We really enjoyed Hong Kong and while it probably wasn’t very interesting to read about it, provided us with a nice rest before jumping head first into China.

(Hong Kong photos will be included in the China Photo Gallery)

Favorite moments:

• Great food
• Viewing the city from the Sky Terrace at Victoria Peak
• No spitting, no littering, and no pigeons!
• Air conditioning to our hearts’ content
• The big city park in Kowloon
• Midnight (and later) snack runs

Not so great:

• The hard, short beds and flat, floppy pillows
• Closet-sized apartments and phone booth sized bathrooms
• Being offered “tailor shop, nice tailor” 32 times in one day (no joke, we really counted)
• The crazy amount of signs which are all brightly lit and flashing

Total Money Spent Per Person: $285.36

Average Per Day Costs Per Person:

• Lodging: $9.63
• Food: $8.44
• Transportation: $0.63
• Misc: (Internet, supplies, laundry, entrance, etc.) $5.08

Total Average Per Day, Per Person: $23.78

Number of Days: 12

It’s our last day in Hong Kong and since we are about to go stir crazy being inside the entire week, we wanted to get out and see the last little bit of Hong Kong that we could! So we went to see the city from Victoria Peak, the purported highest scenic point in all of Hong Kong.

In Hong Kong

But first a quick but exciting stop at the United Sates Embassy. We have finally completely filled up our passports and had to swing by to get a few new pages stuck in. From the embassy the tram up the mountain was just across the street.

Tram heading our way

We walked to the tram station and decided on spending the extra (US$2) on the Sky Terrace ticket. It was definitely worth it! After making it to the top, we were impressed by the incredible view. When we explored the other areas around the Peak, we were glad we spent the extra money to go to the Sky Terrace because while the view from the lower peak was nice, it was nothing compared to the Terrace.

The View

We were lucky to have an unusually sunny, clear day mostly smog-free and that certainly had an impact on our impression. On the walk back to our room at the Mirador Mansion we blundered through a couple of very nice little parks, surprisingly quiet oases from the noisy Hong Kong traffic. A worthy last day spent in Hong Kong!

Well, as you all know, we were without access to our blog for the entire time we were in China. We have been working furiously for the past four days to update the site and catch everything up so that if we can not access the site in China for another month, you will still get some schedule new posts. So we have been working like mad to bring you this fantastic content!

Well, we slept most of the day away due to our apparent aversion to fixing our jetlagged bobyclocks. Otherwise, we regret to report a rather dull day of rain and also planning our first month in China and little else. More eating and sleeping…Hmm… pretty typical stuff. But hey—we leave for mainland on Monday!

Just a rainy workday/night

By around midnight we were starving so we ran around the corner to our favorite snack stand.

I don't even know what half of this is

They have pretty much anything you would ever want to fry and eat (and a few things you wouldn’t). Our favorites are the spring rolls, meat sticks, veggie triangle things, and the tuna wraps. But for the firmer stomach they serve up squid tenticles, fish balls, lobster balls, chicken feet, whole fish on a stick, and fried chicken livers.

The stand in the rain

This place stays packed at all hours and was even pretty busy with late night snackers in the heavy rain. We ran back to the room with out treasures and spent the rest of the night finishing our china plan.

It tastes better than it looks

Still intensely jet-lagged. Can’t seem to get to bed til 3am and can’t seem to wake up til noon or 1pm. But, the good news: we got our Chinese visas today! It was incredibly easy, much to our relief, but cost a little bit extra.

The view down our block

After our fantastic trip to the visa agency it was off for some much needed Thai food. The area we are staying in is full of Thai restaurants and we have been living it up. Today it was some tasty Hai’nam chicken.

Hai'nam chicken

Then it was off to the huge Kowloon city park. The park is massive, covering several city blocks right in the middle of Kowloon City. Not only does it have a giant swimming pool but it also has a waterfowl sanctuary, several large fish ponds, a Japanese garden, a Chinese garden and a large aviary with birds from all over the world.

In the middle of everything

It's a bird! It's a plane!....no wait, it's just a bird

We spent the rest of the afternoon watching the macaws in the aviary and remembering the days we spent in Brazil which seem so far away now…

Travel Tip:

If you are not in your home country when you apply for a Chinese visa, you will likely run into a certain amount of hassle and possibly rejection. Also, the biggest issue with the Chinese visa is that you must have proof of lodging each night you are there, an exit ticket already booked and submit a full itinerary showing exactly when and where you will be while in China. We used an agency to help us get the visa with the least amount of hassle in the history of getting visas. The agency in Hong Kong (Kowloon) is called everbright (their website has changed a few times so a quick google search for “everbright chinese visa” should fix you up). They only had us fill out one form and took our passports before telling us to return in a couple of days to pick up the visas. They take care of submitting our “itinerary,” the lodging and exit transportation ticket proof so we dealt with nothing else. The charges are different based on how soon you want/need your visa (there is a next day service as well as regular 2- or 3- day services for cheaper prices). We paid US$180pp total (visa alone is $130) and it was well worth saving us the headaches that we would have had if we had tried to make the papers ourselves!

Somehow we got up before noon today and dropped off our visa applications at the visa agency. They seem to know what they are doing so hopefully everything will go smoothly and we can pick them up tomorrow.

A Junk (seriously that's what it's called) in the harbor

We spent our day lazily wandering along the famed Star Walk, Hong Kong’s Hollywood Boulevard, just in front of the even more famous Hong Kong skyline.

Bruce Lee showing off some moves

The skyline is rather unremarkable during the day but when we returned at night, we were met with bright lights from neon signs announcing “Panasonic,” “Epson,” or some similar brand at the tops of many of the skyscrapers across the bay. A pretty amazing skyline.

Hong Kong island from across the bay

The Star Walk is nice at night too with tiny blue lights along the ground as you work your way through the many names of famous stars and the giant Bruce Lee statue with camera toting tourists posing just like him. A pretty fun atmosphere but it can be hard to find cheap food in this area with its numerous upscale malls and often limited “food courts.”

After a confusing morning of more attempts to find the Mirador Mansion with both a faulty map and utterly incorrect directions (written by the hostel!), we finally had success thanks to Saben’s mad navigational skills that are borderline freakish. We spent our day wandering around the city, exploring the endless shopping malls, seeking a cheap barber for Saben’s chia-beard, and finally, phase one of chopstick mastery. There was no fork option and we were eating noodles in soup though they were nice enough to provide everyone with a ladel.

Complicated with chopsticks

The food so far has been quite an experience. They will eat anything here! As proven by the soup options at the resturant from tonight.

Soft Bone!?! I don't even know what that is

Unfortunately we are doing little in the way of sightseeing while we are here. We have come to China with very little of a plan so we are spending the next few days getting an idea of a route together as well as being horribly jetlagged. Not to mention that we will be coming back to Hong Kong to renew our visa in a month so we don’t feel the pressure to run out and see everything for fear of never being here again.

Luckly for us the room we have is very nice (though really really small) and has fast wifi so the work is going well!

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