Hong Kong Island Tour – The North Side
by the mother, who found the nearly-3-year-old to be quite heavy after a few hours in a wrap
Hong Kong
When you come to Hong Kong you can take a tour in an open-top bus and it really does look like a cool way to see the city. But it costs over US$100 for two adults and two children. So, as per usual, we made our own tour.
Starting in the New Territories (simply because that’s where we are staying), we took the train in to Downtown Kowloon.
We walked down bustling Nathan Road (where we had been staying in a hyperbolic “hotel” in the not-aptly-named Chungking Mansions), where we did not purchase fake watches or handbags or have suits tailor-made……we walked briskly past The Peninsula, not even stopping to take a photo, because we were heading for the Ruskie Consulate, which we knew would close at midday (we had a spot of housekeeping to attend to as well as play tourists this day). Our fast feet flew towards the Star Ferry Terminal and raced up the gangway with not a moment to spare.
Over the other side of the harbour, leaving behind memories of Chungking Mansion’s lifts (there is a permanent queue outside these laboriously-slow-in-spite-of-apparently-being-recently-upgraded lifts, which are packed full of people day and night….our rooms being on the seventeenth floor – athough the lift only went to the sixteenth and we would walk the final flight of urine-smelling stairs – we always had plenty of time to read the notice telling you not to panic if the lift got stuck…..), we entered one of many spacious glittering mirrored lifts that sped us to our destination – 21 floors up in just as many seconds. And just as well it was quick. We ended up leaving the building at precisely 12 noon, after a much more more friendly encounter than our Russian experiences in Cambodia. What’s more, they verbally approved our applications on the spot before taking our money. We just have to wait a week for the paperwork to be completed (or pay an extra $500 per person for the speedy service – nah, we’ll just spend the money on HK sightseeing thanks very much).
Having already trained and walked and ferried and fancy-lift-ed, we now spotted an open-top bus well, we did see one, but we hopped aboard a double-decker tram. For over 100 years trams have been running 30km along the island, and at only $2 per adult no matter how far you go, it’s the most reasonably-priced transport around.
Out came the Lonely Planet walking tour guide. Guide is the operative word here – we read the details and then wandered our own way, zipping up streets that took our fancy and detouring to find toilets. But we did take in the spot the British flag was first planted in 1841, the ginseng sellers (sniff deeply as you walk past them), a fish-on-the-road-sellers, highrises (could you possibly avoid them?), inner-city apartments, Ladder Street (Jgirl14 and Kboy11 ran to the top while the littlies played at a nearby playground), Hollywood Road, an antiques and curios market, the food market of Graham Street falling down the hill….by now we were well off the LP tour and so abandoned it altogether and headed for the longest outdoor escalator in the world. At purportedly 800m long, we were expecting to see a l–o–n–g staircase rolling up the hill, but actually, it is a series of many shorter runs. An impressive feat, nonetheless, one that runs downhill before 10:30am and uphill the rest of the day. At the top we could have turned around and counted the number of steps downwards (and Jboy13 is sure to have done so <wink>), but we took an alternative DOWN DOWN DOWNhill route and wound through and under traffic and past the botanical gardens instead, eventually coming out as instinct predicted we would, not too far from the central ferry terminus.
Another ferry, another couple-a-kilometres walk, another train, still more walking….and we were back at Tai Po market choosing dinner, walking home and crashing into bed.
By the way, the cost for the section the open-top bus would have taken was HK$32.50 – or US$4.19 for the eleven of us! Plus we got to ride a tram.
(Admittedly we did not get entry to Victoria Peak, but we didn’t have time for that anyway – perhaps we’ll do it another day, and we’re bound to walk one way, because we value the exercise do everything on the cheap.)
If you would like to read Dad’s account of the day, you can find it here.
In spite of his reservations about blogging in general, and his reservations about a nearly-80-year-old’s ability to wrestle with technology, he has become a blogger 😉
Tags: children, food, money, postcard: Hong Kong, recreation, toilet, transport
rayres
it’s amazing how well you get to know a place when you’re just visiting! i always reckon if you’re looking for directions, ask the tourists who look like they’ve been beating the feet 🙂 the locals often seem to get stuck in the ol’ home-work-food-home flight path, but the tourists know where the hidden gems are! (like the 24 hour $1/slice-that-is-1/5-to-1/4-of-a-pizza pizza place in melbourne! always fresh, always variety, and made by actual italians using italian ingredients! and always frequented by tourists 😉 )
Ah, so you might get to see the good ship Queen Victoria! Wave hello nicely and I’ll tell my folks to hand any unwanted items to the lovely NZ family with 8 kids 🙂 Sounds like the day around town was great! Those stairs look ominous! Hate to face them going uphill at the end of a day.
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[…] street, shoulders brushing, everyone jostling to their destination. Until this walk we had only once had cause to hurry, and so had meandered our way through the city. This time, in an effort to not have *too* late a […]