MG1666

This is our last day. This morning we headed off over to HK Island to use the mid level escalators, which we are told, climb a mile from the bottom at Central to maybe half way up the mountain. The escalator serves all the people living from those levels who live in the immediate densely populated areas. Otherwise the local streets are crosshatched all the way, so access is Ok if you have transport or use a bus. Each escalator is of normal length, it is just a matter of swapping onto the next climbing escalator. They run down to about 10.25am each day and swap to up for the rest of the day. We found the directions for the starting point by searching on Google. After finding two options, the second seemed Ok and it ... read more

This morning we visited the HK Museum of Science. I imagine it’s similar to the Melb Science Museum that I haven’t yet visited. So here, and maybe unusually, we saw the dinosaur exhibit for specimens taken from Lufeng in Yunnan province. It contained a few skeletons and a film - the most important aspect of this is that it’s supposed to be one of the biggest dinosaur finds in the world, which something I never knew. The film showed that the Chinese have made a full sized roof, maybe the size of a football field, over part of the site for visitors to see some of the remaining specimens in situ. We then completed our shopping for Paul. On the way back to the hotel, we found an arcade that was full of shops run by ... read more

First thing today, we headed to the Hong Kong Museum, which was three minutes walk from where we stay. But before we got there, we met up with two butterflies whilst strolling past under a Chinese Banyan Tree on the way. They were large black with blue flashes and landed on Maurs shoulder - one made a great picture. The history museum has two main exhibitions - one on the early history of Hong Kong and the other concerning the time since the republic of China movement began in 1911. The first exhibition contained many expensive static displays, exhibits, explanations and films about the pre history right up to now. This gave us an insight into Chinese life as it developed here. The latter part of this history explained the horrible events of the British Empire ... read more

Today we bought a hop on hop off bus ticket and used it to travel through Kowloon where we are staying and over on Hong Kong Island. The best part bit of this was sitting up on open top of the double decker bus. We had English commentary via ear pieces. It was interesting noting close up, how overhanging neon signs were steadied to buildings by very old cables, the locals washing which was everywhere hanging out their apartment windows and how some of that had come adrift and fallen onto some of the signs' frames. Some of the footpaths' verandas had all sort of junk laying around up there including part from air conditioners and I aslo saw a tree or two attempting to grow out of some verandah cracks!. So back to the blog, ... read more

We all got up early at 8.00am to go to the bow on the front deck to watch the boat entering Victoria harbour Hong Kong. It’s pretty amazing - the harbour is probably a smaller version of Sydney Harbour but here the surrounding mountains are closer and off course the high rise apartment buildings are as thick as anything on every side - I’ve never seen anything like it before. This day became our port day in lieu of the trip being cut short by not visiting Taiwan. We walked around Kowloon which is where the ship berthed, walked up to where our Hotel was, the Regal Kowloon and then meandered back along the shore walkway. It was interesting see the difference in town between the new areas and the older areas which were very different. ... read more