Welcome to our blog! We were recently married and are now preparing for a year-long, around the world trip. This blog will feature our preparation and, of course, reports from the road.
Here is our current itinerary:
- October 16: Quito, Ecuador
- December 5: Lima, Peru
- December 21: Buenos Aires, Argentina
- January 28: Santiago, Chile
- February 23: Queenstown, New Zealand
- March 28: Sydney, Australia
- April 5: Bangkok, Thailand
- June 22: Hong Kong
- June 26: Shanghai, China
- July 19: Johannesburg, South Africa
- August 15: Barcelona, Spain
- August 18: London, England
August 21: Denver
Those are just our major stops for our RTW plane ticket. Within each of those regions, we will use local transport to visit many more countries. You can see a more detailed list of some of our potential destinationshere.
As our itinerary becomes clearer, we will post updates!
Hong Kong wasn't part of our original itinerary, but in order to fly to Shanghai on our RTW ticket, we had a layover in Hong Kong and decided we may as well spend a few days exploring the city and its famous skyline.
Hong Kong was a bit of a shock to our wallets compared to the rest of Southeast Asia, but we were able to find a relatively inexpensive hotel in Kowloon across the harbor from Hong Kong island. We stayed in the Chungking Mansion. Contrary to images that "mansion" may conjure, the building is a huge, old building housing a myriad of small shops and restaurants on the first level and numerous hotels and guesthouses on the other levels.
From Wikipedia:
CUHK anthropologist Prof. Gordon Mathews estimates that people from at least 120 different nationalities have passed through Chungking Mansions in the past year.
With this lively mix of guest workers, mainlanders, local Chinese, tourists and backpackers, the Chungking neighbourhood is one of the most culturally diverse locations in Hong Kong. Chungking Mansions was elected as the "Best Example of Globalization in Action" by TIME Magazine in its annual feature "The Best of Asia."
The building is kind of rundown and the rooms in the hotel we stayed at were barely more than a prison cell. But that is par for the course, so we've been told, for budget accommodations in Hong Kong.
Our first full day was Wednesday and we were happy to find that most museums have free admission on Wednesdays. The monsoon season is heating up and the weather wasn't great so we took the day to wander the Kowloon Cultural Center on the water facing Hong Kong Island. This area provides some of the iconic views of Hong Kong.
We visited the art museum and the space museum. The art museum was great with everything from modern art to calligraphy to ancient artifacts exhibits. The space museum was definitely geared for kids and rather dated. They still have Pluto as a planet and one exhibit called Venus a star!
Street food seems to be harder to find in Hong Kong now than it was just a few years ago as we've been told the government is not renewing licenses or issuing new ones to street vendors. This is a shame as we were really looking forward to Hong Kong street food. We did find some dim sum down near the Temple Street Market and tried some dumplings and a BBQ pork bun.
Restaurants were much more expensive so we stuck to street food and eating cup o' noodles outside the 7-11. "For richer or for poorer..."
The rain never really went away for our time in Hong Kong so we never made it out to some of the outlying islands to experience some of the hiking and beaches in the area, but we did visit Hong Kong Island via ferry.
Immediately noticeable as we stepped off the ferry was the lack of hawkers. Hawking bans are strictly enforced on this side of Victoria Harbor and, we must say, it was nice respite. As the skyline pictures above indicate, Hong Kong Island is filled with modern skyscrapers and most house incredibly nice malls in their lower levels. We went to the 88-story International Finance Centre and the I.M. Pei-designed Bank of China Tower. Both may be recognizable to you if you saw the recent Batman movie "The Dark Knight."
We wandered around a bit as well and the central elevated walkway made getting around a breeze.
We eventually headed back to Kowloon to catch the Symphony of Lights, which is a well-coordinated musical presentation in which the lights of Hong Kong's buildings display an elaborate lightshow in step with the music. The lightshow was pretty cool, I guess, but we commented that we may be a bit spoiled by Vegas. The music was interesting too. It was sort of like a combination of syclavier-era Frank Zappa mixed with 16-bit Nintendo music (I realize that analogies should make something clearer and probably no one gets this analogy, but it is literally all I could think of -- it was weird!). Here is a video that we did not take if you're interested in seeing it (I don't have audio on our PC right now, so I'm not sure if it is the same music or not)
It was cool too see a bit of Hong Kong. It is definitely the most contradictory city we have visited, with one foot firmly in the east and one firmly in the west. Now on to mainland China where hopefully we won't be eating cup o' noodles!
You know how you can tell this is Jim and not leslie, Zappa reference notwithstanding? There is no review of the cup o noodles outside 7-11.
Actually, Jim I DO get the reference, so at least it wasn't totally lost. The light show is wild! I think the main difference between that and vegas has got to be the scale of the thing. I wonder who pays for it?
Another great post, but I too look forward to you guys having cheaper times. Keep the posts coming!
You know how you can tell this is Jim and not leslie, Zappa reference notwithstanding? There is no review of the cup o noodles outside 7-11.
ReplyDeleteActually, Jim I DO get the reference, so at least it wasn't totally lost. The light show is wild! I think the main difference between that and vegas has got to be the scale of the thing. I wonder who pays for it?
Another great post, but I too look forward to you guys having cheaper times. Keep the posts coming!