This place is great. Hong Kong has to be one of my favourite cities. It’s just so alive.
We’ve been here over a week now, staying in Kowloon (on the mainland directly opposite Hong Kong Island). And strangely enough, even though Hong Kong is a lively bustling city, we’ve found it really quite relaxing. Strange. Maybe its partly because the temperatures are much lower than in Delhi (nice and comfortable at around 29 Celsius rather than 41!).
Anyway, we’ve wandered around the town as we usually do, visiting Victoria Peak on a beautiful clear day (see the pictures below). We’ve taken lots of ferries to get from Kowloon to Hong Kong Island and back – which was incredibly scenic tonight as we managed to skilfully (by accident) time our crossing so that it coincided with the nightly light show. This is when the major skyscrapers in Hong Kong’s waterfront show off, competing to light up and flash, all coordinated to a cheesy music soundtrack which you can listen to on the waterfront of Kowloon. It sounds incredibly tacky – and I suppose it is – but it also looks pretty good as you’ve got some fairly impressive buildings with neon and laser displays!
We’ve also wandered through loads of the parks around here. Hong Kong has in retaliation to its urbanisation developed some of the most spectacular parks I’ve ever seen. They are beautifully artificially sculptured to look natural (lots of waterfalls, ponds, exotic trees), but also include animals - pretty impressive ones. The Kowloon Park for instance has a massive pond enclosure, complete with a flock of flamingos. The Hong Kong garden competes with a gigantic aviary. But the clear winner of the animal stakes is the Botanical and Zoological gardens, which has huge, well-maintained enclosures of limas, orang-utans, sloths, flamingos, cranes, ibises, parrots, and loads of other birds and animals. And a jaguar! Sadly, when we visited the jaguar was not too well (a notice said it was ‘on medication’), and seemed to be sleeping at the back of the enclosure. On the other hand the orang-utans were definitely having fun, and there were three really sweet baby ring tailed lemurs climbing around or clinging to their Mums.
Another great thing about this part of the world is the food. Chinese food is for the most part really nice – and best of all, varied. Dim Sum, sea food, rice and noodley things, Peking Duck… lovely. We were also lucky to meet up with TJ briefly (one of our friends in Newbury for those of you that don’t know him), and we had some lovely Chinese foods we hadn’t come across before. There are a few scary ‘foods’ in this part of the world that we haven’t summoned up the courage to try yet: including chicken-feet, insectoid things, and plenty of restaurants that smell odd! Saying that, one of the nice things about Hong Kong is that you can very easily get good food from other countries than China: Italian, Japanese, Thai, or just a good sandwich! At least this stops you getting too saturated with East Asian cuisine! Unfortunately this wasn’t the case in India, where you try Indian interpretations of dishes from anywhere but India at your peril!
Anyway, on to Tokyo next – tomorrow. That should be fun! We’ll post some more pictures and notes soon. All the best.
We’ve been here over a week now, staying in Kowloon (on the mainland directly opposite Hong Kong Island). And strangely enough, even though Hong Kong is a lively bustling city, we’ve found it really quite relaxing. Strange. Maybe its partly because the temperatures are much lower than in Delhi (nice and comfortable at around 29 Celsius rather than 41!).
Anyway, we’ve wandered around the town as we usually do, visiting Victoria Peak on a beautiful clear day (see the pictures below). We’ve taken lots of ferries to get from Kowloon to Hong Kong Island and back – which was incredibly scenic tonight as we managed to skilfully (by accident) time our crossing so that it coincided with the nightly light show. This is when the major skyscrapers in Hong Kong’s waterfront show off, competing to light up and flash, all coordinated to a cheesy music soundtrack which you can listen to on the waterfront of Kowloon. It sounds incredibly tacky – and I suppose it is – but it also looks pretty good as you’ve got some fairly impressive buildings with neon and laser displays!
We’ve also wandered through loads of the parks around here. Hong Kong has in retaliation to its urbanisation developed some of the most spectacular parks I’ve ever seen. They are beautifully artificially sculptured to look natural (lots of waterfalls, ponds, exotic trees), but also include animals - pretty impressive ones. The Kowloon Park for instance has a massive pond enclosure, complete with a flock of flamingos. The Hong Kong garden competes with a gigantic aviary. But the clear winner of the animal stakes is the Botanical and Zoological gardens, which has huge, well-maintained enclosures of limas, orang-utans, sloths, flamingos, cranes, ibises, parrots, and loads of other birds and animals. And a jaguar! Sadly, when we visited the jaguar was not too well (a notice said it was ‘on medication’), and seemed to be sleeping at the back of the enclosure. On the other hand the orang-utans were definitely having fun, and there were three really sweet baby ring tailed lemurs climbing around or clinging to their Mums.
Another great thing about this part of the world is the food. Chinese food is for the most part really nice – and best of all, varied. Dim Sum, sea food, rice and noodley things, Peking Duck… lovely. We were also lucky to meet up with TJ briefly (one of our friends in Newbury for those of you that don’t know him), and we had some lovely Chinese foods we hadn’t come across before. There are a few scary ‘foods’ in this part of the world that we haven’t summoned up the courage to try yet: including chicken-feet, insectoid things, and plenty of restaurants that smell odd! Saying that, one of the nice things about Hong Kong is that you can very easily get good food from other countries than China: Italian, Japanese, Thai, or just a good sandwich! At least this stops you getting too saturated with East Asian cuisine! Unfortunately this wasn’t the case in India, where you try Indian interpretations of dishes from anywhere but India at your peril!
Anyway, on to Tokyo next – tomorrow. That should be fun! We’ll post some more pictures and notes soon. All the best.
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