Ethnic Variety – What’s available?
Like Singapore, Macau has a mini-UN offering available. The offerings are predominately Chinese, of which there is an extremely good selection. Other ethnicities available are Vietnamese, Korean, Mongolian, Thai, and Russian. I’ve yet to encounter a place that offered Japanese, Indonesian or Filipina, but it wouldn’t surprise if they were available somewhere.
Summary of Venues and Prices
Girlie Hotels
The west side girlie hotels are the best bang for the buck in Macau, to the best of my knowledge. There are some major hotties squirreled away in these joints, and the prices are vastly lower than most of the saunas elsewhere in the city. They are my favorite stomping grounds. For precise locations, please consult my mongering map posted in the Macau section in Discus.
Forsun – located on the main drag of Avenida de Almeida Ribeiro, the Forsun girls ask for $500. Usually the best looking girls on the west side can be found here. About 20-30 girls on offer.
London – located right next door to the Best Western Sun Sun hotel, this girlie hotel provides the largest selection of girls on the west side, of at least 50 at night. And for some reason, they seem to have the biggest chests. Prices here are $300.
Ruby – just 50 meters away from both the East Asia hotel and the Forsun, the Ruby is about the same size as the Forsun and offers 20-30 girls at night. In the daytime, you’ll find 5-10 working in the lobby. The girls here never fail to mob you when you enter the lobby. It’s quite a pleasurable experience. The rooms here are the dungiest, but what the hell, you’re not there to give decorating tips. Prices here are $300.
Freelancers & Streetwalkers
You need to keep your wits about you, as opportunities can arise quite quickly on the streets of Macau. On the west side, I’ve found freelancers hanging outside the Hotel Man Va on the corner of Rua da Caldeira and Trv. Da Caldeira. These girls seem to be working out of the Wo Ping Boarding House, located just across the street from the Man Va. I’ve also found a small group hanging around near where the Travessa das Virtudes meets Trv. Do Auto Nova. I’ve exchanged glances with girls in Senado Square who were obviously available, but didn’t partake.
The big areas of course are “freelancer alley,” a pedestrian mall that kind of starts at the Lisboa on the northeast side and runs several blocks, behind the Fortuna, Landmark, and Holiday Inn hotels, and the ground floor shopping arcade inside the Lisboa. The Russian freelancers are usually found outside the Lisboa on the northern corner entrance, or across the street.
Saunas
As stated in part one, saunas fall into two main categories: brothel types, and full service joints that offer other services. The former seem to be cheaper in price; the latter tend to have higher prices and more elaborate facilities. The higher end saunas can get to be quite expensive, even by U.S. standards. Adding to the information on saunas I listed in my first Macau report, here are the details on the places I hit this trip.
Big Boss
Location: Avenida Da Praia Grande No. 613-639
Prices: $868 Thai; $1268 Vietnamese; $1568 Korean
Hours: Open 24 hours.
Darling 1
Location: In the Casino Jai Alai building, next to the New Yaohan Dept. Store
Prices: $1380, $1500, $1700 (models)
Hours: I believe they are open 24 hours.
Hong Thai
Location: on the west side near the girlie hotels at Rua de Cinco de Outubro, No. 177-179
Prices: $738 for one hour with a Chinese. I didn’t jot down the Russian prices. You could also get a seven hour session (midnight to 7 am) for $1388, something I was seriously considering with the girl I did there, but never got around to it.
Hours: Something like 2 pm to 7 am.
Hot Spot
Location: at the corner of Bairro Iao Hon Rua Dois and Rua Seis. The entry is on Rua Seis at No. 73. You can’t miss it with the neon signs and posters.
Prices: Best bang for the buck in all the saunas, at $398 for one hour. The joint is very classy as well. Highly recommended.
Hours: Open from 4 pm to 6 am.
Hou Va (Centro De Massagens Electricas)
Location: 19 Rua De Ferreira Do Amaral
Prices: $480 for Vietnamese, Mongolian; $580-680 for Russians if memory serves me correct.
Hours: Opens at 3 pm. Unsure about closing time.
Tin Vong (Centro De Sauna E Massagens)
Location: 72A Avenida do Conselheiro Ferreira de Almeida (Across from the Chinese Gardens)
Prices: $650 for Vietnamese; $780 for Koreans and Mongolians
Hours: Unknown.
Getting There & Away
Most visitors will probably come over from Hong Kong on one of the high-speed ferries. You can take a ferry directly to Macau from the airport (HKG), or from one of two piers in Hong Kong itself: Kowloon or Hong Kong Island. The jetfoils run from the island, while high-speed catamarans run out of Kowloon. One way tickets run about $140-160 HK, with a discount available if you purchase a round-trip in advance. I prefer one ways, because you can’t change the dates on the round-trip tickets (so I’m told), and if you want to extend a day, you’re hosed. Anyway, they permit you maximum flexibility.
Macau has an airport with direct flights from several destinations in China and SEA. There is now a direct flight from Bangkok.
Where to Stay
There are numerous hotels to choose from, of all classes. If you are visiting on Sunday through Thursday night, it’s pretty easy to simply show up and bag a room (except for Grand Prix week). You can get great discounts by booking your hotel at the travel agents inside the ferry terminal once you arrive. They are located to the right of the information office, just around the corner. I used TKW to get an excellent price at the Grandeur Hotel for my last night in Macau. The price I paid there was about the same as what I paid for a walk-up room at the Best Western Sun Sun, and the Grandeur was a much higher quality hotel.
The Sun Sun is a nice place, and conveniently located in the west side girlie district. Just be sure to book a room at a travel agency or before arrival. The East Asia is dirt cheap, but I recommend against staying there. I was driven out by noisy tour groups and the most god-awfully hard bed I’ve ever slept on. The floor probably would have been better, it was that bad. High spenders can choose from the Ritz or the Mandarin Oriental.
Getting Around
For shorter and medium distances, I suggest walking. Macau is pretty compact, and it doesn’t take long to get to places on foot. Also, you learn a lot more about a place, both culturally speaking and in the mongering sense, by sticking to the sidewalks and streets. I wouldn’t have discovered half of what I did if I didn’t walk a lot.
Public transit and taxis are both ridiculously cheap in Macau. For longer distances, I always took taxis. Fares were averaging $3-5 US. If you are on a severe budget, buses are plentiful and cost about 50 cents.
Dining Out
Following is a short list of some places I ate at on this trip. All of them had decent grub, so I’m not listing any dogs here.
A Lorcha
Rua do Almirante Serigo, No. 289. Ok Portuguese food on the west side, down by the maritime museum and A-Ma Temple.
Baia Esperanca
R. Gov. Tamagnini Barbo, 30-50A. This restaurant is located out in Taipa Village, near the old waterfront. It’s the first place I encountered the presence of the small Portuguese community that remains in Macau. Several groups were at tables, and the owner/chef is Portuguese. The food was good, the prices were cheap, and a wonderful afternoon breeze was blowing in. I felt totally content and at peace with the world during my meal here.
Caffe Toscanna
Travessa de S. Domingos, No. 11. Located on an alley just off Senado Square, this Italian joint has an extensive menu. The owner is Italian, the wait staff are all Filipinas.
La Bonne Heure
Travessa de S. Domingos, No. 12 AB. Literally located across the alley from Caffe Toscanna, this French joint featured inexpensive lunch sets.
La Comedie
Located across from the Macau Museum of Art. The ground floor is a French Café, the second floor is a nice sit-down French restaurant.
Platao
Travessa de S. Domingos, No. 3. Down the alley from Caffe Toscanna, Platao offers a Philipino interpretation of Portuguese food.
Exchange rates and accessing money
The currency in Macau is the pataca. However, Hong Kong dollars are accepted everywhere (the only exception is that no one will accept the HK $10 coin, and some shops don’t like any HK coins at all – but everyone loves the HK paper money). The pataca is pegged to the HK dollar, so they are almost identical in value. ATMs are plentiful and provide you with the option of withdrawing in patacas or HK dollars. I always choose the dollars.
For those of you who bank at Bank of America, they have a branch and ATM on Avenida do Almeida Ribeiro, just down from the post office, which itself is next to the Largo do Senado. Withdrawing cash with your ATM/debit card incurs no fees from this machine.
Internet Access
Internet cafes are not plentiful in Macau, and Club Hombre is filtered out by the government. But I have found four places, which are detailed on my map in Discus in the Macau section.
The best prices can be found at First Quadrant, located at 318 Rua Do Campo. I found this Philipino-run place when I walking to find the Hou Va. It’s pretty close, so you can plan on checking e-mail and banging a Viet girl within a couple of blocks of each other. The internet section is upstairs in the back; the front looks like a woman’s boutique.
The cyber games place across the Macau Museum of Art still offers net access. I also found a place on Avenida do Dr. Rodrigo, behind and just around the corner from the Grandeur Hotel. The fourth place was in the Edificio Chong Yu facing the Avenida da Amizade.
Non-mongering Activities
Mongering aside, Macau is an interesting place. The areas of the peninsula and Taipa island that haven’t been transformed into modern high-rises are quite interesting to wander around. It’s like a several hundred year old European city had a Chinese culture dropped on top of it.
The tourism offices in the ferry terminal and in Senado Square have various pamphlets listing walking tours, churches, temples, museums and fortresses to visit. At the very least, one should visit the Museum of Macau located in the Monte Fortress, the façade of St. Paul’s Cathedral (the most famous landmark in the city), Senado Square, Guia Fort, and the new Macau Tower, if the weather is clear enough to make the $70 HK fee worthwhile. If you have more time, throw some Chinese temples into the mix, and a couple of the old Portuguese churches. And of course, if gambling is your thing, then Macau is the place in Asia to do it. The new Sands casino is quite large and straight out of Vegas. There’s even a Vegas style buffet inside if you really want to load up.
Lastly, you can also purchase special single day visas and slip across the Chinese border into Zhuhai, which is something of a mongering destination in its own right, although some recent crackdowns have diminished the scene somewhat. Whatever you decide, you really can’t go wrong with Macau. You’ll be able to quench those desires….24 hours a day.
However, the Chinese I have encountered are pretty conservative sexually, so all I can do is dream.