From Shanghai it was off by high-speed train to Hangzhou. This is one of those cases where the journey is every bit a part of the entertainment; there is just something about being on a train going 150 miles an hour that is cool. They’re all over China, of course; it’s just the U.S. that doesn’t seem to be able to develop effective high-speed rail.

Once we got there, thought, we discovered that Hangzhou is really a beautiful city, or at least the part of it we saw is. It’s a city of “just” 8.7 million people, making it slightly bigger than New York City, so I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised that most Americans – me included – have never really heard of it. It is, though, one of China’s primary tourist destinations, particularly for the Chinese themselves. As we walked around West Lake, the primary tourist attraction, there were almost no westerners besides us; I’m sure non-Asians made up less than one percent of the people enjoying West Lake the two days we were there. And as a result we were often the objects of much interest.

West Lake, named a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2011 for having inspired poets, artists, and scholars for over a thousand years, is the center of Hangzhou’s beauty. We had the opportunity to explore the lake on two very different days: Friday was gloomy and misty and beautiful while Saturday was clear and sunny and beautiful.

And crowded. Anyone who doubts there are a billion Chinese should go to West Lake on a beautiful spring Saturday, particularly after several days of cool rain. There might not have been a billion Chinese there, but there were a lot. And perfectly easy to understand why – it’s a stunning place. A big urban lake with beautiful landscaping and parks all around it. Even man-made causeways across the lake with willows and cherry trees and peach and plum trees, all just starting to blossom. It felt as though we were almost cheating to experience the beauty of spring in Hangzhou without having ever gone through winter. I mean, spring is supposed to be the reward for surviving winter, but for us we just dropped in at the right time. Instead, we saw – and more importantly smelled – our first lilacs of the year. Heaven.

Our last night there we went to a water show, one of those big Asian extravaganzas they like to produce on a lake or river. A cast of scores (though we saw one a couple years ago with a cast of hundreds) with lights and music and costumes on an only slightly submerged stage, acting out some great and ancient love story. I didn’t really understand it, of course, but it was beautiful and entertaining. The only down side of the evening is that for whatever reason the city is not remotely set up to get all the tourists who go to the show back to their homes or hotels afterwards; we had to walk a long way back – with kids who weren’t real keen on a long walk at 9:00 PM – before we could finally hail a cab for the rest of the journey back.

So that was Hangzhou. We would have considered staying longer but the forecast was for a return to cold, damp, rainy days after the one beautiful Saturday, so we decided to get out of the cold and head south to Hainan, a big island in the South China Sea. A little beach time is always a good thing.

On kind of a lark, we spent three days in Macau, China’s “other” Special Administrative Region (along with Hong Kong) just 40 miles west of Hong Kong. Basically we had three days to kill before meeting my brother Al and his family in Singapore so we figured why not see Macau? Now we can check that one off.

Compared to Hong Kong’s seven million-plus population, Macau seems tiny at just over 600,000 people. Yet, when compared to other countries and “dependent territories,” Macau is the densest region on earth with nearly 55,000 people per square mile. To put that in some context, tiny Monaco is second with about 48,000 people per square mile while New York City, the densest city in the U.S., has about 27,000 people per square mile. In other words, imagine New York’s population doubling and you get a sense of Macau’s density. But – and this is a big but – Manhattan’s population density (as opposed to the City as a whole) is 70,000 people per square mile, so Macau falls pretty far short of that level.

Macau is primarily known as a gambling mecca, having surpassed Las Vegas as the world’s leading casino market. Since the official government monopoly on casinos was ended in 2002, there has been an explosion of huge new casinos moving in: Sands, the Venetian, Wynn’s, and MGM Mirage all have a huge presence here. And not unlike Las Vegas the new mega-resorts are a bit away from the older places and make them look pretty dowdy.

As a result of all this – driven largely by the mainland Chinese taste for gambling – it’s gotten pretty rich. In fact, measured by purchasing power parity (a concept that tries to even out economies based on differing price levels), Macau has the highest per capita income in the world, having recently passed Qatar. Now, we spent time walking around some of the non-touristy parts of Macau and there are lots and lots and lots of people who would not be described as well off by any standards, so I suspect that #1 ranking is a function of a few very, very wealthy people here.

Like Hong Kong, Macau was only recently reunited with China, having been ruled by the Portuguese since the mid-sixteenth century until turned over in late 1999; at that point it was the last European colony in Asia. As is the case in Hong Kong – at least in theory – Macau is part of China under the “one country, two systems” concept of Deng Xioping.

It turns out that unless you’re really into gambling (we’re distinctly not), there’s not much reason to spend a lot of time in Macau. It’s a fun mixture of Portugal and China, and we found one pretty darned good Portuguese restaurant. And the big casino hotels have some great restaurants; one building alone had two three-star Michelin restaurants. But three days there is more than enough. Now it’s off to Shanghai to meet my brother and his family for two weeks of exploring China.