Hey everyone. I have just set up this travel blog so that i can report about my trip in china as well as give you all the chance to view some of the photos that i have taken thus far. As my trip continues i will be adding more photos and explaining more about my adventures in china. First things first, i left brisbane on the 10th of august on a non-stop flight to hong kong with two other students from ACNM brisbane (camilla and mitch). The flight took about 9hrs, the longest flight i have ever been on,and i guess in some way it didn’t seem too long. When we landed in china and had disembarked the plane, the firstlocal we saw was an army officer armed with an automatic machine gun, something we are not used to in australia. We continued on following the other passengers of the plane to where we were to pick up our luggage. On route to our luggage, we had to pass through a section that was kind of like a metal detecor, except it was a body temperature reader. I guess it is there to detect if anyone coming into the country has any severe illness or something, pretty high tech if ya ask me. We then got our bags and shuffled our way through all the following passport checks etc. Then came the time to try and get from the airport to our hotel, this made for some funny times. We finally work out how to get a train ticket to central station and from there we got a cab to the hotel.
Not wanting to waste anytime, we checked into the hotel and dropped our stuff off before heading out for an adventure around the city. We walked around for a while taking note of where we were going, and checking out the inner city of hong kong island. Below is a picture of one of the streets we were in, and this was at around 10 or 11pm hong kong time.
As you can see, there were still quite a few people out and about, and it wasn’t just adults either, there young kids out with their parents and everything. So as we came to learn very quickly, the peolpe of china stay out till some crazy hours. We then started to look for somewhere to eat, and found a place that seemed quite clean descent. Ordering proved to be quite difficult, be we got there in the end simply by pointing at some pictures they had up around the resteraunt. Also, as is in aussie tradition, we had our first chinese beer for the trip. We then headed back to the hotel for some well deserved rest.
DAY 2
We got up reasonably early so that we could go on a tour of hong kong before we flew out for nanning at 6pm that night. On the tour there was one dutch guy, three germans, a few americans and what i think was a french chick. The tour took us right around hong kong and proved to be very useful for getting our bearings. One of the places we stopped at was a temple (which i’ve forgotten the name of, have a brochure somewhere). There is a couple pictures of it below. The first is from just outside the main door looking in at a second door which only their monks (or something of that description) are able to enter (have to rotate this photo cause i’m not sure how to with this travel blog thingy). The second is of an altar with some insence sticks on it. They use these to say their prayers with.
After this we went up this mountain which has an observation area that is 480 meters high and looks over hong kong island, kowloon, new territories and more. However it wasn’t really a clear day so the photos i have are from a bit further down the mountain so that the cloud and mist didn’t block our view as much.
As you can see the whole city is all highrise buildings.There is only house on hong kong island, and as you can imagine, it’s worth quite a bit of cash. The amazing thing about the highrise buldings in hong kong is that i think msot of them, if not all of them, were built using bamboo scaffolding. I have some other photos of this and more of hong kong, but i’m new to this whole travel blog thing and i have somehow lost the uploaded version of them. So i guess i’ll leave it at that and will report more to you all next time i write a blog.
Posted from China:
posted Monday August 2006