Once when I was a small boy, I sat on a sofa with a sore throat and the blessed prospect of no school. I was officially sick and it was winter.

It was a Thursday- you remember these things- and that meant a guaranteed free pass for a Friday off too…’just to make sure.’

Good old parents. They knew the score.

The tv was on and Robert Mitchum and Jane Russell were giving it all they got in a black and white noir film located on the island of Macau off the steamy China coast and definitely filmed in a Hollywood studio.

In fact, it was called Macau. I mean, what else?

Big Bob would get knocked around,trade drinks and banter with Jane Russell and smolder. Come to think of it, so did Jane Russell. To me, this was an island beyond imagination…a black and white island in fact where everyone was either a hard drinking freighter captain or a hard talking girl with a mystery to untangle.

It wasn’t great film-making. And to make a point, one cute critic said something along the lines of: ‘The biggest intrigue in this thriller is who had the bigger chest- Russell or Mitchum.’

But as a sick day memory, it stayed with me.

And so,I always put it on my list of places I had to go to. You know those places. We all have them located in our hearts: you know in your mind that it’s a Destination with a capital ‘D’.

But you don’t know why. And if you trundled down into your imagination, you would never find an answer except that curiosity and romance sometimes are as catchable as quicksilver. Well, I have gone to most of the intriguing places I hankered over,places with no explanation except a need to go: Zanzibar, Grand Canyon, Afghanistan, Palmyra, the Scottish island of Islay. And this week, it was the turn of Macau.

I expected a slow rolling stinker of a ferry to get me there from Hong Kong,chugging to the horizon until the smokey harbour rammed with dubious freighters appeared. Not really. My boat was a sharp swift hydrofoil that ate up the seamiles so fast they asked you to clip up your seatbelt for safety.It’s never how you imagine these places.

Macau, it turns out, is no sleepy out of they way vagabond isle. It is a gigantic gambling heaven; larger, blingier, glitzier, more over the top than Las Vegas. The casino towers, topped by gold cupolas and dripping with lights crown the island, this island owned by Portugal for almost 5 centuries until it was handed back to China in 1999.

But peek beyond the whacko gambling glitz and the ages old Portuguese town emerges, small elegant squares and alleys, rows of baroque houses and quiet 16thc churches made of wood and stone and filled with light and imperceptible breezes to slacken the heat.

The Portuguese colonists have for the most part gone. But they left hints behind. The streets and shop signs are bi-lingual in both Portuguese and Chinese, the restaurants serve that Portuguese fish stew and vinho verde is easily on hand. The mainlanders love the place, not only because China loves throwing the dice or flipping the cards, but because they can glimpse the easy on the eye elegance of Southern European architecture.

From the main square to the remaining facade of a 17thc cathedral gutted by fire that sits like a tiara on a hill, thousands pour up a cobbled street taking in the sites.

No Mitchum eyeing up Russell, no sly sea captain hiding his contraband in a foggy port, no half finished bottle on a barroom table as the good guys and the bad duke it out. In fact, no movie from my childhood.

But an island that was destined for a visit. And an island with a quiet past hiding behind the bright towers of the casinos.