MANY tall buildings, Kowloon Park and Star Ferry

  Hong Kong, Hong Kong
Monday, March 12, 2007

Saturday Mar 10th

An early start today as our flight to Hong Kong left at 8.20am, Bangkok Airways have only recently added a direct flight to Hong Kong which is a huge improvement on having to fly through Bangkok or Singapore. We checked into Novotel Hong Kong and were upgraded to a room on the top floor, this was because I'd asked the manager at the Novotel Bangkok to phone ahead to Hong Kong and request it for us as regular guests ! I was surprised this actually worked though !

The first thing which struck me about Hong Kong was the enormous amount of tall buildings including the International Finance centre, Central Plaza, and the Bank of China Tower which are all in the top 15 tallest buildings in the world. The Lippo Centre (formerly the Bond centre) is a pair of twin towers which were dubbed the 'Koala Tree' as they resemble Koalas clutching a tree and were intentionally designed this way on request from former owner Alan Bond.

There were posters all over the place advertising a new collection by Madonna available in H & M starting Mar 10th, we were amazed at the queue to get into the store !!! There were easily more than 100 people waiting to get into H & M to get their hands on this new collection ! We also rode the longest escalator in the world which consists of 20 escalators and 3 moving sidewalks, it is 800 metres long and climbs 135 vertical metres ! Partway up the escalator we saw the Rednaxela Hotel on Rednaxela St, notice anything strange about the name ? The street was originally called Alexander, but when a Chinese artist writing the street name reversed the letters in Chinese fashion it was decided to keep the new name ! We also visited Times Square which has one of the largest shopping malls in Hong Kong.

Sunday Mar 11th

We caught the train across (acutally under) the water to Kowloon and walked around for a couple of hours. We visited the Peninsula Hotel which is ridiculously expensive, this hotel owns 15 Rolls Royces !!! We planned to have tea there (pretty much all we could afford :o) ) but there was a queue of about an hour so we gave up on this idea. We next had a walk around Kowloon Park and saw a variety of sights and activities, with it being Sunday there were lots of locals out and about (Sunday is their only day off). Many of them were stood around chatting but there were also people dancing alone in front of their ghetto blasters ! We also saw a sign for the Beijing Olympics 2008 showing good forward planning! Nearby the park there were also thousands (I'm not exaggerating) of local girls sitting on the pavement with packed lunches, it seemed pretty obscure to us especially as the weather wasn't great ! We caught the famous Star Ferry back across the water, it's been operating since 1888 and was the main means of public transportation between Hong Kong island and Kowloon until the Cross Harbour Tunnel opened in 1972.

In the evening we found a great bar (I've included a picture as the bar was featured in the James Bond movie 'The Man with the Golden Gun') and watched England beat France in the 6 nations at rugby, this was quite a surprise as England hadn't been getting great results or playing too well. It rounded off the trip nicely to be cheering a win against the French. Unfortunately France won their game the next weekend (scoring in the final minute!!) to just beat Ireland on points difference and win the 6 nations for 2007. The Rugby World Cup is being hosted by France later this year and they definitely have a chance of winning, although New Zealand are rightly the favourites. England are the defending champions having beaten Australia in the final (in Sydney!) in 2003, but as much as I want them to defend their title I don't believe we have a strong enough team this year.

So here ends my first ever travel blog, I hope you've gained some enjoyment from reading and also hope some of the information may come in useful when making future travel plans. Please be sure to keep sending news and pictures from your own lives and travels, it's been fantastic to receive replies from so many people already !

All the best
'Zooming' Andy