Day 2: Hong Kong

3 november

Arrival at 7:30 in Hong Kong (Hong Kong time). The goal is to get a bus to a lookout. We manage the bus part, but arrive at Victoria park (instead of peak). Well, about 1000 girls in the 15 - 22 age range: sounded like a chicken hen.

One thing about Hong Kong: every building is HIGH. And not just high, but really really high as you can see on these pictures:

Here the group splits up in to two smaller groups. The group I'm in (5) are getting a taxi to take us to the peak. As you can see from the pictures above the view is incredible.

After enjoying the view for a while we decide to go to the 'big Buddha' This is about an hour outside of Hong Kong. First we take a taxi to the bus station. This was pretty expensive as we had to pay the toll (the bus we took earlier didn't have to pay it). There is a long line for the bus but after half an hour we are in a bus enroute. The trip takes us outside the city pretty quickly and the environment is incredible. No high-rise buildings, but lots of dense forest that reminds us of movies about Vietnam.

Arriving at the Buddha, the most impressive is not the statue itself, but the surroundings.

After hanging around for a while, we decided to get back to the airport in time. This didn't go as smooth as we hoped: there was an enormous line for the busses so we opted for a taxi again. The taxi's arrived very irregularly: sometimes 3 in 5 minutes, followed by 15 minutes nothing. Also some taxi's behaved pretty strange: they dropped people off, but didn't take any new passengers. Luckily, after 45 minutes of waiting (and us getting scared we might miss our plane) we were first in line and a taxi arrived. The taxi drove a lot faster than the bus so we arrived at the airport with time to spare.

We watched an impressive sundown at the airport, but sadly I was to late with my camera: there was to little light to work without fixing the camera, and I didn't have anything for that handy.