Hong Kong - February 20

17 degrees, cloudy early, turned sunny and warm late afternoon

Today Chris and I were on our own. Hong Kong is the end of the second segment of the 3 segment cruise we are on, so there isn’t much in the way of organized tours happening as most people are leaving the boat.

Kowloon Taphouse

The ship does provide Hop-On, Hop-Off bus tickets and ferry tickets for us today. I love the Hop-On, Hop Off bus. We try to use these whenever we are in a city with them. There is no itinerary for us to follow, we just do our own thing.

For the most part we ride around listening to the accompanying recorded descriptions. It is fascinating just to look at everything around us. This place is something else… Not as frantic as I expected, but so, so many high rise buildings and super high end shops. Kind of like New York on steroids. Hong Kong is also cleaner than I’d expect for a city this size and the people seem polite – everyone lines up politely, there’s no rushing or pushing for anything that I’ve seen. I think Hong Kong would be a place we could come to on our own for a week or so.

Hong Kong Park

After seeing much of this bustling, packed, highrise/high end shop filled city we decided to have lunch…nothing crazy…just a pizza. After lunch we walked back to the ferry to get across the bay to where the ship is docked.

At one point we had a few minutes to kill while we waited for the next Ho-Ho. We used this time to wander around a bit…we came across Hong Kong Park. A gorgeous park in the middle of the city, not too big, but lovely, lush…and there was a ‘happy-room’ – this is what most guides in Asia like to call a washroom. I’m continued to be amazed at home frequent and clean washrooms are in Asia – many of these are public, no buying an overpriced glass of wine to use a filthy toilet!

sun finally appeared

Once we were across the bay we decided one last refreshment stop was in order – after all…we still had a bit of Hong Kong money to spend. We found Kowloon Taproom…a tiny place open to the street pouring Hong Kong micro brews. We only had a certain about of $$ to spend so we tried to communicate this to the waitress…we didn’t do so well…all of a sudden 2 beers arrived. We think we were able to understand which beers they were, and luckily our money covered it…and they beers were quite delicious. I can’t believe I’m starting to say beer is delicious!!

One the way to the refreshment stop we saw a sign for a Lululemon. The sign was tiny and pointed into an offive building. It was on the 17th floor of an office building. We were lucky to see the tiny sign for it. When we were in the elevator there Chris said he thought we would be open someone's apartment – that was exactly what it was like. The prices were a tad on the high side. I was looking for a long sleeved t-shirt…prices ranged from 150-200 Canadian…needless to say I didn’t buy anything – WOW.

There was a sail away from Hong Kong bonus for us…because the sun finally came out this afternoon and the position of the ship leaving the port we were able to spend a bonus early evening on our balcony. I was convinced the last time we would do this was in Manila…it was glorious to be able to do this once again.

Deanna – nope…no shoes, I gazed at some through a closed shop window after our top-of-the-world drink. I don’t even want to THINK of how high the prices would have been. In retrospect, I should have found a shop open to check out the prices – ONLY check out!!