HK Day 6: Lantau Island

Today we went to Lantau Island, HK's biggest island and home to tourists attractions including a massive bronze Buddha and Tai O, a fishing village (both of which we visited today). It was coincidentally a ridiculously windy day, but we decided to take the cable car up the mountain anyways, since the roads that the bus take are windey and takes a lot longer (we took the bus on the way down).  Surprisingly, even though it was windy, the cable car was quite stable, although the higher we got the more we could really feel the impact of the wind.  At the top, we climbed up to see the giant Buddha and we had a bit of really tasty Buddhist vegetarian food.  We then took a bus over to Tai O where we wandered around and looked through the fishing village.  We bought a live fish, and brought it over to a restaurant at the other side of the village and they cooked it for us for dinner.  (The fish was still moving inside the bag as we were walking over and made my sister jump every single time since we forced her to carry it.  She had an especially good time eating it...revenge is sweet).  As I mentioned earlier, we took the bus back - took so much longer, but also less nerve wracking. 

Taking the Cable Car to Lantau Island

Tai - O

-M

HK Day 5: Rain day & Food!

Today it rained a lot here in Hong Kong.  It was a bit of a downer as we were hoping to spend the day outdoors visiting gardens and temples, on the bright side it was more the Toronto weather I'm used to (thank god!).  As it started to pour, we arrived at a temple called Wong Tai Sin and looked around - lucky for us, rain meant less people (normally it'd be packed).  In the evening, we decided to take the tram from one end of the city to the other, just for kicks.
 

So obviously a trip to Hong Kong isn't complete without food! I don't think I've talked about food yet, but basically it's awesome.  Not all food is cheap here, but practically all of it is really good.  The street food here is extremely tasty, and the fruits are really really sweet and fresh. So, in case you're hungry here's some food:


-M

HK Day 3/Day 4: Kowloon

Humidity! Ahh! These last few days we spent in the Kowloon side of Hong Kong (we're staying on the HK Island side).  We did a lot of random stuff including visiting my dad's old school & old house, eating tons of street food, and tons of shopping in markets and malls.  Here are some random highlights!

Transit
HK has THE best transit system ever!  SO much better than the TTC!  It's clean, fast, cheap, air conditioned, it has internet and phone service (as well as internet stations where you can go on the computers for free if you need to look up something) and it's so much more organized with something similar to a metropass called the octopus card!  The octopus card works kinda like what Montreal uses for their metro with a card that you scan on a pad.  You can top up the card with an amount and use it for the bus, streetcar, subway, and in some cases you can use it to buy things like water.  Transit itself is so cheap, one trip on the trolly/streetcar (which goes super far) is less than $0.50 Canadian!

Hong Kong Subway System!

The bus and streetcar are both double decker and run extremely frequently.  I should also mention the taxis are really cheap even though the traffic is a bit hectic.  Oh, and McDonalds delivers.  

Kowloon
We've spent most of the trip on the other side of HK, but the Kowloon side is incredibly vibrant.  Both by day and by night, it's more live and upbeat than I've ever seen Toronto.  During the day there was so much going on, between the street markets and the high class malls (one of them was a hundred times bigger and nicer than either Eaton or Sherway), and at night the city came to life.  For some reason Monster's Inc is a super big deal here.  At night, the city lit up with street performers and pedestrian only sections throughout majority of the downtown area. 

View of Hong Kong Island from Kowloon

-M

HK Day 2: Victoria Peak

Hong Kong is so hot.Yet somehow, all the locals here don't sweat, and I seem to be the only one getting eaten alive by mosquitoes.  Today we walked around the city in more or less a large circle from the hotel to the Soho area, over to Victoria Peak via tram and then we spent a bit of time at the Hong Kong University campus.  HK is really hilly...REALLY hilly, so since they're super smart, they decided to build a system of escalators outside which go for over 800m!  The surrounding buildings are trendy little boutiques and restaurants which are Western styled.  

One of the markets close to our hotel

Longest outdoor escalators in the world!

Tram going up to the Peak

The track going up was ridiculously steep

View from the top of the peak

HKU campus (they had free internet!)

-M

HK Day 1: Arrival

If I could fly first class for the rest of my life, I'd do it in an instant.  Our flight left this morning at 7am and got to Vancouver at 10am (Vancouver time).  We had a 5 hour layover in Vancouver, then took a flight straight to Hong Kong, arriving at 5pm HK time.  The flight was awesome, the maple leaf lounge had a load of food and comfy couches, plus pretty fast internet.  The first class seats on the flight also meant a ridiculous amount of edible food and we had individual little pods which reclined into a bed & the movies and tv shows available made it hard to force myself to sleep. 

Vancouver Maple Leaf Lounge

HK flight Menu

Random First Impressions of Hong Kong: 

• It's HOT. We arrived in the evening when it was cooler, but even then it was super humid
• Every store/building has their AC cranked up all the way, so crazy fluctuation of temperature 
• The streetcars and transit in general is a lot cleaner and nicer than the TTC
• It appears none of the men here wear shorts - they all wear long pants which is nuts as this place is legit ridiculously hot
• The bugs here must be on steroids, the cockroaches are MASSIVE
• There's a lot more westerners here than I expected which is kinda cool - I think there's actually more Westerners in HK than I'm used to seeing at school!
• Watching British TV is amusing

Random Streets

-M