Hong Kong has never been on my list of places I'd like to visit, but since Krista and I had a 12 hour layover starting at 6am, we figured "why not?". So after getting some local money, we took the subway to the heart of downtown, walked a few blocks, and found the bus up to "the peak". It was my first ride atop a double decker bus and we went up some very steep, curvy roads to an area that was mostly closed. We managed to get some noodle soup for breakfast and walked a trail that took us all around the mountain. At one point, we found some stairs heading off the trail which took us to this amazing viewpoint. There were two roadies up there who do that ride fairly often. They do it early in the morning to avoid the horrendous local traffic. The view was pretty nice, if you could look through all the haze, which I assume is smog. The harbor is huge and the skyscrapers are equally big. There's scaffolding just about everywhere you look -- it seems like being a builder in the city is very lucrative!
When we finished the loop trail, we arrived back to where we started to an entirely different scene than when we had left. All of the restaurants were open and the place was packed with people. The tram had also opened, so we took that back down into the city.
A short cab ride took us back almost to where we had caught the bus. A friend of Krista's knows a woman in Hong Kong who offered to meet us and show us around. After a few minutes of waiting at our rendezvous spot watching the hectic city go buy, two women in their fifties came trotting over waving their arms yelling "yoo hoo!" They were a total riot and after some brief introductions, they ushered us in to an elevator and up a building to THE dim sum restaurant. It's 2 stories in a very big building. Our floor had at least 100 round tables in it. Carts were everywhere delivering goodies to the tables and every table was full. We, of course, were the only Caucasians in the room. At one point, they got impatient with the carts, and one of them took me with her up to the counter around the cooks so that I could help her carry all of the plates that came around. Honestly, they were so talkative and such characters, that I felt like I was stuck in an episode of Absolutely Fabulous. The meal, by the way, was amazing -- best dim sum ever!
After, they gave us a little walking tour of the north side of the harbor and then put us on the ferry across to the south side. There we sat and watched the world go by as well as a dance performance outside in a plaza. Soon it was time to walk to the metro (past all the fancy stores like Rolex and Louis Vuitton) and get back to the airport. Kathmandu awaits and honestly, I can't wait to get there.
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