FYI. For safety and security reasons, I will NEVER blog about future plans or movement. Thus, I can report that we just had a great holiday in Hong Kong and Sanya - a beach resort in Hainan, which is an island provence in the South China Sea.
New Years Eve in Hong Kong - Magical
For NYE, we (us and another family from Beijing) splurged for rooms at the Grand Hyatt overlooking the harbor. At 8, we watched the harbor “light show” where all the buildings along both sides of the harbor dazzle with a display of lights. Because it was NYE, they included syncronized firework display launched off of boats. Afterwards, we had a nice dinner and headed back to the hotel where we watched the countdown concert on a local HK channel. After a few minutes, we noticed that when the stage lighting in the show would change colors, the same would happen across the harbor and it took only a second to realize that we could faintly see the live event. This was pretty cool…especially at midnight when they did a small fireworks display. Actually, I was surprised their weren’t more fireworks but they save those for Chinese New Year. Overall, it was nice evening.
New Years Day Kicking Around Hong Kong
Hong Kong might be my favorite city in the whole world. Being my first trip to Hong Kong, I was immediately blown away by the aesthetics of the place but soon followed by my surprise at how civilized it is. No spitting, honking, hacking, littering and so on. Being a (former) British colony really seems to work.
We spent the morning shopping and I was so thrilled to buy real shoes that fit. That’s HK in a nutshell…they don’t monkey around with protectionist duties, taxes and nasty games against western companies…they are simply another big city with the same brand names that we are used to in the U.S. It sunk in when I was at the grocery store and could buy a 12 pack of Energizer AA batteries. It didn’t feel hard at all to exist there. Everyone spoke english.
Later that day, we went to the peak overlooking the harbor where we took in the amazing view and had a dinner at (of all places) Bubba Gumps which is a chain of Cajun-style seafood restaurants based on the Forest Gump movie. Ok, so we’re typically “too cool” to fall for the Hard Rocks and Planet Hollywoods of the world, but in that specific time and place, with a lingering Beijing hack, it really hit the spot to have a real western meal. As a matter of fact, it was probably one of the best meals I’ve had in months. That’s what living over does to you…you crave tastes of home and are willing to sell your principals to get it.
Hong Kong Disney
Once we sold out for the movie-themed restaurant, we might as well go all the way. Yep. We went to Disney. As we pulled into the parking lot, I was quite optimistic we’d have the place to ourselves due to a lack of cars and busses. What I failed to realize was the subway stop which was feeding hordes of people into the ticket queues. But to our delight, it wasn’t terribly crowded and we could easily repeat some rides.
Hong Kong Disney is much smaller than any of the US Disneys (Disnae ?). It’s only the Magic Kingdom with Adventureland, Fantasyland and Tomorrowland. There’s only a couple rides in each but it was still fun because we left feeling like we did everything. After the 8 pm fireworks show, we took the subway back to our hotel and slept very well. The next morning we departed back to the airport to head to the second phase of our holiday in sunny Sanya.
Shenzen
If you don’t fly into Honk Kong Intl., you can save a few hundred dollars per ticket so we opted to fly into Shenzen which is on the China mainland and is home to many manufacturers of, well, 40% of everything you and I buy…period. It’s just another big, nasty, polluted Chinese city on the other side of the Hong Kong harbor.
Once there, we took a Turbo Jet ferry to Hong Kong. I was hoping we would get to ride on a gas-turbine hydrofoil, but those seem to all be replaced with high-speed diesel catamarans. The ride only takes an hour and a half and you get to pass under the Tsing Ma suspension bridge with incredible views of the mountains on both sides of the harbor.
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