Note: This entry was originally written during the Chinese New Year celebrations.

Chinese New Year is a ten day festival in Macau, and things didn't get start to let up until long after I'd left. Most of the big name shops were shut for the length of my stay, but every square and every cobbled side street was packed throughout the weekend with people of all ages, celebrating and having a good time - and all of the small vendors and market salesmen were taking full advantage of the crowds. Wandering the narrow back alleys, growling slightly at anyone who looked as though they might be about to throw a firework at me, I found the streets to be filled with peddlers selling handcrafted jewellery boxes, urns, dragon cabinets and various types of unidentifiable meat from sources probably best not to think about if you ever want to eat again. Looking for authentic Chinese handicrafts, a wandering tourist in Macau can get lost among the narrow lanes during the hours of daylight, as he finds himself in the midst of hundreds of tiny winding passages full of quaint local antique shops selling all sorts of furniture decorated with intricate Chinese art. One of the most frustrating things about my visit was coming across the most beautifully hand-crafted wardrobe covered in brightly coloured dragons and Chinese designs and knowing that there was absolutely no way I was ever going to be able to get it home. The price of the cabinet was only about fifteen pounds - the same thing in the UK, which wouldn't even be hand made, would set me back as much as two thousand in some places. I would've loved to have snapped the wardrobe up the moment I saw it, but the shipping charges alone would have cost me a couple of years wages! It was sitting in what seemed like an open garage in a backstreet, a local man squatting outside on a stool pointing at the price tag and nodding furiously. Obviously, life out here is totally different from anything I am used to back home - but somehow, I can't help feeling that if I needed to spend months carving out an intricate wardrobe covered in dragon art, and another few weeks painting it in exquisite detail, the last thing I would then want to do is immediately flog it out of my garage for fifteen quid. There have got to be easier ways to make money.

Looking for a quick bite to eat for breakfast on my second day, I had almost given up finding a cafe that was open when I stumbled across one of the meat vendors I mentioned earlier. His shop wasn't much more than a small cubical on a sidestreet hardly wide enough to get a car into, and the single meat product he was selling was being prepared on a small portable cooker which was perched precariously on the twelve inch wide pavement outside. I greeted the vendor in the traditional way at Chinese New Year, by bowing and saying "Kung Kei Fat Choi" - Happy New Year - in my best Chinese accent, and was more than pleased when his face split into a wide grin and he began bowing back and jabbering furiously, obviously pleased that somebody had bothered to make the effort. A passing tourist, who obviously saw me looking suspiciously at what was on offer, recommended something which looked like a large slab of thick bacon - I couldn't even pronounce the name he gave it - and so I daringly took my life into my hands and ordered a piece. Swatting away the flies, the vendor literally cut me off a square from the slab using a pair of rusty scissors, and I walked along the street taking tentative bites out of it and wondering how long it would take all the exotic eastern diseases to set in. I'm led to believe, since my return, that the meat was some sort of pork or beef jerky, cooked and prepared on the streets and usually sold in large slabs - I must have looked very strange to have had a small square cut off for me, although I didn't realise I was doing anything odd at the time. Whatever it was, it was strangely sweet for a meat product - almost as though it had been cooked in honey - and didn't leave an unpleasant aftertaste, but I still wasn't about to go back for more. I'm still alive to tell the story, though, and that's the main thing.

After following the New Year revellers for a while, I came out at the central square, where a platform had been set up as though a concert was about to take place. Around the platform, there was hardly a space to be found in the crowd - everyone was awaiting the arrival of the New Year dragon, an event which pulls people in from all over the island. I don't think there could've been a single home in the whole of Macau that had anyone in it that morning - it really did seem as though every single person on the island was stacked five high in the town square. Now, I have to say that I considered myself highly privileged to be in a position to witness the New Year dragon first hand - there are Chinese New Year parades all over the world, and you often see them covered on television, but to actually be in China (okay, so Macau wouldn't be officially part of China for another couple of years, but lets not quibble) to see it live really was something else.

After standing around for a while, having every last breath of air squeezed out of me in the throng, everyone began to fall silent. Two men, dressed entirely in yellow, were pushing their way through the crowd accompanied by police. As the police stood at the base of the platform and kept everyone back, the two yellow suited men climbed up onto the stage and began beating out a rhythm on either side of a huge drum that had been placed there. And then the dragon appeared. It was quite unlike anything I had ever seen, many times better even than I could have imagined - as the crowd began to part, literally hundreds of men and women in yellow suits appeared from around the corner of a building and wove their way across the square carrying the yellow and red New Year dragon puppet above their heads. The dragon itself was over a mile long - I'll just say that again, in case you missed it the first time: over a mile long - and each man in the procession was holding aloft a pole which was connected to the underside of one small section of the puppet. As they crossed the square, the hundreds of puppeteers moved the poles back and forth in the air so that the dragon's body undulated from side to side, sections of it dipping and rising under the control of the man below, creating the appearance of a living creature, it's long tail rippling and swaying as it moved. Despite the fact that the puppet was more than a mile in length, the choreography was exact - each puppeteer was completely in synch with the rest, and once the entire dragon was within the square, which took at least fifteen minutes and culminated in the creature being tightly coiled many times around the central stage, the dragon began to dance to the beat of the drum...

As the dragon dancers moved around the square, curling the dragon up into tight circles and then suddenly speeding off through the crowd scattering small children in all directions, people began to surge forward to touch the tail whenever it went past. It seems that touching the dragon's tail is believed to bestow good luck for the coming year, so local people suddenly seemed to forget any idea of public safety and were just pushing each other out of the way to get at the dragon - but then, these were the same people who had been chucking fireworks at each other only minutes earlier, so I don't know why I ever thought they might be interested in safety. As the dragon continued to dance around the square, it was joined by lots of little dragons which appeared from every side street and started to weave in and out of the feet of the puppeteers. For a moment, I felt sure that these children in costume were bound to trip up one or two of the yellow suited dragon controllers and then a domino effect would take place, resulting in a crumpled heap of dragon in the middle of the square, but no such thing happened. Eventually, the dragon began to move off down the main road, the little dragons following on behind - and then many of the crowd formed themselves into a procession and let themselves be led away pied-piper style. Not wanting to spend the whole day following a dragon, I went off in the opposite direction to explore the town.

As it turned out, there was just no escaping the dragon. I don't know why I ever thought that there would be, really - after all, it was a mile long! For most of the rest of the day, it somehow managed to turn up wherever I went - whether I was sitting outside a cafe having a cup of tea, or wandering down a side street miles from anywhere, I would hear the approaching sound of merriment and then a mile of yellow and red would appear around the corner to bear down on me. Wherever it went, it seemed to gain more followers - so, by the middle of the afternoon, the mile long dragon seemed to be followed by another mile of people throwing lit boxes of fireworks into the street and whooping for joy at the resulting explosions. And, of course, there was also a secondary group of yellow suited men following the first around just in case anyone carrying the dragon got tired and needed to be replaced. At one point, the smoke from the fireworks was so thick as the dragon dancers went past that I had to get up from where I was sitting enjoying a spot of lunch and beat a hasty retreat into another street entirely as I literally found that I couldn't breath. It comes as a complete surprise to me that Chinese New Year in Macau doesn't routinely end with thousands of people being carted off to hospital or taken off to the morgue in wooden boxes. They must be made of sterner stuff in that part of the world!

Before leaving Macau, I had been told that one thing I absolutely must do was visit a small but popular restaurant on the very tip of the island called Fernando's. I wasn't totally sure what I was letting myself in for, since "basic" and "quaint" were both words I had heard used when describing the place, but I'd also been told that Fernando's was able to serve up chicken and chips and other western dishes, and I was starting to miss a bit of home style cooking, so I decided to take the chance and hope for the best. I hailed a Taxi at the town square and asked for Fernando's restaurant, expecting to find myself engaged in another half hour conversation involving the waving of translation cards but, much to my surprise, the driver threw his arms up almost in joy and cried: "Ah, Fernando!" before driving off at high speed. This was a good sign - if the Taxi driver knew about this remote restaurant and sounded so overjoyed to be taking someone there, then I figured it must at least be as popular as I had been led to believe.

At this point, I need to clarify something. Until now, for simplicity, I've been referring to Macau as "the island". In fact, the Chinese special administrative region of Macau actually consists of the Macau peninsula, and the two islands of Taipa and Coloane. Although once an island itself, the Macau peninsula is now connected to Zhuhai in mainland China by a narrow isthmus and a border gate, and the peninsula is connected to the island of Taipa by a series of bridges. Most of the population of Macau lives and works on the peninsula, where the city of Macau is now considered to be one of the richest in the world - in comparison, the islands of Taipa and Coloane, when I visited, could almost be compared to the New Territories of Hong Kong, being dotted with small rural villages and farming communities. Unfortunately, the human desire to expand being what it is, the two islands of Taipa and Coloane have now pretty much merged into one thanks to a new city called Cotai being created from reclaimed land between the two - Cotai is home to a new strip of super-casinos, threatening to turn the islands of Taipa and Coloane into a clone of the Macau peninsula with all its bright lights and nightlife. In addition, high rise apartment buildings are shooting up all over the islands, making it seem as though the traditional village life of the islands might soon become a thing of the past.

About Simon and Burfords Travels:

Simon Burford is a UK based travel writer. He will be re-publishing his travel blogs, chapters from his books and other miscellaneous rantings on these pages over the coming weeks and months, and the entry on this page may not necessarily reflect today's date.