China/Korea 2009: day 11 (Hong Kong)

Hong Kong day 3: Thursday 10/8/09
Map of my Hong Kong stops, this day in green; no photos from today. Yellow highlights in the text correspond to flags on the map.

I lost my camera at the end of this day, so I'm going by memory, pamphlets, and limited notes on my iPod since I don't have my photos with their time stamps. 

With only a couple days left in Hong Kong, I started going through my list of things left to do and prioritizing and organizing them. I went to the Space Museum again, this time it was open. It was relatively cheap and had some cool stuff but being in the space business some of their info was dated. They did have more on the Chinese space program than I had known before, though. East along the river from the Space Museum is the Intercontinental and the New World Center, and on the east side of that is where a bus tour starts. I saw the bus on my first day, but already had my Peak and Macau trips planned out, so I waited to do my city tour at the end of the trip rather than the beginning (of course, I should have done this first) and after picking up the pamphlets the night before at the Star Ferry terminal, it had many of the things I wanted to do. It's called The Big Bus Company, and they have a Kowloon bus (the Blue Bus) and a Hong Kong bus (the Red Bus) tour. You can buy both but you have 24 hours to use them. I did the Red Bus tour this day, which started at Central. It's a hop-on, hop-off double-decker bus, with an audio tour playing from included earpieces. Mine never worked, so I used my iPod headphones which have the same plug. Go to http://www.bigbustours.com for more info, but I'll hit the highlights of what I did. 

The Red Bus drives around all the major buildings on Hong Kong island, talking about the history of them, the unusual architecture (like the IFC, HSBC, and Bank of China Buildings), the Convention Center, the differences between how things used to be under British rule until 1999 and how they are now with Chinese rule (like the PLA HQ building), the Cross-Harbour Tunnel, and stops at the Peak Tram and Lan Kwai Fong. I got off at the tram stop and went up to the Peak so I could see the skyline in the daytime. Still spectacular. Afterwards, I took the Star Ferry back to Kowloon so that I could head up to the Temple Street Night Market (which is several blocks long) for dinner and shopping. That is a giant flea market where they sell everything from power converters to knockoff purses to fresh fruit to sex toys, and there are hole-in-the-wall restaurants all over the place. I had dinner at a place where I pointed to pictures on a menu for what I wanted to eat (English subtitles, I got Vietnamese stir fry). 

By 11 or so I was ready to go back to the hotel, so I found the Yau Ma Tei metro station and took it back to the Tsim Sha Tsui station. I had just exited the station going up to the street level when I realized I had left my camera on the metro. The guard told me I'd have to leave my contact info with lost & found in the morning. Adios, camera! Now, if you're going to buy a new camera, Hong Kong is a great place to do so, but you have to know what you're looking for and how much it costs. If you don't know, they'll rip you off. On my way back to the hotel I saw them filming a scene from a TV show that I was told is like a Hong Kong version of CSI. At my hotel, I spent a couple hours online looking for cameras and figured out what I wanted and how much it cost, and found the locations of 3 shops who were known to be reputable.

Shakeys pizza. Pineapple chicken salad, penne carbonara, mango daiquiri. Dinner in temple st night mkt, Vietnamese stir fry beef noodles w egg rolls. Lost camera on subway, saw scene from HK Police Force (CSI)