Hong Kong

Not since my first day in New Zealand when I would meet Nic's Dad and Brother, had I had more trepidation stepping off a plane - this was China we were stepping into. The first unusual thing we had to do was walk past a scanner that detects your body temperature, through a heat sensing camera. If you're not green and yellow on the screen then you're probably green and yellow in the flesh and there's no getting through. After immigration we collected our bags and funnelled through a corridor before entering the vast cavern that is Hong Kong's shiny new airport. In that corridor was a little information counter with a very friendly girl who told us exactly how to get the cheapest train ticket to our station for the hotel, wrote our hotel out in Chinese so we could give that to a taxi driver too and then even wrote on another piece of paper in Chinese 'I am vegetarian'. This now crumpled comfort has saved us in many moments of difficulty.

Our hotel was decent enough, but so it should have been considering it is the most expensive place we have paid for yet. Hong Kong is a special administrative region of China and as such we granted it a special administrative budget while we were here, otherwise we just couldn't have done it. We were here for three reasons. 1. To see it, 2. Because it was a good place to arrange our Chinese Visas, and 3. Disneyland Hong Kong!!!!!!

Through a tangled series of events surrounding me asking for butter, we had left the plane with two United Airline dishes in our bags and these proved invaluable when we bought a box of Muesli and also some fruit, chocolate, milk and juice from the shop downstairs. Combined with the teaspoons in the room, and the fridge, kettle and coffee sachets, we had everything we needed for making our own breakfasts as we looked out over the gigantic container ship port outside our windows. We were on the 30th floor with a fab view over the port and back across the bay to the iconic skyline beyond. Our hotel was not in a central position, it was in fact in the centre of a suburb on Tsing Yi island - a public bus and an underground away from the action but we kind of liked that to be honest. There was a charm about waiting for and then riding a small bus with everyone going to or coming back from work. It gave us that little bit of insight into life here, after all, it's not like we're on holiday. We could see in the windows of the apartment blocks behind our hotel and the size of the apartments is tiny. It's amazing that such a tightly packed population, with such cramped living conditions is as friendly and civil as they are. We wondered how these characteristics would continue when we entered the mainland.

The mainland was a visa and a week away yet though, and while the government scrutinised our papers (which happened to be a little vague regarding professions) we had a city to play in. This didn't mean too much walking though, at least not if you happened to be heading in the direction of Escalator Street, where for 17 minutes we rode a series escalators up the street from the bottom of the hill to the top. The escalators change direction at different times of the day to suit the commuters. We also went to the space museum which was utterly dreadful. The artifacts were all mock-ups, including a laughable space suit that wouldn't win a fancy dress competition, and the odd interactive demonstration was either in bits or did it's own thing regardless of your frantic button pressing. The only exhibit worthy of place was an HK flag that had been to space and back, a bit of a tenuous exhibit to build an entire museum around. Still, it was fun enough, not too expensive and we watched an omnimax 360. presentation about space that was pretty cool. Hong Kong has a light show every night which fires lasers and spotlights into the sky and quite impressively, all the buildings that form the skyline, flash on and off and twinkle together, synchronous to music and fireworks. We watched that and then wandered along HK's version of Hollywood's Avenue of Stars, where people clambered over each other to put their hands in the imprints of Jackie Chan and his fellow artisans. We found a beer festival by accident one night on a back road and had a good time sampling the exotic European ales and barbecued food. Also enjoying the scene was a boat load of US Navy guys on a bit of shore leave. We left before things turned unpleasant, but there was reason to suspect the fun might have wrapped up an hour or so after we left. Then the following day it was up bright and early, a bit of breakfast, a bus, the underground and then change onto another underground train with a bit of a difference. This train had plush seats with little golden statuettes in display cases, and its windows were an unusual shape, that matched the shape of the handles for standing passengers. The shape resembled the silhouette of a familiar cartoon mouse's head and ears. We were on the Mickey train heading to Disney.

Disney HK was great fun. For the hard-core theme park goers it's going to disappoint but for a day's departure from our travels it was great. In size and intensity it was like a two thirds scale replica of Florida Disney but in terms of crowd excitement it was right up there. We arrived half an hour early but were by no means the first there. We were allowed in straight away but along with the rest of the crowds were kept within the main street USA precinct where the shops are until a cordon was dropped at 10 o'clock and the craziest all-or-nothing rush ensued as little girls competed with familiar Navy marines to be the first on the roller coasters or to shake hands with Pluto.

Disney was not the most surreal experience we had in Hong Kong. The conference centre was playing host to the 2007 world Toys Expo. We went along to see what this Christmas' must-have was going to be. With the exception of Lego however, there were no other stalls that anyone in the west would recognise. Instead it was all Manga cartoons and ninja robots and very Japanesesque such likes. Amid the mele were hundreds of kids dressed up as their favourite sword waving, laser touting, kitty eared, big Haired, big booted, short skirted characters, all posing and taking photos of each other - it was mad.