First thing I did not expect about Hong Kong was how beautiful it was. The mountains there are big, like really big, and cool looking too. As we drove from the airport to Causeway Bay on the island (on a London style double-decker bus), I could see how awesome everything looked. A few pics from the ride:
At first, I was disoriented by the hustle and bustle. Compared to Shanghai, HK is a very compact city, with more people living near the center of the city. We arrived at the hostel, Yesinn at Causeway Bay, and it was my first time staying at a hostel. It was about what I expected. This hostel was pretty nice. Very clean, decently comfortable bed, a few couches in the living room/lobby with all sorts of international travelers, and a disorganized front desk.
By the time we settled in, it was pretty late, so we had dinner at a local noodle bar (pretty good), and walked around a little bit. It was kind of difficult to navigate, but we ended up stumbling upon a small remote controlled car race track and watched that for awhile. I don't have a picture from that, but I took a video, which you should bug me about when I get home.
The next day we got up early to go on a hike: Dragon's Back. It was across the island. When we left, there was a 10 percent chance of rain. If that's not foreshadowing, I don't know what is. The hike was really nice, cool trail/mountains. I was able to take some pictures...
...until that cloud hit. It rained. Hard. HARD. HARD. Like unexpectedly hard. Absolute downpour. I did my best to protect my phone and camera. My phone escaped without damage, but my camera had some temporary water damage that has since dried. We wanted to get to the peak, so when the rain started 2/3 up the mountain, we quickly got their and tried to hurry down. Some of the trails turned into rivers and the rocks became very slippery and difficult to go down.
Finally we got back to the hostel, dried off, changed, and had a quick lunch at Ajisen Ramen again (we ate there in Shanghai once). Again, delicious, but terrible service. We went to Central HK on the island to explore the escalators. There is a series of escalators that can take you way up into the city. It takes about 15 minutes to do all of them and is a fun journey. On the way there are plenty of bars and restaurants, mostly western style.
Finally, we returned to the Hostel. We met the other people on our trip who were flying in on Friday, and we went to Din Tai Fung (See Qingdao Day 4 Post). It's a Dim Sum place. Very good.
The next day we went to see the Big Buddha on another island. It was only built in the 80's, and we didn't realize this at first. Nevertheless, it was impressive. To get there you take a very long gondola, which had great views and windows that did a great job of messing up otherwise perfect pictures.
And the Big Buddha:
And back down:
That night, we went up to Victoria's Peak, which looks down across the whole city. It's quite the view. We watched the sun set from there. Most of the pictures I took at night didn't turn out very well, but I managed a couple very good ones:
Before:
Most of the other pictures are similar or are very blurry.
The next day began with a really good Dim Sum Lunch. We went to the Ladies Market at Mong Kok, which is like an outdoor fake market, but not really focused on fakes, more just on random stuff. Pretty cool to see, and the vendors were more calm than the ones in Shanghai.
We went back to Central (Lan Kwai Fong) for dinner at a Greek place (nice to have real western food) and it was quite good. We then went across to Tsim Sha Tsui Harbour to look at the light show at night. We were on the top deck and it began to rain hard Hard...ok I won't but you get the point. We rushed to the lower deck for cover but could still see the show...mostly. It was hard to get pictures.
We took the Star Ferry back across to the Island and maneuvered through a series of covered crosswalks and buildings to avoid the rain and get to the Metro Station and eventually go to the hostel, where we woke up too early to go to Macau. I won't go into that here.
Instead I'll say that Hong Kong was really one of the more awesome and unique places I've been. People are definitely more used to westerners, even compared to Shanghai, which is very western my Chinese standards. It maintains a unique culture based off of traditional Chinese culture, influenced by the west, but it still had some extra depth do it. The language is Cantonese, which is different from Mandarin. I think Cantonese sounds really cool, the intonations are really important.
I guess what I liked most about Hong Kong's culture is the fact that people seemed very happy, even if they live in a tiny apartment. There is good food, lots of things to do, and you can get from bustling city to beautiful pristine mountains in less than a half hour with less than twenty Hong Kong dollars ($2.50). People are friendly and are happy to help if you have questions or are lost. Most people have pretty good English, or at least know a few words/phrases. Also, there are either no or very few scammers (One taxi over charged a little bit too much, but not too bad).
Finally, the food was really good. Both the Western and Cantonese cuisine was really good. They serve a lot of noodles as opposed to rice, which was a nice change of pace for me. And of course I leave you with this:
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