HK trip report

All in all, it was a pretty decent trip. But then, any vacation where nothing goes terribly wrong is going to be decent if you enjoy traveling. So yeah, it's really not going to be up there with my greatest trips of all time, but I enjoyed it nonetheless.

Anyways, I think we just picked the absolute worst time to travel there. The lunar new year resulted in a mass exodus by hong kong residants, and left us with all the tourists. The hong kong airport had more flights leaving the day I arrived than at any other date in history.

This sucked for several reasons. For one, lots of shops and stores were closed because people were on vacation. Secondly, all the touristy places are extra busy and crowded.

Personally, when I'm travelling I want to experience the culture. I want to eat where the locals eat, party where they party, etc. And this was a terrible time of the year to do that. But I digress.

The airport and transportation system in HK is incredible. Cheap and easy to get any and everywhere. We got to our hotel with no problem, and my room was pretty awesome. Gotta love the glass bathroom. I was instantly relieved to have gotten seperate rooms :).

The first night we stayed close to our hotel, in the WanChai district. We started out with dinner at a bar and ordered some sloppy joes. Traditional Hongkongese fare.
Then we headed out to the bars which were... well, interesting.

Every single girl, in every single bar, was a hooker. All of them were either philipino or thai, and all were looking for cash. I guess it depends what your looking for, but I wasn't all that impressed.

It wasn't long before a dude came in all hammered and claimed to be Dennis Hopper's son. It was pretty random, but whatever (I looked it up actually, and his story doesn't seem to check out, but he was funny, buying drinks and lived in HK so had some good info). He made fun of us for being where we were, and took us to a new place. We danced and drank there for the night, and I ended up spending way too much money. I don't really remember it all but apparently I ball harder than Dennis Hopper's son.

The next day we got a lot of shopping done in Tsim Tsa Tsui and had a whole lot of dim sum. We then joined about 400,000 other people for a huge 30min fireworks display.

It was pretty cool, but crowded. People actually showed up around noon to get good position for the 8pm show.

We grabbed some peiking duck afterward which was awesome, dropped off some stuff at the hotel and headed to Lan kwai fong to hit some bars and clubs. I think we checked about 8 different places that night, but spent the majority in this 3level club called "beijing". They played some good music and we actually met some cool local people.

We had planned to go to Macau for a day, but it sort of fell through. We way overslept, and then headed to the ferry terminal. Once we got there, one of my buddy's was like "do you think we'll need our passports?", and I'm like 'yeah were all idiots, lets go back to the hotel". No clue why it never crossed my mind, but I'll blame it on the hangover.

By the time we got back, there was a 2hr wait for the 1hr ferry ride. If it was the same both ways, it would suck because I had to catch a plane the next morning. So instead we just decided to head to victoria peak.

VIctoria peak is the highest point on HK island and has an incredbile view of the island. We took a cab up instead of the tram b/c it was a ~3hr lineup. We managed to get a good look at it in the day, grab some dinner, and then see it again at night from up there.

So I guess we didn't really 'do' much there, but it was a good excuse to party and have some great food. Good little weekend trip, but I don't think I'll be back any time soon, unless it's to Macau.