HK 2011

This was a trip that was pretty much planned and led by my friend who had already been there several times before. That basically meant that he knew what to see, eat and do there pretty well. With that in mind, we touched down one sunny morning at about 5am, waited for the MTR to commence service, left our luggage at our hotel (we could only check in at 2pm) near olympic station, ate our breakfast and traipsed to see the Great Buddha on a hill.

All this and the sun was barely even up. In our next 4 days, our days would start from 8am in the morning and we would only return to our hotel everyday after 12am. It was tiring, exhilarating and I loved every second of it.

Another thing I noticed during my short visit was that Hong Kong Cha Can Tings (Tea restaurants) serve up a really sumptuous breakfast. They were so hearty my friend and I just had two meals everyday. Breakfast and then Dinner. The very first breakfast I had was from a shop named The Australian Milk Company. The set I ordered consisted of 2 pieces of toast- very well buttered, a big bowl of macaroni, scrambled eggs which were among the best I've tasted and milk tea. My friend ordered the same. If there is anything I miss about Hong Kong, it would be their breakfasts.

More on the breakfasts later. For now, back to the sightseeing.

Ah yes, the Great Buddha on a hill. To get there, we took the MTR to Tsung Chung station and sat a cable car to Ngong Ping. Mist engulfed the cabin as the elderly couple we shared the cabin engaged in small talk with us in the approximately half an hour cable car ride. We bade them goodbye at the top and made our way up the many flights of stairs.

There really wasn't much to see or do at the top but we milled around admiring the Buddhist wares and climbed back down. Not 400m from this tourist attraction a path beckoned us. It was the path to see the one thing we didn't get to see much of the coming next days - mother nature.

After walking about for sometime, we then took a bus to a fishing village nearby.


As you might imagine, seafood was the order of the day but having had a filling breakfast, we decided to just skip lunch altogether.

Feeling hot and thirsty, we then decided to call it quits and returned to Tung Chung. In this case, the journey back to our starting point consisted of an hour of steep hills. We felt like we were taking the elevators up and down a 40 storey building a couple of hundred times.

Once back, we took a break at one of the factory shopping malls near the station. This apparently was the largest factory shopping mall in HongKong. It was huge and my friend and I wandered about aimlessly for an hour or so.

Disneyland was next on our list. I basically just pulled my friend along to take a look at the special MTRs designed for the theme park.

If I had a must-do list,this would be on it, right along side having Dim Sim at the 1 Michelin star restaurant.