Day 129: Onwards to Hong Kong

Finally time to leave the Philippines after almost three weeks here! We had a bit of a sleep in followed by a hotel breakfast, then a bit of stuffing around online in the room. Our flight to Hong Kong wasn't until 3pm, but even though I could probably hit the terminal with a golf ball from our hotel room window, Manila traffic meant that we had to leave by midday if we were going to make it.

So we checked out at 12pm (didn't quite manage to fit in a visit to the rooftop pool unfortunately) and crawled in traffic over to the terminal. Made it with plenty of time, which we needed because a huge group of 10 was checking in at the sole check-in desk interminably slowly. Very unusual for us to be using a check-in desk - normally AirAsia have self check-in machines which only take a couple of minutes, but apparently this technology hasn't made it to Manila yet.

Security and emigration were pretty quick, then we spent an hour or so sitting around waiting for the flight. Not much to report from the flight itself, though we circled Hong Kong before coming in to land and had a great view of sunset. No signs of the typhoon that had gone through the day previous!

It's a huge airport and took us ages to get out, but having organised systems is such a nice change from the Philippines. Caught the airport train into the city to our hotel on Kowloon (the mainland side of Hong Kong). 10 minutes walk from the station not too bad, and on arrival we were given an upgrade which was very nice! The room is still very small (it's Hong Kong!), but larger than some we've been in and we're on the 26th floor with a good local view.

After dropping our stuff off we wandered around the local neighbourhood to find some dinner. Shandos was still feeling unwell so we just picked a random noodle place and ordered via pointing. Although this is still in many ways a very British city, they've had a huge influx of migrants from the mainland since 1997 and English is nowhere near as widely spoken as it used to be. It's certainly nothing like Singapore, at least from what we've seen so far. Our noodles were delicious at any rate, so we did well there.

After dinner we went back to the hotel - it had been a fairly long day at this point and neither of us were particularly inclined to have a night out or anything like that. We had a brief look at the rooftop bar on level 30 (nice, but much the same view as our room) before turning in for the night. We've only got limited time here so I'm expecting to have a very busy few days!Read more