We’ve passed the 6 month mark, we’ve passed the 200 day mark, these were roughly the mid point of the trip. But I always viewed Hong Kong as the mid point. What went before were the cheaper countries and the rougher part of the trip. Vietnam, Cambodia, the Philippines and Nepal were where food and accommodation would be cheap. What comes after Hong Kong is South Korea, Japan, Malaysia, Australia and New Zealand. They would be the expensive but western countries. Travelling there would be easier and safer but much more costly. Today is day 222 but leaving Hong Kong feels like the next phase of the trip. The adventure...
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When we were in the Hong Kong History Museum I read about the different banknotes in Hong Kong and how a few banks were given the authority to design and print paper money. At the time it didn’t really sink in what as to exactly what it meant. On the train out of Hong Kong I emptied the banknotes from my pocket and could clearly see what the money exhibition been referring to. I had three $20 notes in my pocket and each one was issued by a different bank. Reading on Wikipedia about the Hong Kong Banknotes we can see that three banks have permission to issue money, in addition to the Hong Kong government (although it only issues $10 notes). Lucky me, I had one from each bank! So from top to bottom we have: Standard Chartered HSBC Bank of China Even better, I had a $10 note which is issued by the Hong Kong Monetary Authority. We thought this was very unusual. One country allowing many banks to issue differing notes. Very few countries in the world have this system! The irony is that the UK is one of the few other countries in the world which operates like this! We were thinking that at home we only had one type of note, issued by the Bank of England, but then found out that a further seven retail banks are also allowed to issue notes in the UK. In England and Wales only the Bank of England can issue notes, but there’s many banks that have permission to print notes in Scotland, Northern Ireland, Jersey, Guernsey, etc. I suppose this should have been obvious when thinking about Scottish notes. But there we have it, an interesting...
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We were up bright and early to go to the International Commerce Centre. Well, actually we got up around 8am and left about 9am, but that’s pretty dammed early for me nowadays. We walked down the street towards the tower, it was already in the mid 20s even at this time of morning but the humidity wasn’t too bad. And it was much clearer than the day before! We arrived at the tower at 9:30am expecting huge crowds. Instead it was deserted. We found out why at the ticket desk, the tower doesn’t open until 10am. Argh! At 10am we bought the tickets and jumped in the lift to the 100th floor, 385m up! It took 1 minute to reach the 100th floor, almost two floors per second, which is bloody fast. No wonder our ears popped quite a few times on the way up. The observation floor was empty and very quiet, a real positive. We spent a long time walking around the whole floor looking down on Hong Kong. The views are amazing from this height! After we’d taken the photos and enjoyed the view we sat down for a coffee. It was a bit pricey and not great coffee, but to sit and relax and look out over Hong Kong and enjoy the view made it worth it. Next on the agenda was to buy lunch and take it to the top of Victoria Peak. We bought sandwiches and yogurt and made our way to the Peak Tram station at the bottom of the hill. There wasn’t much of a queue and it wasn’t long before we were on our way up. The tram isn’t very comfortable, the seats are hard wooden benches and when the tram hits its maximum gradient of about 45% our backs were quite painfully pushed hard into the seat. At the top is a large shopping complex filled with cafes, restaurants, shops, etc. It had a McDonald’s, Burger King, Häagen-Dazs cafe. The usual assortment of brands. We sat outside and ate our sandwiches… Then we went for a walk around the peak. The actual peak is closed to the public because it’s filled with radio antennae. Surrounding the peak are very expensive and exclusive apartments all ringed with high gates, CCTV cameras and security guards. As we walked up the road it was surreal; the apartments looked old and shabby and dirty but the garages contained Ferraris, Lamborghinis, Porsches, etc. We followed the road round till we reached Victoria Gardens, which was totally accidental as the humidity was crazy again and we were soaking with sweat. We stumbled upon the gardens...
Read MoreThis was a rather boring day and pretty much a waste. I had planned to go up the ICC building. It was just around the corner from our apartment. But it was very hazy and poor visibility so we decided it would be a waste of money. The same is true of The Peak. Both were viewpoints and both would be pointless to visit. We wandered around, ate lunch, wandered some more and went back to the apartment to watch the Canadian Grand Prix. A fun...
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Our first destination of the day was a monastery, the Ten Thousand Buddhas Monastery. It was built by an old man in his retirement in the 50s, on the side of a steep hill on the edge of Kowloon. Despite the name the monastery actually has almost 13,000 Buddha statues of various sizes from the tiny to ones larger than a human! It was a short journey by MTR to the bottom of the hill where the monastery is situated. Going up was awful. The humidity was through the roof. It had rained earlier (as it often does in Hong Kong) and the humidity had been bad enough in the city, but now on the hillside, which is covered with dense forest it was almost unbearable. The path was quite steep making it feel even worse! The path is lined with Buddha statues, each looking unique and many are rather comical. We were soaking with sweat but this was still quite a sight! At the top are a few colourful looking buildings. This was a nice monastery. It was almost totally deserted, giving us plenty of peace and quiet. Surrounding all the open areas are more Buddha statues. Inside the main temple there were multiple Buddha stele with ting images of the Buddha carves into the stone. We climbed a little further up to the shrines at the top. Thankfully, one of the shrines had a door and air conditioning inside. It took us over 15 minutes to cool off and for the sweat to mostly dry. We ventured out again for a few minutes to look at the waterfall and yet more Buddha statues before getting back to the air conditioned shrine. It was interesting here to see the contrast between the quiet and peaceful hillside and the edge of the city below us. After cooling off we made our way back to the bottom of the hillside and into a shopping centre to cool off yet again. Getting around Hong Kong was really not pleasant today! Kate Hudson would be happy to note that there was an IKEA here, we didn’t venture in though. Our next destination on this hot, sticky and muggy day was a park, smashing really! We took the MTR to within 200m of the entrance to the park. Inside the park, called the Nan Lian Garden is a very popular vegetarian restaurant, where we planned to eat lunch. It sits under an artificial waterfall and sitting in the restaurant you can look out through the waterfall over the park. This sounded very good but on arrival it didn’t live up to its hype....
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