Hong Kong

October 2005
6 days

Gavin wrote:

Then we flew to hongkong, well actually we flew down to singapore then up to Hong Kong, but the flights were very pleasant and i mucked around in Photoshop on the flight and tried to connect to an unsecured wireless network (which worked, but internet didnt).

We met my cousin Phil at the trainstation from the airport and we are staying with him and Andrea his wife, and two small girls, Sophie and Laurren in their lovely apartment which overlooks a beautiful beach (were so jealous).

Hong Kong is such a cool place, maybe our favourite city so far - its got the northern bit which is insanely built up with loads of sky scrapers and futuristic walkways (including the worlds longest covered escalator! (whcih is actually a seriies of escalators - not one massive one)) And the southern bit where we are staying, which is only 15 minutes away but feels like a different world with beaches and parks and even a theme park which we are going to today (not disney land)

Our first day in hong kong was spent shopping and wandering around the many many many malls and then in the evening we went to Lan Kwai Fong which is the drinking area (of course). We found it is very expensive to drink there, but they did have proper pints so we had to indulge as we had not had a pint since england.

We have also spent a day at the beach opposite and yesterday was a massive sightseeing trip where we went to the Peak which overlooks the skyline above a mountain - amazing views! Went to a free city zoo (lots of monkeys), did the escalator thing, rode a tram, rode the star ferry over hong kong harbour and watched the nighttime light show - where basically loads of sky scrapers have been fitted with lights and lasers and at 8pm theyall take part ina huge lightshow to music.

well today we are going to a theme park called ocean park.

also we are beginning to get our plans together for China, we have applied for our visas and we think we know what we are going ot do - instead of flying to bejing which was too expensive we are going to explore southern china and maybe tibet, by train - should be a laugh.

We spent a few more days in Hong Kong, the theme park was great, a ride called the Abyss was actually pretty scary, it free falls for 60m.

We checked out a couple of markets around Hong Kong, one in Kowloon (northen HK) (which is how i imagined chinese cities to be but arent at all) and one near Phil and Andreas apartment called stanley market - where i bought a really cool laptop bag which has compartments for all my gadgets without advertising the fact that i have a laptop, basically it looks like a normal black backpack.