Macau, China: Enormous casinos and gorging on egg tarts.

The one-hour hop from Hong Kong to Macau was relatively painless, and we were delighted to discover that our hotel room there was five times the size of the one in Hong Kong. And five times nicer too - certainly in our top three of the whole trip.

Macau, traditionally a Portuguese colonial enclave, is now home to some enormous casinos - a result of the island's gaming laws being opened up to international developers some years ago. It has in recent times overtaken Las Vegas for gambling revenues, which gives you an idea of how many 'high-rollers' are in town, most of them from the Chinese mainland (where gambling is prohibited). We spent an enjoyable evening cruising around some of the big ones near our hotel, such as the Wynn, StarWorld and the Lisboa.

The following day, we took in some of the non-gambling culture that Macau has to offer, with a walking tour around the old town centre, which radiates out from the picturesque Senado Square. (This was also the only place we could find a launderette whose staff could understand that gesturing at our bag of laundry meant that we'd quite like them to wash it for us in exchange for money. Our walking tour took in several quaint old sights, including the ruins of St Paul's church. Here, excellently, the most intact bit of the ruins is the entire front wall. An enormous stone staircase leads down from the church and this area gets crowded with obsessive Chinese holidaymakers all determined to get the perfect vacation snap.

Sight-seeing out of the way, we decided to head to the Grand Lisboa - a bit of a Macau icon these days, and something of an opinion divider architecturally, to put it mildly - and enter a tournament in their poker room. There were sixteen entrants, almost all of whom were extremely competent players. Jacqui, who did extremely well not to get knocked out on a very awkward first hand, made a straight on one hand before her stack of chips was gradually whittled down and she finished 13th - still pretty good since she'd never played poker in a casino before. I came 9th after my ace-king of spades came up against another guys pair of queens when I didn't think he had anything like as good as that! You had to come in the top three to win money, so we left empty handed but having thoroughly enjoyed the experience.

In the evening we took a free shuttle bus - the casinos lay on these super-comfy buses intended for shipping punters to their door; the reality is the local Macanese use them as a convenient free way of getting across the island before walking the rest of their way to their destination - to the incomprehensibly gigantic Venetian casino. To give you an idea of the scale of this place, how's this for a stat? The Venetian is the fourth-largest building in the world by area. Inside, like its Vegas counterpart, there are fake blue skies (look closely when you visit and you can see the built-in sprinkler system on the blue and white mural) and fake riverways full of Venetian gondolas, complete with singing operatic gondoliers. Visitors can take a ride in one, for a fairly steep price. We decided against, and merely opted for a gawp at this silly spectacle. Next door at the new City of Dreams resort was pretty impressive too, although its newly opened and I think they could improve the signage a tad: we traipsed round for the best part of half an hour trying to find the restaurant we were after. Otherwise very nice though, and featuring an impressive audio-visual show inside a room called The Bubble.

On our last full day, we took the bus (a public bus this time) all the way to the southernmost tip of Macau, the former island of Coloane. Its connected to the mainland these days thanks to artificial land reclamation - a popular urban development technique in this particular part of the world. Coloane was lovely, a really charming little settlement where nobody was particularly bothered about going for the tourist dollar, they'd rather just carry on with normal life. The highlight - and, if we're truthful, the number one purpose - of our visit, was to drop in at Lord Stow's Cafe and try his famous egg custard tarts. These things are so damn gorgeous that the company exports them to various places around Asia including Japan and Korea. We liked them so much that we bought three boxes of six: one for us and two as gifts for friends we'd soon be seeing in Beijing.

Dinner on our last evening was heartily scoffed at a superb and authentic Portuguese place called Afonso III. Delicious and reasonably priced Portuguese fare if you're ever in town and run by nice people. I devoured my pork escalopes inbetween enthusiastic 'mmm...' noises. The evening ended with a nightcap at the Wynn, where we caught the bizarre Tree of Prosperity Show as we were walking out. When it finished, we left bewildered but grinning all over our faces. Such a Vegas touch, yet on the other side of the world. Watch the video to the end and you'll see some of the sights at the Venetian too.