We landed very early on a Saturday and when we got to the hotel we were told that the earliest we could get a room would be at 11am, so we had about 6 hours to kill. Now, at this point we had just come off of a 14 hour flight with no Internet so our first stop was naturally the business center where sucked on the sweet sweet teat of the interwebs. The Internet told us that we should go to Victoria peak and indeed, after spending about an hour more checking what else has changed on the Internet in the last few hours (did you know that we’re slowly running out of chocolate?), we were on our way!
It was still very early when we left the hotel and we decided to walk to the peak, about a 15 minute walk, but we had time and we decided to use it to take the scenic route, we went through the soho district of Hong Kong to find a city waking up, markets opening up and a variety of weird foods being sold for close to nothing.
We really wanted to try something but didn't really know what most things were and the markets were filled with non English speakers so we decided to take a chance on something fried, after the seller at the place yelled at us: "shooeat, shooeat" which we had hopefully decided means sweet, we decided to go for it. Indeed, it turned out to be a sort of Chinese style donut and it was delicious and fitting as this was the 4th day of Hanukkah.
We finally made our way to what we thought would be a cable car ride like you would see at a ski resort or at Hong Kong's Lantau island (more on that later) but instead we found a train that is pulled up at a ridiculous angle up a steep hill.
The Victoria peak building was basically a mall, built on a hill, that has an observation deck on its top. Now, this isn't our first rodeo, we've seen plenty of observations decks (CN tower in Toronto and top of the rock in NYC to name a few) but those didn't prepare us for the beautiful views we saw from the peak.
Hong Kong, lit by the early morning light was just amazing, as it is one of the most densely populated places in the world, it really had an inordinate amount of skyscrapers, those were complemented by the hilly terrain and the vast expanses of nature and water. A really nice place this Hong Kong :)
When we got off the observation deck, we got some OJ and sat down to plan our next move (there was wifi there so we weren't gonna leave so fast). After surfing the web for some time with no real results, we noticed a sign that said Victoria peak garden with an arrow pointing upwards and to the left. We thought to ourselves, what the heck and went for it. Getting to that garden was no simple task though, it required a lot of uphill walking but we eventually made it up.
We went through a neighborhood we suspect was for rich people (judging by the cars not the houses) and arrived at a nice little park where we saw a nice Chinese family having a picnic, we proceeded to do our own little picnic with some salted almonds we had in the bag and a single kinder bueno chocolate snack, sounds silly, but was fun, laying down on the grass for a few hours and soaking in some sun, could be worse.
We noticed on our cached google map that there are still parts of the park that need exploring and explore we did! We got to a sign that said Governor’s Walk and decided that if its good enough for the governor it's good enough for us!
We were wrong.
An hour or so of walking later, and not seeing a living soul, we finally saw a sweaty guy, breathing heavily, coming from the direction we were going towards, we naturally asked him: what's there? And he answered "there?.....there's nothing there...." We let him go and then headed back, the walk was not without its views but all in all it was probably ok to skip it.
It was well past 11am which meant we could go to our hotel and go to our room. We took the scenic way back and got to the hotel at about 3pm at which point we decided to take a quick nap and continue exploring.
The nap was not a short one…
We woke up about 4 hours later and struggled to get out of bed... It was bound to happen, you can't travel to an almost completely opposite time zone and not get hit by a wicked case of jetlag, but we rallied and went out to find some booze to help us deal with our condition.
We ended up at a nice little tapas bar in soho called latitude 22 where we got some sangria and some tapas and met a few fellow westerners who told us that they had just come from a Franz Ferdinand concert (which explained why they had dragon tails) and that they all worked at Zara and some were working at Zara Hong Kong, but all were originally from Spain. Nice people. After the booze we went back to get a good night's sleep.
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