First Stop - Hong Kong

We're here! We made it! The flight was great, excellent food, hard to sleep though. So we arrived a little tired but excited and ready to explore.



First Impressions
The first thing that struck us about Hong Kong was how clean and organised it is. There are so many forms of transport, and excellent roads. Every sign has English and Chinese (Mandarin? sorry i'm ignorant when it comes to asian languages), and almost everyone in tourism, transport and hospitality speaks English.






The sidewalks are quite narrow, but there are really cool crossings where all the traffic stops, and pedestrians can cross wherever they like.


The air in the morning and at night is very foggy, and during the day there is a bit of smog and air pollution. You can see people wearing face masks on the street like surgeons, to protect their lungs.

Lost in Kowloon

Despite the organised road system, disoriented travellers such as ourselves might find it a little hard to locate their accomodation. We got off at the right bus stop, but proceeded to walk in every direction but the one that lead to our hostel. Our Octopus transport cards which kind of function like a debit card, made jumping on buses at the last second much easier to do.

Eventually we found our hostel on the seventh floor of one of the hundreds of high rise apartment buildings. There's an open air balcony where we can look out over the dirty tenement housing and a little alley way that makes up most of this building. We left our backpacks here and went off to have lunch at a place that the hostel manager recommended.


The restaurant reminded me of Hard Rock cafe on Chapel St. Maybe it was the little booths. There seems to be a TV in each restaurant. This one was blaring a dramatic asian soapie. Pretty funny to watch when you don't understand what's going on.






Stanley Market

We took the subway and a double decker bus to get to the famous Stanley Market on Hong Kong Island. The bus ride was amazing! We were at the front of the top floor with views of the coastline and little islands.









The ride through the city in Hong Kong was like riding through a concrete jungle, but when we got closer to Stanley, we almost thought we were by the Mediterranean Sea. The little roads curved around the coastline, with big Tuscan houses and huge hotels everywhere. There's definitely a strong influence from Britain, and consequently Europe.


Stanley Market was gorgeous! There was a beautiful colonial building by the water's edge, which is now filled with posh restaurants. Everything here is expensive, and the restaurants have mostly European food. It was so beautiful though, and the bus ride was worth the whole trip.

We noticed on the ride back, that most of the cars here are either extremely old or extremely new and expensive. Every new car is a Mercedes, BMW or lexus. There is no middle ground here when it comes to cars.

Mid-level Escalators
For those that don't know, this escalator system is the longest undercover escalator to be built in the world. It's massive! We took the escalator all the way to the top, which takes about 20 minutes, but we got off at Hollywood road for a while, to check out the little antique shops, and roadside stalls.












Hollywood road was really cute, and Loren is regretting not buying some of the cute little artifacts that she found there. Still being cautious on the first day about filling her pack with souvenirs.


Botanical and Zoological Gardens
At the top of the escalators, we found the botanical and zoological gardens. The gardens weren't much to see, but the animals were great, and it was free entry! Artur was addicted to the Lemurs, so we stayed for ages watching them. We gave a commentary on their activites, which we found quite hilarious at the time. It was like watching Big Brother, all the flirting and bitch fights over food etc. It was great.


The Peak
From the peak, you can see the best views of Hong Kong, especially at night. The Peak is a huge mountain, and there's also a tower on top for even better views. We took the tram to the top, which goes 45 degrees or steeper at some points in the climb. The city lights looked amazing from the top of the tower, but it was so freezing out on the terrace.

The only thing we would have changed would be to take the bus back down from mountain. We had to wait for over 40 mins in line for the tram in the freezing mountain night air. Having been enjoying the warmth of the day, we had not packed anything remotely suitable in our day packs to prevent us from freezing up there.

Dinner at Causeway Bay
We heard there was great original Hong Kong food at Causway Bay, so we went searching around for our dinner. We were starving at this point, and anything would have been good, but we turned down a take-away style Chinese restaurant and kept looking. There were hardly any restaurants even on the most recommended streets, so we had trouble. All the ones that looked good had no English on their menus. We finally found a Thai restaurant - not what we were after, but it looked great. The food there was amazing!! If you're ever in Hong Kong, go to the New Bangkok restaurant. We had a whole fish simmering over a flame on our table. It was soooo good.

We were planning on checking out the night life in Lan Kwai Fong, which is supposed to be pretty great, and Sunday nights are big for going out here, but we were exhausted by this point, so we limped home, nursing sore shoulders and feet, but happy hearts.