With Southeast Asia behind us, we moved on to the "western" gateways to the rising "superpower" of the Far East, Hong Kong and Macau, China. Hong Kong seemed freakishly modern, and the drive in from the airport to the massive skyscrapers ahead made me wonder whether we had just escaped the third world and by-passed the first world to some other future place that our society would eventually become.

The city of Hong Kong is split between Hong Kong Island and a peninsula called Kowloon on the mainland. It's just a short ferry or subway trip from one side to the other, and the skyscrapers rise up dramatically on either side of the harbor. However, we captured the best view by taking a one hundred year old funicular railway from the bottom of Hong Kong Island up to Victoria Peak, which is a small mountain that rises to about 1500ft behind the central business district. From here, we could see all the buildings of Hong Kong Island as well as those across the harbor in Kowloon. The modernity of the skyscrapers was unbelievable and we debated which ones looked like spaceships, electric razors, or some type of transforming robot.

Beyond the glamour of the glass, steel, trendy stores, restaurants, and fine hotels, Hong Kong still retains some of its older culture and customs. The city got its start as a port for the British to export opium, but it later turned into a center for financial services and manufacturing. The combination of these things brought a lot of mainland immigrants into Hong Kong and with them they brought Chinese medicine. There are Chinese medicine shops all over Hong Kong, and there is one area in particular with entire streets devoted to the practice. One can walk down the street and buy dried flying geckos on a stick or even deer antlers or poisonous snakes and shark fins to add to your favorite soup of the day. The range of food/medicine is incredibly vast and as a Tibetan told me "The Chinese will eat anything in the sky except the airplane, anything in the sea except the ship, and anything on land except the table!"

After getting our visas to mainland China sorted, we took a ferry across the bay to the old Portuguese colony in China, Macau. Macau has now become the "Las Vegas" of Asia and actually already turns over more money there than in Vegas. However, the city is absolutely nothing like Las Vegas with the exception of the new and rising mega-casinos that are beginning to dot the landscape because Macau, fortunately, still maintains much of its character from its days as a Portuguese trading colony. The old architecture of the old town still exists and is maintained, and the people of Macau still keep their culture alive as well, which lies mainly in the form of beef jerky. They have entire stores that sell large sheets of all sorts of beef, pork, veal, or chicken jerky and are eagerly waiting with a pair of scissors to cut you off a piece to try for free. After not eating too much meat in Southeast Asia or India, this onslaught of meat was almost mesmerizing and Ian and I nearly made a feast just from eating samples at several of the shops throughout the town.

One night spent perusing the Venetian and Sands Macau Casinos was definitely an experience and not being much of gamblers our small backerpackers budgets did not last long among the well-seasoned Chinese but seeing and experiencing the "other" mega-casino city in the world made it worthwhile. Now we are making our way into China, and our first stop will be a very small city for China, Guilin (670,000 people), and here we hope to take a boat down the Li River through one of the most picturesque landscapes in the world. Till next time, cheers.