Maybe you haven’t heard about Macau before now.

I remember hearing about Macau maybe 6 years ago. It was some far off place that someone mentioned might be a good idea to invest some money.

Not understanding at the time how (or why) I would want to do that, I dismissed Macau as one of those far off places.

But when we were in New Zealand, our friends Lucia and Ivo mentioned Macau and how they had enjoyed their time on the island that up until 1999 had spent 400+ years as a Portuguese colony.

So we decided that while we were in Hong Kong, we would also spend some time in Macau.

In Macau I found myself wandering through Megalithic casinos reminiscent of some of the largest casinos I’ve been in, in Las Vegas. Except there is one primary difference in the casinos here.

They seem bigger. I don’t know if that’s actually true, or if it’s even possible as I’m amazed by the sizes of the indoor spaces in Las Vegas Casinos, but wandering through Macau’s Venetian, I’m fairly certain that the gaming floor was higher roofed and took longer to walk across than the same space in the Las Vegas Venetian. And having spend a lot of time in the casinos of Vegas (having traveled there 15 times in 6 years got me very familiar with the town), I find it hard to say even that the spaces could be bigger.

We read somewhere as well that over 3 million (!!) sheets of gold leaf were used in the construction of the Venetian. It’s amazing to realize that the wealth you’re looking at is not fabricated with gold paint, but it actually displayed with real gold.

The other big difference in Macau is simply the amount of construction going on. I know that there are some amazing and huge projects going on in Las Vegas right now. The same is true in Macau… it just seems to be happening at a different degree of speed. One casino is slated to open early 2011, and multiple others are in various stages of completion on Cotai, the middle island of Macau. The middle island is rapidly becoming the southern island as well, due to major earthworks (building up earth by dredging the ocean).

The casinos of Macau are fascinating and growing at a breakneck pace for the size of the construction projects being developed.

It definitely merits taking a look at how you can capitalize on the growth here. One thought I have of how an average person could do that is by investing into one of the companies that’s publicly traded that will be opening a casino here sometime in the next couple of years. That’s not investment advice as I haven’t done it myself, but just something to think about whether or not it would be right for you and your situation.

The casinos in Macau are like other casinos elsewhere, just seem to be bigger and growing more rapidly.