Advertisement
Published: June 26th 2008
taken from the path of the Intercontinental
...yes we just liked to hang around posh hotels without staying there!Ok, ok we said we weren’t going to do blogs for places we have already been to...that has gone out the window due to the fact we went on a shopping trip to Hong Kong, bought a new camera and just couldn’t resist taking loads more pics: so here is our double-take Hong Kong blog!
We decided to fly into Macau (*officially the worst airport in the world...we’ll go into this later!!) as it was cheaper than flying to Hong Kong itself and we then hopped on a ferry to Kowloon to make our way to the fantastically luxurious Chungking Mansions. After some sort of heated discussion between the owner and workers of the guesthouse about our booking for 15 minutes or so, and us impatiently tapping our fingers on the reception ‘desk’ we checked into our ‘room’ for our shoe box style living for the next 4 days...the picture says it all really. The first thing we did was to go in search of our favourite Hong Kong restaurant, the Garden Noodle restaurant on Canton Road...the last time we were in Hong Kong we loved this place and imagine our dismay to find it had gone. We asked the
nearby restaurant what had happened to be simply told ‘no more...gone’. Bitterly disappointed we went for an Indian instead, which was pretty good but after stuffing ourselves with chicken tikka, madras, naan and rice we felt a little bit sick!
The first order of the trip was to SHOP, SHOP, SHOP and to get our external hard drive fixed. We managed to find the shop where we had originally bought it and got it fixed thankfully we hadn’t lost our 160gb worth of backup files...the only problem was that this shop was in the Wan Chai computer centre and wandering around the shops there looking at cameras put an unshakable idea in our heads that we should buy a new super-duper camera to replace our rather big, now looking outdated camera!
With wills of steel we walked away from the camera shops empty handed and went in search of H&M...Donna was in heaven! A few shopping bags later and lots of groans from Neil, we exited H&M ready for more wandering around Hong Kong. We must say at this point, we really like Hong Kong as a city/place, it has great shopping spoilt only by the fact it
doesn’t have a Top Shop 😞 a fact which we are amazed at!
We did all the touristy things we didn’t manage to fit in last time we were in Hong Kong. We went to Temple Street night market...this is a great area of Kowloon, we loved wandering around the market stalls, browsing the ‘genuine fakes’, seeing all sorts on offer from solar picture key rings, Buddha statues and pictures, watches and ahem...personal ‘massage’ devices of all shapes and sizes!! After a while of searching we found what Donna had been looking for...a digital watch, with a white strap - a black strap WOULD NOT do as it didn’t ‘go’ with the rest of her accessories - see what a headache Neil had shopping with this OCD one? The best thing of all was that the watch was only £2, what a bargain and it hasn’t broken yet...a bonus as Donna has an impressive track record of breaking watches. We loved wandering around this market, a lot of the things on sale were similar to the things sold in Thailand, with one big difference. They were a fraction of the cost of the things on market stalls in Thailand.
the Bank of China building
...it's the one in the middle! We were in heaven but wished that we could send more things home for the house!
The weather was pretty crappy in Hong Kong the 3 days we were there...to be expected in typhoon and monsoon season we know; so we postponed going up to ‘the Peak’ on Hong Kong island as long as we could, as for our first 2 days there was constant cloud over the peak. Our last day, luckily was bright and sunny, no more rain and getting slippy and slimey flip flops! But before we went to the Peak there was one thing we just HAD to do...yes, you guessed it...we bought the camera! We spent a while shopping around Wan Chai computer centre, comparing and discussing with various sales assistants the merits of different cameras. We narrowed it down to two, took some pictures with each then chose the winner! For those who are interested, it’s a Nikon Coolpix s550, 10 megapixel with 5x zoom. It’s very impressive with smile detection software and all sorts of other posh stuff.
We hightailed it to the Peak Tram station, via a few air conditioned shopping centres, eager to snap some pictures. The wait for
the tram was a long one, we waited about an hour to get on a tram, we also had to give several Chinese people waiting with us severe dressing-downs as they were trying to push in, as is the Chinese way! The wait was well worth it though; the tram was quite unique, it takes you up at such an angle that it makes all the buildings alongside it look like they are built at 45 degree angles! We got to the top and the view was fantastic, we were really pleased we had taken the time to go up the Peak. The biggest surprise of all was how much there was to do at the Peak. There were 2 shopping centres (one has a viewing terrace on the roof, called the Sky Terrace which gives 360 degree views of Hong Kong island...we didn’t pay extra for this, we were happy with the view from the viewing points), there were nature walks and a Madam Tussauds.
The queue for the tram back down wasn’t too bad and we hopped on the Star Ferry to take us back to Kowloon. We really like the ferry in Hong Kong, it’s cheap
and a fun way to get around and most importantly you can sit down for a while to rest your weary legs after too much shopping. Briefly, the other things we did; we went on the Mid Level escalators (well it’s a travelator actually!) the longest in the world and mooched around the Central area’s back streets. We also found a new favourite restaurant in Kowloon - called Delicious funnily enough. We got a soup starter, a chicken/beef and rice main dish, gorgeous steamed pak choi with soy sauce and a coffee for £3...what a bargain!
All too soon our time in Hong Kong came to an end and we had to make our way back to Macau airport for our flight out. We stocked up on a Mc brekkie (knowing it would keep us going for 4 days!) and set off on the ferry. It was a bit of a rough crossing but we made it to the airport in plenty of time. This is where it all went wrong. Let us say now, we HATE Macau airport. First we had to queue for 45 minutes to get through the security baggage scan, so we joined the check-in
queue at 11:45am...our flight was due to take off at 1:30pm. We made it into the departure lounge at...wait for it...1:15pm and boarded the flight straight away. It was chaotic with no organisation at all, even as we were sat on the plane there were people boarding 15 minutes after we had! Unbelievable and it made Donna twitch uncomfortably at the disorganisation of it all!
At last we took off, relieved to be away from Macau airport and deciding that Hong Kong would be on the agenda very soon for another shopping trip!
Advertisement
Tot: 0.06s; Tpl: 0.015s; cc: 9; qc: 24; dbt: 0.0344s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
two4deroad
Vibert & Shanna & Ty & Nathan
Shoe Box Room
Chung King Mansions!!!! We'd recognize the room anywhere! Did yours have wireless internet? Try Block D 7F. But beware of the grumpy old men......... P.S: If you're ever in HK again check out Cute Fei Vegetarian Restaurant on Humphreys Avenue. Great staff, Delicious food