View from hotel room

Wed, Feb 1 - A beautiful sunny day in HK. The view from our 32nd floor JW Marriott Hotel room, an upgrade because Margie spends so much money on the Marriott credit card. Our ship, the Seabourne Pride came in about 7 am this morning. We watched it dock at the Ocean Terminal which you can see on the left side of the picture. There are two white ships superimposed on each other. Ours is the smaller on in front of the larger one. We will cab it over about 1 pm today. The cab will take a tunnel under the harbor to get from HK Island to Kowloon.

Tai O dried fish mkt

After Big Buddha our tour bus took us to a small fishing town Tai O. The small fishing boat business with people living on their boats has all but disappeared, replaced by large mechanized fishing ships. Hence, no junks except for tour boats and boat people now living in high rise buildings on the shore. This village has switched to importing dry fish from SE Asia and drying some of its own for the restaurant and market businesses. The Chinese use dried sea food for making soup stock. They put it in cloth bags and put the bag in a pot of boiling water for 4 to 9 hours to make the stock. You do not eat the dried food, discarding it after the stock is made. Many of the homes in this village are built on stilts over the water, but these are disappearing as well. We took a high speed ferry back from Lantau to HK Island. The ferry weaved in and out among the many freighters at anchor or moving about the Lamma Channel which leads to the container port. Hong Kong is the third largest container shipping port in the world, exceeded by Singapore and Shanghai.

Temple of Ten Thousand Buddhas

This is  the temple at the base of the Big Buddha. Lots of pretty flowers in pots. Gold statues of Buddha and other religious figures. Incense in the air. An occasional monk sighting but they do not talk to you. Our guide was very informative with all sorts of facts about the Buddhism and Taoist religions.

Big Buddha

Tuesday, Jan 31 - This guy is big, the biggest Buddha in the world, sitting on the top of a mountain on nearby Lantau Island. The Buddha is erected by the monastary on the mountain, which is a large complex of buildings with 23 monks, supported by donations from its supporters. Many come here to pray and burn incense. We got here on a tour bus, traveling through tunnels and over the largest suspension bridge in the world, built to withstand winds of almost 180 mph created by typhoons. The monastary is in the middle of a national park where they had to spray top soil and seeds on the native granite from helicopters to create vegetation.

View from hotel room

This is the view from our 32nd floor room at the JW Marriott. The view looks over Victoria harbor at the Kowloon peninsula. The boats we see are ferries, dredging barges and cruise ships. The shipping part of the Harbor is out of sight to the west with many many container cranes. The convention center is the building at the far right in the picture. The weather has been pretty good the past few days as you can tell. Note the highways that flow through the center of town. Also, the reclamation project as they build out  into the harbor to make more space for buildings and waterfront activities.

Dinner view of HK Island

This is the view of HK Island skyline from the Hutong Restaurant on the Kowloon side. Most of the buildings have special light displays for the New Year. At 8 pm they have a laser light show as well. The food at this 30th floor restaurant was Sezchuan which means it will be spicy. We had the tasting menu which had scallops, shrimp, duck, beef in small portions but at the end you are quite full. Our table was right by the large windows looking out on the harbor and HK Island skyline.

Since most people have small living spaces, the families and friends meet at restaurants in large groups and share a meal at large round tables. Tables for two are for the tourists.

MTRS at Rush Hour

Took the subway back to Kowloon on Monday night for dinner. It was late rush hour and wall to wall  people going home. The guy in the yellow jacket holds up a stop sign when the car is full to keep more people from trying to get on as the doors shut. Most people are polite. Almost everyone has a phone texting or playing games. Mostly young people. The subway comes  every minute at rush hour, every 4 minutes at other times. A great system, easy to get around. We bought Octopus cards just like Orca cards so we do not need exact change everytime we use the subway, bus, or ferry. One can easily get back and forth between HK and Kowloon by car tunnel, subway tunnel, or the Star Ferry. Just a matter of 5 or 10 minutes.

Pizza Express at Stanley Waterfront

Monday, our big outing was taking the public bus to the other side of HK Island to a small town, Stanley. The buses are double deckers and the road over the mountain was very winding and narrow. We had front row seats on the second deck so it was a great viewing spot. We stopped at Repulse Beach before continuing on the Stanley. This is a very broad sandy swimming beach with high rise condos behind it. There are shark nets up. The beach is right off the main southbound shipping channel so we could see the ships from the HK harbor passing by. There were always 3 or 4 container ships in view at all times. A really busy channel. Stanley is best know for its market which is why Margie wanted to come here. Again, several blocks of enclosed stalls but the quality of the merchandise was better and of course, prices higher, than the Ladies' Market. We had a brief pizza and beer (Stella) repass before catching the bus back to Central HK. Needed a break from the Cantonese food. We got the express bus back which went through a long tunnel in the mountain rather than over it. A really pleasant low key outing seeing the countryside.

Visit to HK Zoo

Tuesday morning, after a vigorous work out in the fantastic exercise facility at the hotel, we walked to the HK zoo and botanical garden. It is all up hill to get there. It is a nice oasis in the middle of the high rise condos and office towers, much smaller than Central Park in NYC. Not the flowering season. Some interesting animals and birds, particularly the cranes and the orangotangs. They also had a fierce endangered North American racoon on displey. Sunny weather today in the 60's.  A good walk before our trip to see the Giant Buddha this afternoon.
Getting around by foot is interesting in HK. They keep the pedestrians and the cars separated as much as possible by building a lot of overhead walkways over major streets and connecting the major business centers as well as subway tunnels under the streets or betwen buildings. It is a real maze to figure out but once you figure it out, it is fun getting around.

The Ladies' Mkt.

Sunday afternoon, we took the subway to Kowloon to check out the markets. Margie wanted to go to the Ladies' Market in particular. This market ran for 5-6 blocks with stalls on both sides of the street. Many knock off handbags, clothes, wallets, etc. Also, a lot of cheap clothing items, trinkets, jewelry that the locals buy. Few tourists but you get the idea that most of the customers are the locals buying what they can afford. A few blocks away are the major designer stores for the rich. A real mob scene. We did not buy anything, just experienced it. We also went to the Jade Markey and to Chinese department store. The jade market was full of jade trinkets and jewelry but one can not tell the quality if you are not an expert. Macy's would have loved to have had the crowd at the department store. It was mobbed with after New Year's sales.

Sunday church at St.John's Cathedral

Sunday, we attended the 9 am choral service at St. John's Anglican Cathedral, about 1/4 mile from the hotel. It is the third oldest building in HK and was an officer's club during the Japanese occupation in WWII. The place was mobbed with standing room only. Many foreign female maids (housekeepers) come here on their one day off a week to congregate, socialize, and share among themselves. The church has a special ministry for them, as they are often abused and otherwise isolated. The largest number are Phillipino and they send money back home for their families. The service was very traditional and the music, excellent.

Tea at the Peninsula Hotel

Margie had to have tea at the old Peninsula Hotel so here we are. It is on the tip of the Kowloon peninsula and is a grand hotel in the Olympic style. Traditional tea consists of superb scones, small tea sandwiches, and small deserts plus tea. We had a little champagne with it as you can see. It is served in the lobby so we could watch all of these people coming and going, many with fancy shopping bags full of clothes, etc. The mainland China people come here to do their fancy shopping from stores with all of the world wide fancy brands. Prices are not cheap. Some people in China have money. We waited 30 minutes in line to get a table for tea. It is a very popular event. Tuned out to be our dinner as we retired to our hotel about 6:30 went to the executive lounge for some drinks and decided to go to bed. Still catching up with the jet lag.

Silver dragon cocktail @ the intercontinental

    The Silver Dragon, a fancy Chinese New Year special cocktail for Margie at the Intercontinental Hotel overlooking the HK harbor. It is a gin drink with lychees floating in it. Quite tasty. She had a Singapore Sling before this one. Quite the drinker. The Intercontinental is in Kowloon the penninsula across Victoria Harbor from the Hong Kong Island. I had a straight forward but excellent martini. None of that fancy stuff for me. Lots of construction along the harbor shores and lots of dredging in the harbor. I do not think they have any environmental assessments in their new construction. They seem to decide to do something and do it ignoring environmental impact or public reaction. Historical buildings are very rare as they become victims of the new construction. They get things done but at a price.

After dinner at Royal HKYC

Al at the Royal Hong Kong Yacht Club on Friday night. We had reciprical privileges through the SYC. Required a letter of introduction. The RHKYC is located on HK Island close to our hotel right on Victoria Harbor with views of both HK and Kowloon. We had a very nice, Western lobster dinner in the Compass room with views of the city lights of Kow Loon. Food was very good and drinks cheap. Got a RHKYC hat and shirt as sourvenirs. Really unique. Taxis here are numerous and cheap so getting around is easy.

Retired to the hotel lobby bar for a night cap and listened to band playing Western jazz music. The city is so cosmopolitan that it is sometimes hard to remember you are in China.

Dim Sum Anyone

At lunch on Friday we went to a basic Chinese Dim Sum restaurant recommended by Frommer's. It was a free for all. The place was mobbed. You grapbbed seats at tables whereever you could. You got your Dim Sum ticket from a waiter and then you had to go chase the Dim Sum carts to get the food. If you waited for it to get to your table, the carts would be empty. The law of survival of the fastest applied. We had a couple of courses and decided we had enough. A couple at our table spoke English and used to live in Cupertino and were somewhat helpful. No real sanitation, ? clean dishes, no napkins. A real experience for both of us.
PS This picture doesn't do the mob scene justice.  It was a complete free for all.

Year of the Dragon

The Year of the Dragon decorations are all over HK, just like our Christmas decorations. This display was in a office tower plaza. the bushes in the foreground have real Mandarin oranges on them which is a common decoration, as are dragons and red and gold signs and banners. Very festive. We also saw some high school kids acting out in dragon costumes to the tune of drums and cymbals. They seemed to be having a lot of fun. Getting around HK is quite easy, the people are friendly, and the apartment buildings are very tall since land is scarce. Many modern sky scrapers, lots of traffic on multilevel highways running through the city, choices of trams, buses, taxis or subways. A large, busy, international city.

The Travelator

Here is Al on the Travelator, the longest escalator in the world going from downtown Central District to the Midlevels residential district. We are finding HK very hilly with lots of stairs to get from one street to another. Hence the benefit of the Travelator. The gold dragon is a decoration celebrating the Year of the Dragon. My new SCI Yacht Club jacket is working great here in HK. Margie is loving taking pictures with her iPhone and downloading them directly to the Blog.

Al in the midst of photographing a bird at the HK Aviary in HK Park. Great colorful bird species, parots and other birds totally different than our species. They were somewhat tame and could be approached pretty easily. This is a small sanctuary in the midst of very tall office and apartment buildings and congested streets.

Plane arrived on time and we were greeted by our prearranged driver to take us through the airport to our Mercedes limo for a 40 min drive to our hotel. The JW Marriott was waiting for us with our receptionist taking us right to our room where we registered in our room. We are on the 32nd floor with wonderful view out over Victoria Harbor to Kow Loon. Weather is somewhat hazy with the temp between 50 and 65F. English spoken and written everywhere as you would expect. We feel pretty good after our 13 hour flight. Looking forward to getting out and walking. The hotel is at Pacific Center and right at the financial district so very convenient.

From 3200 feet

Can't believe we are on our way each snug in our own little pod across from each other...we wave! Now approaching the int'l dateline, shortly leaving Alaska, with about 9 more hours until we reach Hong Kong.

Sent from my iPhonep

Settling in his pod'

Waiting for our Plane

Kirin seafood Richmond BC

Day 1!

Today is the first day of Al's retirement and a new lifestyle for Margie and Al. Tomorrow we will leave for six weeks in SE Asia beginning our trip with a week in Hong Kong!

Beginning a Blog!

Two days until departure!