I want to be honest: I went to the Cotai Strip expecting to find it contemptible and came out genuinely impressed, in the way you’re impressed by something audacious enough to abandon all pretense. The Strip is built on reclaimed land that was seawater forty years ago. The entire enterprise — these towers, these canals, these replicas of Venice and Paris and ancient Rome — was constructed on mud dredged from the Pearl River delta, and the scale of what was built there is, in its strange way, one of the most extraordinary building projects in human history.
The Venetian Macao is the beginning and end of any honest reckoning with Cotai. You enter through a lobby large enough to park aircraft and emerge into an interior that contains a replica Grand Canal, complete with gondoliers who serenade you in Cantonese, shopping malls the size of city districts, a casino floor you could fit several football pitches into, and a ceiling painted with a Venetian sky that cycles through artificial dawn and dusk regardless of what time it actually is outside. I spent an hour inside and genuinely lost track of time, which is, of course, by design.
What makes Cotai interesting — genuinely, not as a guilty concession — is how nakedly it exposes the logic of the casino resort complex. These buildings are not trying to pretend to be anything other than what they are: machines for separating wealthy people from their money in the most comfortable circumstances possible. The City of Dreams has a nightclub, three hotel towers, a Michelin-starred restaurant, and a theatrical show about a dragon. The Galaxy Macau is approximately the size of a small town. The Studio City has a figure-eight Ferris wheel halfway up its tower that I rode for no particular reason other than the absurdity of it, dangling 130 meters above reclaimed land in a gondola that appeared to be suspended from a Batman logo.
The food on the Strip is better than it has any right to be. Several world-class Cantonese restaurants operate inside the casino hotels — the gambling revenue funds kitchens of a quality that would be impossible at those prices in Hong Kong. I had dim sum at a restaurant inside one of the towers that was as good as anything I’ve eaten in the Pearl River delta, served by waitstaff in silk uniforms who materialized out of nowhere whenever a teapot needed refilling.
I don’t gamble, which means I moved through Cotai as a pure observer — someone who came to look at the thing without participating in its central function. This is a legitimate way to experience it. The architecture alone is worth a few hours. The sheer human density — the tens of thousands of visitors from the Chinese mainland, the bus tours from Guangdong and Fujian, the high-rollers in private VIP rooms hidden behind discreet doors — gives Cotai an energy unlike anything I’ve experienced in any other city. It is excessive and occasionally overwhelming and entirely without pretension about what it is.
When to go: Evening, when the lights are on and the whole enterprise reveals its full neon ambition. Weekends are intensely crowded. If the casino floor claustrophobia gets to you, most of the larger hotels have elevated walkways between them — the sky bridge between The Parisian and The Four Seasons offers good elevated views of the Strip.