day 19 - Hong Kong - 04.09

Finding the correct station and line to go to from Shenzhen was quite a bit of a hassle. We walked back and forth about 20 minutes trying to figure it out of how can we cross the border and take a train and exchange money. Finally found some people who were able to help. Meanwhile we had our worst meal yet - the food was just bad as were the drinks and the dishes were so dirty that they served the food in and so on and so on - it was just very bad. This was before the crossed the border so were were glad to get to the other side.

Crossing the border was a long process as usual, one side checks you off and the other one checks you back in. Meanwhile there was lots of walking as we figured to cross it on foot and then take a metro line to the city. Metro was a breeze - so very easy. Next step was to find a hostel to stay at. The buildings (and by now I can say the whole city) is a multi level maze. For an example the hostel we are staying at has an address Nathan road 32-50 or something. Which basically means that there is one single entrance and all the firms or hostels are simply located around the building on different floors and corners. Our hostel is on 3 different floors I think and not covering the whole floor. So once you get to the correct floor then you still need to go and look for the correct area :) Sooo confusing at first. The city itself reminds a bit of the same situation - being laid out on many different levels of walkways, car roads and shopping malls with their tunnels.

Here are huuge cockroaches :( I guess everybody knows how I have long fingers, well the roaches are about the size of my thumb and they have long long legs so they move super fast. Oh those are disgusting. I hope there are none in our room (correction after 12 hours - cockroaches have been spotted in our room, but those are the small sized ones luckily).

The biggest part of the morning we were trying to arrange plane tickets for us to go to Vietnam. For this we had to navigate ourselves to the airport which was not really complicate but quite expensive. Subway system is very convenient like in most places, convenient and easy to understand. The only question we got was about switching stations as in Beijing you could buy one ticket and travel between any line without getting a new one, but in Shanghai you have to go out of the station and get another ticket for the transfer line and then come back down again - very ridiculous. In Hong Kong you can buy one ticket for most of the trains - just airport line has a separate and very expensive ticket. Anyhoo, but after finding the right counters and getting the offers from 2 airlines which were at a different sides of the airport (and this place is huuuge you know) and after double checking the offers from internet once more and calculating our possibilities about 10 times over we got our tickets to Hanoi - weheee!!! Our possibilities included flying out of Guangzhou which would have been 35% cheaper, but would have meant taking a 2h train there and flying to Hanoi in the afternoon so we would not have caught our train to Sapa the same evening - that would have been too much effort and extra cost to us so we decided to fly out of Hong Kong to make it easier. Originally we were gonna fly out on the 8th, but later we changed the date to 7th.

After running around at the airport for ever and ever and navigating there and back for ever and ever we made it to Victoria Peak. That was awesome! Well to tell the whole story we got a combo ticket including tram ride there and back + viewing platform + Madame Toussaud's museum.

Victoria Peak is 552m up on the hillside and they have pretty neat old looking trams taking people up there which are going up in a very steep hillsides at times and best of all - they stop at the very steepest places :) so you sit there trying not to fall of your seat :D Tram ride was definitely nice experience - me liked it a lot :) Going down was same - only backwards, so you actually went back first :)

Ok, but on the top there is quite a big building with all sorts of shops and restaurants and museums. We had to take about 10 escalators to get to the viewing platform - they should think about extending the tram tracks :) So the viewing platform - wept us off the feet. It was fabulous, the whole town was like on a plate, all the extremely tall buildings were silently standing in front of us - and there were so many of them. This view was best of all, beats Shanghai and New York and anything else I've seen before. Although in New York there is no such place to look where the whole town is visible as far as I know. So yes, view was magnificent with the buildings and mountains on the background and the boats and water and ports and oh uh, it was soo great.

Last we wondered to the wax museum. I've never been to one before and there were 3 floors of wax people - celebrities, politicians, athletes, rock stars and actors. There were quite many unknown Asian ones, but being in Hong Kong this is understandable I guess. After the museum we headed back down by the tram again - backwards :D

Evening was time to exchange our money (basically get rid of Chinese one), check into our hotel and get a good dinner in.

Oh and the traffic is backwards here - like in England.

Oh and you probably noticed that the days in my headings have been redone - it was a bit incorrect at first, but now it is all fixed and neat :)