Hong Kong :-)

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Hello everybody, well the days of a cheap meal and drink have gone, Hong Kong is so expensive!! It's fantastic for a few days though and if you're affluent then even more so with big named shops enticing you in to spend quite probably all your money.

Our accomodation in Kowloon was situated in the Chunking Mansion which is the most derelict, tatty building you have ever seen but the guest house..Ocean View was actually very pleasant and quiet compared with the ground floor indoor market which was fairly intimidating but after the first night you get used to it. Hong Kong in itself however was in no way intimidating, we could walk anywhere and besides the area around Chungking nobody hassled us to buy this and that and it felt great to be able to just amble down the street without having the offer of 'peep show' (I can only think the man in Thailand was trying to sell me a Mitchell and Webb DVD) or having fruit thrust in my face; I mean seriously if people knew my diet they'd at least have the decency to waft a big slab of Dairy Milk if they wanted to get results.

On our first night we abandoned our usually staunch policy of eating the local cuisine and instead decided on a visit to Pizza Hut, which was decked out like a really posh restaraunt-still tasted like same old Pizza Hut though. We ventured over to Hong Kong island the next day getting the ferry to central pier (after one of many visits over the few days to Starbucks) before walking down to Causeway bay past a giant stadium-esque structure called the Expo Centre (the equivalent of the MEN arena I think). It was here that a Sikh man tried to tell me and Tamara our fortunes but while Tamara stayed and listened I simply walked off and sure enough he asked Tam for money and then she walked off...funny would've thought he'd be able to predict the people that were going to pay him and not, being a man of the stars and such.
After seeing everything of interest in Causeway Bay-again like a Kowloon a collection of shops we decided to head down towards Hong Kong Stadium which while quaint was a fabulous piece of archetecture. After seeing the stadium we decided to call it a day and got the very efficient MTR back to Kowloon.

For our next days adventure we again ventured to central for a better look around there, well after I'd sent a massive parcel back home to relieve a bit of weight from my rucksack. In Central we visited the HSBC building where there are two Lions that the tale goes that you rub their paws for good luck, so not being adverse to a little good luck we did. After deciding that Central was again shop dominated we decided to move on and begin to ascend the worlds biggest escalator on to The Peak. This was the biggest set of false advertising I've ever seen as it was actually about 30 normal sized escalators just one after the other so it's a good job it was free otherwise I may have felt cheated. After getting upto the top we had a little walk around before heading back down on foot and settling on going to a little New York style sandwich deli for lunch. We both ordered Roast Beef sandwiches and it was only halfway into my second sandwich that I realised that the meat was raw...fortunately there were no repercussions :/ but it did put me off finishing it. To finish our day off in Central we visited a little art studio hidden away on the 4th floor of a building to see some works of Banksy and Damien Hirst and had a lovely chat with the two lovely people working there, I'm not a massive art fan but I did quite like this visit. Still what I am a fan of is the cinema and that night we went to see Avatar on the imax in 3D..mainly just so we could say we saw Avatar on the Hong Kong Imax...and then as our last act before flying out the next evening we went to the cinema in the iSquare (a massive shopping complex in Kowloon) AGAIN and saw Alice in Wonderland in 3D which if I'm honest was a bit of a disappointment but still killed time nicely.

That completed the whistle stop visit to Hong Kong and now our Asia leg of our travels is over and the Australian adventure begins!!

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