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Published: October 31st 2007
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We arrived in a very hot and humid
Hong Kong for the last part of our tour and again we were back in a busy city full of people. It was weird walking around an Asia city that had a hint of England. There were the usual sounds and smells of markets and street vendors but also road signs we have at home, no entry signs, pedestrian crossings etc.
We enjoyed our last day with the group eating Dim Sum for lunch which is a typically Cantonese meal eaten either for Breakfast or Lunch and it is basically lots of little dishes similar concept to Tapas. We found a restaurant full of locals and tucked into great Prawn Dumplings, spring rolls amongst other things. We finished by eating these great desserts, they were sesame rolls but inside was a sweet custardy filling....delicious. In the evening we went up to Victoria peak which over looks the city to see it all lit up, and then said goodbye to our group which was sad but hopefully we will keep in touch.
Back travelling on our own we booked ourselves into our first hostel. As we had never stayed in a hostel before
neither of us had high expectations but we were greeted with a grubby room in a building with 17 floors full of rooms....talking to someone from the group who had stayed in many hostels this was by far one of the worst she'd stayed in. But it had a bed and was in the middle of the city and we survived. The best thing about the hostel was that it was next door to an Irish Pub that showed sport. Over 3 weeks without sport we were both getting withdrawal symptoms but we finally got to see football especially Liverpool's great victory over Everton 😊. 3 o'clock in the morning we woke to go next door to see the Rugby world cup final, unfortunately we didn't get the result we wanted but it was a good atmosphere with an equal amount of English and South African supporters.
Whilst in Hong Kong we went by ferry to the Islands, 1st to Lantau island to see a sitting Buddha and also to Stanley to wander round the market and sit on the beach. Outside of the main city area Hong Kong has some great, quiet countryside which neither of us expected.
That night, we stopped to watch the world famous light show on Hong Kong Island. Some of the major skyscrapers are lit up with lights and lasers, all timed to music. It got off to a slow start...but the finale was pretty spectacular. We got a fairly decent video clip of the last couple of minutes so will upload it to the blog when we can.
After 3 1/2 weeks of being in China we were both sad to leave, the people were incredibly friendly and the variety of food was amazing, although we weren't 100% sure what we were eating all of the time, but none of us got ill despite the horror stories and it always tasted good! We had travelled during the National Holiday which we thought was a 1 day holiday but getting here we found it actually lasts 5 days...while we wouldn't want to travel in China again during this time, it was amazing to see the crowds of Chinese tourists wherever we went in Beijing and Shanghai and really drove home the number of people there are in China! We think we got to see some of the real China, although a lot
of it is being knocked down and rebuilt in their rush to modernise, so if you want to come and see you'd better get here before the Olympics next year. We had a great group of people on our tour, and our tour leader was also fantastic and seemed to know every inch of China and all of the good restaurants to eat at. This certainly helped us to see as much of China as we could, and enabled us to enjoy the tour as much as we did.
After being in a lot of cities with all of the traffic and pollution, we needed a break though and were looking forward to relaxing on a beach in Thailand somewhere...but with the thought that we would definitely return to China one day.
Again, we are still having trouble uploading photo's so we will add some more as soon as we can.
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Celeste
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Glad to hear you survived!
I'm so glad to hear that the two of you survived the hostel in Hong Kong! I was very worried about you, what a sketchy place! Hope that you are having a great time on the next leg of your journey :)