July 14, 2009 – Day 201 – Hong Kong

Whoa, talk about a great day! After a rather uncomfortable 12 hours in the Beijing airport, we were terribly eager to get on our flight to Hong Kong. To our great surprise, the airline made a mistake and overbooked our seats with another couple. To remedy the situation, we were bumped to first class! We were as giggly as two schoolgirls the entire flight!

Ahh... the easy life

The other 6 passengers were quite clearly people who “only fly first class”. Two in particular were horrible, horrible to the flight attendants! They made those poor ladies run back and forth probably 8 times to give them more drinks or even to put away their carry on luggage because the one guy didn’t want to trouble himself to get up and taking one step, literally one step, to do it himself! We were amused at these smug people  and even though we enjoyed three times the amount of leg room, first class honestly is not a big enough deal to fly it exclusively. Well, maybe on Virgin Airways…

The view from up here

When we arrived, we began hunting down the hostel we had been thinking of staying at. We spent some immensely frustrating time trying to locate the address of the building the hostel was supposed to be in. Round and round we went and we could not for the life of us find the place! We were getting desperate. It was nearly midnight and this is obviously an unwise time to be freshly off the plane, fully loaded with your pack and gear, and utterly lost with nowhere to sleep for the night. We had only seen 2 hotels in all the time we were walking and although the cheapest one way out of our price range, we had to take it.

Our awesome room

Travel Tip:

If you are planning to stay in the Kowloon neighborhood of Hong Kong, you will have extreme difficulty finding hostels. These “hostels” are inside the skyscrapers and may be on the 10th or 12th floor. We were going to stay in one of the many hostels inside the Mirador Mansion building but we could not identify the building as they had already closed the entrance with the sign for the night and only had the side entrance open and certainly had no idea that the hostels would have no signs outside the building. So it is best to have a good look at a map before hand and if possible arrive before 9 p.m. as most buildings gate off their entrances and only use a small door in the gate for security reasons