowhere else and an evening atmosphere that the day trippers never see. That is worth a night, and for most people it is not worth three.

Plan this trip

Tell us your dates and Asaf will build Hong Kong and Macau as one trip, with the ferry times, the restaurant bookings and the right number of nights on each side. Free, and with no obligation.

Start planning

Keep reading

• Hong Kong: the complete guide to planning your trip
• How many days do you need in Hong Kong?
• Hong Kong in four days, district by district
• Dim sum, cha chaan teng and what to order
• Romantic Hong Kong and Macau in 5 days
• All our Hong Kong trips

Frequently asked questions