So, the flight to Hong Kong took 14 hours - who knew? Actually, it wasn't all that bad - watched three movies and then fell asleep for 7 hours or so. It wasn't too much of a hassle to get through customs and get our bags, which were actually waiting there for us. Bought some octupus cards and caught the bus downtown thanks to chaskemp. Actually, thanks to him for providing most of the info we knew about Hong Kong prior to arriving.

Now, we knew that we wanted to stay at this place called the Sincere house in Mong Kok in Kowloon, which is slightly up the road from the main touristy areas of Tsim Sham Tsui - however, by the time we got downtown, it must have been about 10pm or so. We walked around for about two hours trying to find this place, and didn't succeed at all, so we ended up paying a bit more for a hotel in the area. So, lession learned, I'll try and plan ahead aleast a week or so now for housing. Went out and grabbed some noodles for dinner at a local place, and I think we managed to get to bed around 1am Hong Kong time. Unfortuantely, I woke up about quarter to five the next morning, thanks to the jet lag.

So, in the past two days, we've gotten ourselves a bit more settled in, we found the place we wanted to be at, we've walked around quite a bit - also slept quite a bit, I think last night was about 15 hours in total. Walking around this city is amazing. Each street seems to sell something different. We've named the streets around us flower street, shoe street, cell phone street (well, that is just about every street), goldfish street, etc. We also went down to Kowloon park today, which was nice, yet felt slightly odd for some reason. Between the aviary, the duck pond, the rose garden, the tree walk, the maze, the chinese garden, and the giant swimming pool still under construction, it just felt like they were trying to squeeze one too many things in there. Hoping to get some good views of the harbor tomorrow if the weather clears up - more to come from Hong Kong.

Last day in Hong Kong today, which actually worked out well. We were going to take the ferry over to Macau today, but because the prices on Saturday were much higher, we decided to go tomorrow instead. This turned out to be a good idea, based on what happened today - ferry accident. So, we'll be on that ferry tomorrow to Macau.

I wanted to say something briefly about the scaffolding that is all over this city. They use bamboo and what appears to be plastic wire. Its all over the city, covering buildings as high as 50 stories or so. The picture to the right is of some guys putting it up, and I'm amazed it actually holds the three of them up there. Anyways, after that metal scaffolding killed three people in Boston last year, its a bit unnerving walking under this bamboo stuff all the time. Then again, i guess bamboo would weigh a lot less if it fell. Anyways, interesting...

Today the weather finally cleared up, and we took the ferry over to Central early this morning. Central is the business district which is actually on Hong Kong island - map here- where we have been staying is actually a penninsula connected to the Chinese mainland. Instead of taking the tram up to the peak, we opted to take the #15 bus all the way up. This was a great 45 minute ride through Central and the surrounding areas for $9.20 HKD a person - we made sure we got the front seat in the top deck of the bus. Some of the houses on the way up, as we approached the top were quite impressive, as were the Bentleys and Lamborghinis parked in the driveways. The view from the peak was quite nice, but I'm glad we got up there early - since it was a nice Saturday, it was very croweded by the time we left around 11:30. Took the tram back down, which wasn't as scenic, but only took 5 minutes.

In Hanoi now, and a little sick - got a bad head cold that I can't seem to get rid of, so that's slowed us down a little bit. To finish up quickly on Hong Kong - there's light show that happens every night in the harbor. It was pretty cool, but knowing that it happened every night, it seemed like a huge waste of electricity. So it goes. We spent two days in Macau, which is an old Portugese settlement in China - there were some cool historical sites there, and the food was awesome.