crazyscot

If you thought the words were a bit tl;dr:

• My highlights of NZ (well, my favourite photos from the trip)
  
• All my (posted) photos from NZ (big hierarchical collection; 160 in total)
  
• Hong Kong
  

Hong Kong, Kowloon, and a mini(bus) adventure; HKG-LHR

It's like a Knight bus with a warp engine driven by a crazed weasel on speed!

Seeing as the hotel's breakfast was expensive and the MTR fast and efficient, we decided to head into Central (Hong Kong "proper") in order to hunt for breakfast. After walking aimlessly without success (everywhere offers lunch and dinner but few do breakfast), we fell back to 7-Eleven and McDonalds. Continuing to mooch around for a while, we came upon the HSBC headquarters with what is a pretty cool bank branch entrance by anybody's standards: a pair of escalators from street level.

After ogling the edifice we went to Victoria Peak. We went the easy way, of course - up the "tram" (really a funicular, rising 400m in 1.4km). Alas, we picked the wrong time to go up and had to queue for half an hour, but the views were impressive and would have been even more stunning had it not been hazy.


In the afternoon we figured we'd go across (under) the water and check out Kowloon. Getting there was easy but escaping from the station was not...! The station is built into the base of a massive development named Union Square. Unfortunately it is rather difficult to navigate: if we had wanted to go to the Elements shopping mall, or one of the named buildings which rise from it then all would have been fine, but we ended up taking an exit which led us out to a roof garden area. There was vehicular access but it didn't appear possible to leave on foot - guards shooed us away! - nor did we find an outdoor exit from the mall. Truly this complex imitates Hogwarts. (Will confirmed later that he also finds it a difficult station to navigate, so we didn't feel too bad.)


We gave up and went back into the MTR, which we took to Admiralty. We were meeting daemon_will and Yuki for dinner in Wan Chai, which was one stop away, so we decided to walk the last several blocks. A ferry terminal was nearby, which gave us views across to Kowloon and Tsim Sha Tsui; we spent more time in an English-language bookshop, in which everything was expensive and all the non-display copies shrink-wrapped, ostensibly to prevent curling due to humidity.


Dinner came in the form of a Nepalese restaurant nearby, then daemon_will had a proposal for us: they would accompany us back to our hotel via a HK minibus. Now, while the taxi and MTR and regular bus services all seem to be very smooth, efficient and professional, the minibuses are a bit more rough and ready, a bit more of a Hong Kong sort of experience. They're very popular, running routes all over the city, and very fast, but they're all but inaccessible unless you are (or are with) a Cantonese speaker so that you can answer if asked where it was on the route you were headed. C and I looked at each other and declared ourselves up for it, so we all headed down to the stop and its rather long queue.

We all just managed to squeeze on to the second bus that appeared, and got seats near the front. The driver shut the door and we were on our way. My first thoughts were "this is like the Knight bus", which I rapidly revised to "Knight bus with a warp engine" and then "Knight bus with a warp engine driven by a crazed weasel on speed"...! It seemed that one or other of the pedals was flat on the floor practically all the time. These buses are nippy and manouverable; the drivers don't have a problem with tight cornering or speedy changes of lane, and while they do stop for red lights, you sometimes wish they would be more gentle about it. In response to accidents a few years ago there is now a large Speed Display Unit mounted from the ceiling facing the passengers, which is supposed to go beep above 80kph; in theory if you feel that the driver is driving too fast you can yell at them to slow down a bit. The driver would yell at anything that got in his way or otherwise impeded the journey.

Two passengers wanted to get off part-way, but the driver missed their responding to "<Does anybody want to go to [place]?>" and so was peeved when they (rightly) protested that he'd gone past their stop. It was too late to get into the correct lane, so he asked whether he could drop them at the top of the next on-ramp. Motorway on-ramp, that is, so it was illegal (not to mention bloody dangerous), but dropped off they were and they proceeded to walk down the on-ramp (also illegal and hairy). We got to Tsuen Wan intact, exhilarated and white-knuckled - this is truly a HK experience not to be missed if you get the opportunity.

We're getting up at 0430 for our flight home, so I ought to not write any more for now.

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Added after we got home:

0430 is a horrible time to get up any time of the year, but trebly so when jet-lagged and following the recent stress of the Chch quake. On a whim, I filmed the journey down from the 67th floor - at little over a minute of vertical travel time, that's one fast pair of lifts.

We had to check in by 0645 - too tight to use the MTR as it only opens up for the day at six - and we didn't fancy dragging our bags to the bus stop, so a taxi it was. It came to only HK$200 (GBP 16) for the journey, and we got there in half an hour - plenty of time to cash in our Octopus cards and grab a bite to eat. There were several queues; the longest was not for security, but to get through the door before security that ensures that everybody has a boarding pass.

Boarding the aircraft was a bit shambolic as there was about a 777ful of people queueing up already at the time the announcement asking people in the rear ten rows to board was made, and they just processed people in turn. Whilst in the queue I noticed number of people clutching UK emergency travel documents; it was not difficult to guess where they had been.

The flight was uneventful, and we we were very glad to have a prearranged cab home. Familiar environment, familiar bed, familiar food, familiar (cold wet) weather. This adventure is over, but we've left little pieces of our hearts in NZ and hope to be back there again soon.

Hong Kong

I never thought I'd say this, but I'm grateful for the existence of McDonalds!

HKG airport was fast and efficient; we breezed through passport control, bought ourselves Octopus cards (like Oyster, but also accepted by many vending machines and convenience stores) and headed down to the bus stop. The bus to Tsuen Wan cost HK$17.8 (about GBP1.50) for a 50 minute journey; we then had to find our hotel. The Nina Tower is the largest of the skyscrapers in that part of HK and a quite distinctive asymmetric twin-tower design - straightforward to look for when you've seen it once! - but we had to drag our cases farther than needed as we'd incorrectly stayed on the bus until the terminus.

We were quite tired; thankfully they were able to let us have the room early. We were on the 67th floor (of eighty); the city view from the floor-to-ceiling window is mind-boggling, if a bit restricted by the haze while we were there, and complemented by the views in other directions from the sky lobby on the 41st floor. (You take the express lift from the lobby up to the sky-lobby on 41F, then have to get in the correct lift for your destination floor. The lifts are fast; it only took about three minutes to get between our room and the lobby.)

The hotel is the full 5* luxury experience with excellent fittings, wonderful bathroom with bath and shower, swanky minimalist lobby, connected by walkway to the Mass Transit Railway. And the price? We got a promo room-only rate of just HK$800 (about GBP 64) per night, well worth it.

Having freshened up we went out in search of lunch in the local area. There are several shopping malls joined by above-ground walkways, but the great problem is the language: finding food that we were interested in eating was quite a challenge as we found English wording on many menus to be cryptic or entirely missing. I ended up eating at McDonalds while C found an enjoyable vegetarian risotto in a shopping mall food court. Indeed, walking about here we felt mostly illiterate: while the street names and most signage is bilingual, shops' own posters are frequently only in Chinese.

We trundled back to the hotel and collapsed. We were in bed by 1730 - only 2230 by NZ time, but following a poor night's sleep on the plane and beset by aftershocks the previous night, we needed it.