Once again, I'm not entirely sure what I've gotten myself into. I'm on the turbo jet ferry to Macau, staring at at the shoreline of a city I barely know. (Well, that's where I was. I put down the Axim in order to watch the shoreline, and now I'm surrounded by islands and shoreline that I couldn't name if I had a map. Which I don't. Perils of blogging in real time, I suppose.) I have no preconceived notions of this new city. I know that it has a reputation as the Las Vegas of the area, that there is a famous temple where the first China- US Treaty of Friendship was signed, and that there are some ruins of a cathedral that I want to photograph. I'm pretty certain that I'll need to find a hotel: I didn't start my journey today until almost 2pm, and it seems like a waste not to try to make it to a garden in the morning. (I'm relying on a Frommer's guide to Hong Kong and Macau to pick some spots.) Right now, it's the other ships that have me fascinated. As this Turbo Jet rockets over the silty brown water, we're passing well-appointed junks full of (presumably) high-powered businessmen; cargo ships, their decks stacked with containers like the building blocks of some gigantic toddler; a smoke-black merchant steamer leaving a dirty carbon trail behind it; and a hundred other vessels whose purpose and construction remain a complete mystery to me. Unlike some of my readers I know nothing of the sea. Mostly I'm a city and suburb boy, but to the extent that my soul communes with nature, it's at home in a forest, preferably in winter. This broad flat horizon of water is a foreign country of its own. (My firm orientation contained a mini talk on typhoon warnings and "black rain." That term, to me, is the title of a famous film about Hiroshima, not a meteorological phenomenon.) I can't help but wonder what it must be like to live here.