Hong Kong

Well its 7am Hong Kong time, so about 11am NZT and Row and I are sitting in the United airport lounge sipping rum and gin.. what a life... although we did have to get up at 4.30am to do this.

Day 1: Arrived in Hong Kong at 6.45am (Hong Kong is 4 hours behind NZ but the same day). Felt really tired, there was a bit of turbulence which kept waking me up, and not only that the excitment of finally going on our trip. The flight only took 10 1/2 hours, even though we thought it would be 13 hours... so that was all good. Managed to get ourselves lost looking for the bus that was transfering us to the hotel, thought we were going on the tour that morning. Thank goodness we weren't, I needed a sleep. Finally got to the Hotel, had to wait for the room, this gave us time to have a decent breakfast. (You can never get away from NZ... they had NZ butter at breakfast, although it was nice to know) The first room we got was two single beds, smelt like a smoker had just left, so we asked for another room, which was nicer.

First impressions of the city: Lots and lots and lots (to infinity) of tall apartment buildings. I thought there would be more cultural buildings. Obviously the number of people in the city has an impact on this, but still I could never have imagined this. The entire city is high rise buildings. 6000+ people per sq km, and $40,000 per sq foot for an apartment. Compare this to Australia which has 3 people per sq km. She didn't know NZ.

Slept for a couple of hours and then made our way to the tour pick up point. We toured around Hong Kong Island. We were very lucky we didn't fly in on the 9th, there was a typhon.... So we are in the tail end of the horrible weather. Not that nice, but its still really hot... was 27 C at 7.30am. The tour was great... We didn't go to the top of Victoria Peak (the highest point in HK) because we wouldn't have been able to see anything, so we stopped at a look out point, which still had a good view over the city. We also visited a fishing village which quite literally lived on the water. Mum and Dad, it was interesting looking at the boats from the point of view of bus, they weren't that big, but when you know what you can fit into a bus you have more appreciation for how big a space really is. Also saw this really big floating restaurant, and nothing in NZ compares, it was huge, basically the size of a small mall back home.

After the fishing village it was off to a Jewellry Manufacturer. Oh my GOSH!!!! if only I had lots of money to spend. I found an absolutely gorgeous ruby and diamond ring. It was only over $10,000 HKD (the exchange rate is about 6 HKD to 1 NZD). I had to leave it there, very depressing :) but then I had to think about our trip ahead no point in having a beautiful ring if I can't do anything else on our honeymoon. We ended up buying a very beautiful dancing couple which is hard to describe, you'll see it when we get back...

Then it was off to Stanley Market... Well apart from the rain which was bucketing down, the market wasn't much. We brought a table runner which will remind us of HK without taking up too much space, but apart from that, things weren't that cheap. Pretty much just stalls of bits and pieces and although there were many stalls, every 3rd shop sold the same thing.

Then back to Kowloon, under the Aberdeen and No Excuse Tunnels. A woman at the airport had suggested watching the laser show on every saturday night, and because its the 10 yr anniverisary of China taking back HK they had fireworks as well. We joined another Kiwi couple (from Blenheim) and a Aussie couple (from Port MacQuarie (Shaz and Stu will appreciate the irony of that place) for dinner at a chinese restaurant and watched the show. It was really nice having dinner with other people and hearing about their travels. Wow they had been to so many places (they weren't travelling together), it was interesting listening to their stories and in some cases we could comment but in most we couldn't. But they were wonderful people.

The laser show was a bit of a let down, basically because of the weather we couldn't see anything. But the fireworks, WOW double WOW, they were amazing. I've been in the US for two 4th of July's and they didn't come close (sorry Mary & Bryon). the finale was incredible. The whole show was a dance of a fireworks, it was truly amazing to watch, everything was co-ordinated, even the colours. By this time my eye lids were about ready to close (it was about 1am NZT), so we walked back to the hotel, about a km. Somehow we lost the Ozzie couple, don't know what happened there. We got everything packed and ready to go, because the wake up call was for 4.30am and went to bed.

Even though the weather was crap it was still a nice day. Although both Row and I agree, it was nice to stop over here, we wouldn't want to spend more than another day here. Definitely glad it wasn't a week.

Now we are just waiting for the boarding call for London, another thing I've extremely glad we didn't do, and that's fly straight through to London, I definitely had enough of the plane trip over here, to get back on it for another 12 hours... argh!!! I might have gone crazy... hold on Row says I already am. ahahaha.

Anyway the gin glass is almost empty so I'll leave it here. Love to you all. Row and Megs xxxx