Hong Kong: 30th Sept – 3rd October2009

After a rather gruelling 12 hour flight Matt and I landed in Hong Kong for a three day visit – we’re seeing this as a transitory stop before we kick off the proper travels again, for a few reasons i.e. we’ve been here before so don’t feel the need to run round doing ‘the sights’ / we need to get over the dreaded jet-lag / we need to acclimatise to the humidity / we need a break from being tourists for a bit!

So we’ve been having a nice chilled out time, sleeping in, going for walks, having nice meals and generally simmering down. A couple of highlights have been:

Wednesday – we attempted the ‘Lonely Planet’ Hong Kong pub crawl, 10 of the best pubs on Hong Kong Island. Unfortunately the city was hit by the edge of typhoon Parma, which hit the Philippines earlier in the week, so we had torrential rain, the worst we’ve ever seen and were stuck in the same pub for 2 hours – managed to go to a couple of others after that so 4 out of the 10 isn’t bad!

Thursday – Had lunch in a local dim sum restaurant – it was packed, and out of around 400 people, Matt and I were the only westerners! The food was delicious, even the custard filled bun that we had in between our savoury bites (hmmm, I think something was lost in translation, I could have sworn that was meant to be prawn!). The whole lunch came to £5 – just £2.50 each. Bargain!

Also on Thursday it was the 60th anniversary of the communist party so there was a MASSIVE firework display over the harbour – just amazing – I guess the Chinese invented fireworks, and this was a massive showcase for them, must have cost millions!

Friday – we went to the Kowloon waterfront again to watch the nightly ‘sound and light spectacular’. They literally belt out classical music and have the lights on the buildings over the water ‘dancing’ to it – with additional lasers and everything – this has been on at 8pm every night for the last 6 years and is really a sight to behold!

We LOVE Hong Kong - but for now we’re itching to get somewhere new – Bangkok here we come!