Day 131: Exploring Hong Kong Island

Slept in a bit after our late night last night. After another hotel breakfast and lazy morning, we only made it out again in time for the 11am shuttle bus downtown! So we hopped on that and jumped out at the same stop - China HK City shopping mall, where the ferries between Kowloon and Hong Kong Harbour depart. After a bit of wandering around we made it onto a ferry for the brief trip across to Hong Kong Island.

This side is very different to Kowloon - it's much cleaner, newer, shinier and clearly wealthier. Most of the large corporations in Hong Kong have their headquarters here, and it rather felt like Sydney's finance district around Martin Place and Bridge Street. We wandered aimlessly at first, not really knowing what we wanted to see, and indeed there aren't many historic sites left on this side. After 30 minutes or so of wandering and looking at shops, we hopped on a tram with no destination in mind. The trams are fairly classic, well-maintained double-decker 70s relics, and we sat upstairs rolling slowly through the city. Stops are frequent and they seem very well utilised, so progress was a bit frustratingly slow. Eventually we got sick of it and hopped off near an MTR station.

Grabbed some more baked goods for lunch (savoury bakeries are everywhere - think of the hot dogs buns or pork floss buns at BreadTop and you're pretty close) before heading back to Central on the MTR. We also wandered around a district called Wan Chai which is apparently hipster central these days in Hong Kong, with fancy eateries and trendy bars - most of which were of course closed at 2pm on a Monday!

Since we were over on Hong Kong Island we figured we should visit The Peak - a furnicular ride up to the peak of Hong Kong Island's main mountain (about 480 metres high). We'd been advised not to do it on Sunday as it would be crowded, so hopefully Monday would be okay, right? Wrong! There was an enormous queue for tickets, probably 45 minutes long, and once you've waited in that queue there's a second queue to actually get on the furnicular! It's fairly well organised at least, but man it was a lot of queuing. You can pay extra to skip the ticket line, but you don't get to retire at 35 by paying extra for impatience.

Finally after about 70 minutes, we arrived up at the Peak. It's very touristy, a large multi-level shopping centre with fancy shops, food and drink, a tacky 3D art gallery, and finally after many escalators you can get out on the roof and enjoy the view. It's a pretty magnificent view too, with Hong Kong Island below you, the harbour spread out, and Kowloon glittering across the water. Since it had taken so long to ascend, it was once again approaching evening, meaning that we could watch the sun set and the city lights start illuminating, this time from the opposite side. I took a nice couple of time lapses, and we had a drink in one of the crappy coffee chain places.

Had a quick go through the "free" tacky 3D art gallery, where you can take goofy photos from forced perspectives. But of course the best set-ups are reserved for their cameras only, and then you get the absurd hard sell of a $50 glossy 6x8" picture featuring you and your wife "falling off a building". Definitely one for the album! We declined under much duress.

As it was now dark we headed back down into the city (after a thankfully brief wait for the return furnicular). I'd arranged to have after-dinner drinks with someone I vaguely knew from the internet, so Shandos and I had dinner at a new-school dim sum place I managed to find. This place featured lots of dumplings etc with cutesy faces on them. Very different from the serious waiters and chicken feet of Sydney's trolley-based yum cha!

Shandos headed home on the MTR while I waited for my friend to finish work. We had a good night out - first at a craft beer bar in Wan Chai, then hopped on the metro to another craft beer place in Mong Kok back on Kowloon side. After a few drinks he needed food (he's Asian so can't drink heavily), so we caught a taxi to a random noodle house that he knew down an alleyway in Olympic district. This was the kind of place where you had to know Cantonese to get by - that's all the waiters could speak, and the menu was entirely in Cantonese too. I let Abe do the ordering! Nothing quite like a bowl of steaming hot wonton noodles post beers at midnight.

Exhausted and a little tipsy, we called it a night. He was heading back to his place on Hong Kong Island so dropped me off on the way in an Uber. And when our UberX car turned up - a BMW X1. Nice! Pretty late one for me, I don't think I've been out at 12:30am for a long time! And it's going to be another long exhausting day tomorrow.Read more