Hong Kong Airport to Macau

I flew into Hong Kong with a plan to go to Macau, which is an hour or so ferry ride from Hong Kong. If you arrive between 11am and 6pm you can get the ferry direct from Hong Kong Airport to Macau, meaning that you don’t have to go through HK immigration, but since I arrived at 7am no way was I going to sit around for four hours on the wrong side of immigration.

There was barely a queue for “Visitors” for immigration and I got my bag straight away from the baggage carousel. To get to Hong Kong from the airport you can get the Airport Express for HKD$90 (NZD$15) or buses to pretty much anywhere for around HKD$40 (NZD$7). Being cheap like I am the decision was an easy one for me! Plus, I figured you’d be able to see more from a bus than a train which was most likely underground.

There’s a great website here where you can see where all the buses go to from the airport, then you can click on the routes and see a map of where they go. I worked out beforehand that the bus from the airport to the Macau ferry terminal on Hong Kong Island was A11. I worked out that it was the first stop after going through a big tunnel but I didn’t need to know that because the airport bus had a good information display that showed what the next stop was plus in Chinese and in English, plus if you buy your ticket from the window they give you a bus map as well which is really clear.

On the plane ride a guy and his girlfriend wanted to sit together but were sitting one in front of the other instead in the middle seats. The guy asked the four people around if any of them would consider swapping seats so they could sit together. I was the only one of the four that responded and I said “no, I like the window seat, sorry”. So that made for a bit of an uncomfortable flight. Surprise surprise, these two were also on the A11 bus that I took from the airport, sitting right in front of me. Needless to say we didn’t say anything to each other!

Getting on the bus, I could see very dark clouds forming, and near to getting off the bus, it started pouring with rain. The rain was sideways rain and very strong. But luckily it stopped just before my stop.

I knew it was going to be hot in Hong Kong in June, but when I got off the air-conditioned bus, I think my words were “holy Mother of God it’s hot”. It’s really humid and it looks like it is going to rain all the time – dark clouds are always looming. The high during the day was 32 degrees and the low at night was 28 degrees. Macau was exactly the same.