Extreme tram and Park

We weren’t sure how many islands we would have chance to see in only a couple of days but the main international airport is on its own island to start with. Our hotel shuttle bus took us onto Lantau Island via a bridge, then onto Ma Wan Island, Tsing Yi Island, then onto Kowloon via other bridges to our hotel called The Gold Coast Hotel. It’s a bit far out and takes about 30 minutes on our hotel shuttle bus to get to down town Kowloon. We took the Star ferry over to Hong Kong Island today to explore it. You catch it from the end of Canton Road where it joins Salisbury Road and costs less than 20p (2HK$) each way.

First stop The Peak Tram terminal just up from the Bank of China on Garden Road. The trams run every 15 minutes up and down Victoria Peak which gives spectacular views over Hong Kong Island and Kowloon. It is drawn up by a very heavy gauge cable and sometimes is at 45degrees to level; well worth the 43HK$ for the return trip. At the top there are lots of shops and restaurants but we were too early for lunch. You can get out onto the streets where there seemed to be lots of people around and a load of Chinese people dressed in tartan playing the bagpipes. If you walk down a bit further you get to the second most expensive housing area in the world with spectacular views but it was a bit cold and we didn’t bother.

Back down the extreme tram and cross the road to Hong Kong extreme Park. Everywhere over here seems to be on really steep slopes and you are forever walking up and down hills. The park is very unusual being right amongst all the tall buildings but hardly Central Park as it is quite small. As we left the Park we could see the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in the distance so decided to go for a drink there. The East Asian Games 2009 are being held in Hong Kong in a couple of weeks and there are signs for it everywhere. In the Mandarin Oriental’s Captains bar they serve the beer in silver ice cold mugs; pricey but nice.

From there we headed off to the Lang Kwai Fong area off D’Aguila Street which is an old area of steep windy streets with lots of shops and street markets where you can buy live seafood amongst other things. We walked all the way through there and started to look for somewhere to eat lunch in as we started to get hungry. If you carry on through this area it leads you towards Soho where there are lots of different food restaurants and shops which are also on small steep streets.

If you walk down Old Bailey Street at the bottom of Soho you can catch the Central Escalator on Staunton Street which is the world’s longest, covered outdoor people mover. It’s like a series of escalators that stop at all the parallel streets that you cross so you can walk up and down these streets until you find one that you fancy before catching the next escalator up. All together it’s about 0.8km long and saves a lot of hill climbing but you have to walk down as it only goes one way. We ended up eating at Harty’s where we had the daily 2 course special that cost about 70HK$ each; however they do bring a complimentary sweet out which was a coconut milk pana cotta. That was the first meal that we enjoyed since we got here. Strangely over here they seem to serve warm water with your meal. Not just, “not cold” water but warm, almost hot we couldn’t understand it. We asked for cold water and they fetched us ice cubes in a glass and then poured warm water over them.

We took our time over lunch before heading off on the very long trek back to our hotel down the steep streets by foot, ferry, foot again then a 30 minute bus ride stopping off for supplies at the 7-11 next to our hotel. There are lots of restaurants, stalls and shops in the next hotel to ours which is a sister hotel called the Golden Sands yacht club. There is even a Mc Donald’s there where we got breakfast while waiting for the early morning bus. Only tomorrow left as we must catch the early morning bus to the airport on Tuesday. I do feel that we have seen most of what we wanted to see today so not sure what we will do tomorrow yet. Maybe we will get a day pass for the Metro and travel a bit further a field or try and find where we can buy some cheap software. Claire will sum up Hong Kong tomorrow before we head off to sunny Bali.