Day 70 – Hong Kong

Thursday, April 3rd, 2008

We arrived in Hong Kong this early this morning. For the first time since South Africa, we’re actually docked in a good location relative where everything is. Ever since SA we’ve been in the middle of these big shipyards. We’re docked right in Hong Kong harbor, we actually have to walk through a shopping mall to get outside of our ship area.

Once we cleared customs we took a ferry over to Hong Kong Island. It’s about a 5 minute ride and less than $2HKD, which is like 30 cents USD. Once on the island we walked around for a little bit to get a feel for the area. Unfortunately, it has been really cloudy the since we got into HK. We can’t even see the top of most of the buildings today. Kevin had a Lonely Planet book so we found a park in the area that had a zoo in it. Kind of random to be in the middle of HK, but it was cool. They had a lot of different/strange species of birds and a ton of monkeys, which have been in a majority of the countries that we’ve been in lately.

After the park/zoo we went to meet up with Jim and Chris, who we separated from earlier in the day so Jim could try to find a place to fix his computer. He spilled some water on it between Vietnam and HK and it wouldn’t turn on anymore. We met up with them at the Bank of China building, which has some really cool architecture. It’s not the tallest building in HK, but it probably has the coolest design. We tried going to the top but didn’t have much luck, they only allow visitors to go half way up. That’s probably alright though since it was so cloudy we could barely see anything half way up the building. We did find a little coffee shop on the ground floor of the building and changed our flight from Beijing to Shanghai to later, so we would have more time in Beijing. With our original schedule we were planning on waking up really early, like 4am on the day that we were going to leave to go and see the Great Wall. Now we won’t have to wake up and leave until around 8am.

Next we went to the actual Hong Kong Park, which is a fairly large area with beautiful surroundings. I’ve never been to Central Park in NY, but I would guess that it’s kind of like that. There was a bird garden in the middle of the park. Basically just a large enclosed area with a ton of different bird species in it. Then they have this walkway around in the canopy to walk around and see all of the different bird species. It was pretty cool to see, I’ve never been in anything like that before. Lots of colorful birds and the garden area inside the canopy was amazing. In the park they also had a memorial for the SARS outbreak that happened there in 2003. In the memorial they had a description of the epidemic and head statues of 8 of the doctors who died trying to fight it and find a cure.

Our next stop was this teahouse in the park. It looked like a nice place, but once we saw the menu we found out that they wanted like $5USD for a single glass of tea. There was no way I was about to pay that much, but a couple of the people we were with were willing to give it a try. I had a taste of one of theirs and it definitely wasn’t worth the amount that they paid. Not much flavor at all.

After the park we began our journey back to the ship. We had managed to get pretty far away from where we got off of the ferry. We grabbed some dinner at the ship and then headed back out for the night. First, we wanted to try to find a place to stay the night in HK for tomorrow night, since the ship was leaving for Shanghai at 11 tomorrow and we planned on staying the night in HK and going to Beijing in the morning. We didn’t have much luck at all finding a hotel. Everything was way too expensive for what we could afford. Better luck tomorrow I suppose.

Our next stop was a small night market not far from where our ship was docked. They had a lot of cool stuff, including some artwork that I really liked. I’m pretty sure I have enough artwork now to decorate an entire apartment. Good thing I’ll be looking for one once I get back :)

We’ve had so much practice bargaining in the previous countries that it’s getting really easy. I’ve got my bargaining techniques down now, it’s pretty cool.

So after the night market closed we were all pretty hungry and found this little restaurant that was still open. Needless to say, we stuck out pretty badly. It was good food though!


Couple of side notes about Hong Kong. There are a TON of big name stores on every block. They love their expensive name brands. Almost every block has at least two stores with ridiculously priced clothes. There are also a lot of really nice cars. Poverty isn’t exactly a problem in Hong Kong. BMW, Mercedes, Jaguars are all pretty common cars. You know how some busy crosswalks now have a countdown for how much time you have to walk across the street? Well every crosswalk in HK has this ticker sound signaling how much time you have until you can walk again, then how much time you have left to walk across the street. So there’s this constant ticking sound at every crosswalk. Interesting way to solve the issue.