Dalai Lamas and Black Jack?

Felicity sits at her elegant colonial-style table in our opulent room at the all-too-elegant 'Hotel Lisboa'

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Borders often provide convenient excuses for hypocrisy. A national psyche is founded upon decades of struggle, honed carefully by a dictatorship quick to punish if the status quo, once established, is not uniformly adhered to. Dissidents are jailed, executed or exiled. Then, years later, another region is acquired, surrendered by a departing colonial power – a region so different in its socio-political makeup as to completely and utterly contradict the ethos of the ruling power.  But the region’s autonomy remains intact; in fact, it is embraced! Why? because there’s far too much money to be made and time is short. Let’s join the swathes of luck-hopeful cashed-up Chinese tourists and go to Macau!  

For all the talk about ‘one country, two systems,’ you might as well have stepped into an alternate dimension – let alone another 'system' - when you finally walk through the no-man’s land of shopping centres and make it past immigration, to be greeted warmly by dozens of courtesy buses who will whisk you away to any number of down-town casinos.  So, safely on the other side of the great divide, you board the bus marked ‘Grand Lisboa’ and thrust your hand into your pocket to find a lucky charm or two that you can kiss for good measure. The bus whirls into action, and you find yourself weaving through a maze of highrises, each trying to out-dazzle the next. Before too long your bus pulls into a hotel parking bay. You stumble off with your backpack, walking past a multitude of smartly dressed businessmen in suits and immaculately preened women already in evening dresses and glittering necklaces. Then it hits you – all that excitement, glitz and glamour that’s been missing from your life for so long. Or perhaps you’re just the proverbial deer caught in a miasma of neon headlights?

Felicity eating Portuguese tarts (what we really came for - damn it!) at the airport on the morning of our departure.

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Whatever the case, if you can swallow the hypocrisy, then this place is a very exciting stopover indeed. Just as well you’re not a gambler, right? Imagine being stuck in the prison of grand buffets, private VIP rooms, sexy Russian dancers and complimentary five star hotel rooms. Surely not a prison, you object? I guess that’s for you to decide, isn’t it?

Still, all this freedom that the small region of Macau enjoys with a PRC happy to hypocritically spin a highly profitable buck off one of the most overt forms of capitalism known to humankind kind of makes me wonder: would the fate of Tibet have been any different if the Dalai Lama had taken a liking to Black Jack?