Worlds Largest outside sitting Buddha and Disneyland, Hong Kong

Before I went to sleep last night I had thought about doing a couple of things over on Landau island today and only hoped that I would get enough sleep and still wake up at a sensible time. Well I woke up around midday, so by the time that I got up and dressed it had just gone twelve and I was in a rush to get out the door and down to the metro station.

The tickets for disneyland cost HK$350 normally, the hotel could sell me tdiscounted tickets but as it was the high season the discount was only 10, making the entry price 340 so not really worth wasting time in my opinion, but there you go.

But first I wanted to go and see the worlds tallest outside sitting buddha, and that required a metro journey or two and a bus ride. When I arrived outside the metro station I followed the arrows that led the way to the number 23 bus but just as I was arriving to buy the tickets a tour representative came up and started saying did I want to get a nice aerial view of the buddha and why not go up the quick way, via the monorail.

HK $55 was the cost of a day pass on the buses and the monorail was a futher HK $48 each way, so to go up by monorail and come back by bus was HK $103. What a complete rip off and a waste of time and money.

Once I had bought the ticket I was told to go up the elevator and join the queue to get on the monorail. They never said why dont you waste 45 minutes in a queue that snakes longer than a security check at Heathrow to then take a 25 minute monorail ride that apart from the first and last couple of minutes is dead boring, oh and the view of the buddha is ruined by the cables used for the monorail and the best view is coming the other way, ie, on the way back!

By the time I had queued up and taken the monorail it was almost time to come back. In fact I missed the tea garden, the garden on contemplation and didnt even get time to walk up the long flight of steps that reached the buddha, not unless I wanted to skip my trip to Disneyland and waste the KH $340 that I had already paid ( the OTHER reason why paying in advance at the hostel was a rip off as I had no way of getting a refund if i changed my mind ! ).

So I took a few photos, dodged the other tourists and restaurant hawkers who were doing their best to pull in any traveller too slow to avoid them and jumped on the bus for the return journey. The return journey took around half an hour, which was a fraction longer than the monorail but didnt require queueing up for almost an hour so it was a vast saving of time.

Then it was back on the MRT for a couple of stops and then get out at Disneyland Hong Kong for an evening of fun filled laughter and merriment.

I can see why disneyland has a reputation for being one of the worlds best places to take kids as it was everything that I would want if I were a child. Within the first couple of minutes I passed Mickey and Minnie, an art studio, a animaiton museum and witnessed a couple of Jim Hensons muppets rolling about in one of the crazy professors newest inventions.

Stopping off for a bite to eat wasn't cheap but then again it wasnt as expensive as I had thought it would be, and I have to say that I was impressed with both the range of foods and the quality.

Next stop was to science world where an indoor roller coaster ride in Space Mountain was my destination, and thankfully here all the rides are free. As a sneaky trick that I caught off the locals, go to the exit and pick up a 'fast forward' repeat ticket that means you jump past of the queue, although you can only do this once per hour but it does save a bit of time.

I have never been a huge roller coaster fan, but here inside Space Mountain it is fast, you dont go backward or upside down and the whole place it pitch black except the illumanted stars ( reflected off mirrors to make the sky look the same ) so you also dont think about how high up you are, in fact the only down side is that it is over a little too quickly, but then I could always queue up and go again.

The next place was a ride that was very dear to my heart and it was my all time favourite childhood hero, Winnie the Pooh. I was by far the oldest person on the ride, outsid of parents carrying smal infants, and it wasn't a roller coaster ride as such, but it was nice to see and if the prices were not so high, or rather my budget so low, I would have dearly loved to bring home a cuddly Pooh bear, baby Roo or even poor tired old Eeyore ( which I think was mums favourite, certainly I felt she could sound out the perfect voice for him !).

My timing was perfect here as I came out just in time to see the days parade march with the huge floats go through the main centre of the park and I got to see all the favourites, including some of my favourites being Chip n Dale, Snow White and the seven dwarfs plus Alice in Wonderfland.

As I had already got my entrance ticket before I arrived I didnt have a map or the times for the shows and so took a wrong turn, totally missed a theatre performance by Mickey Mouse and also missed the middle showing of the story of the Lion King. Howeve I had plenty of time to kill before the final show, so I took the Junge River ride which was a lot of fun, even if the boat driver had done it one too many times and I could tell was a bit bored of repeating himself ( now unable to muster the enthusiasm that he would have had a few months ago ).

The thing with Disneyland is that although everything is very fake, it still looks good to the casual eye, especially if that eye belongs to a young child, and I know that I would have gone nuts had I been brought here myself around the age of say ten or eleven. Also, the imagination used here to create places and lands was top notch and I was seing things that I could never see in real life even though I would have wanted to, such as a lost civilization now fallen into ruins and sinking in a swampy river, or Tarzans treehouse that looked like it had been created out of the wreckage of a huge sea going vessel broken up on the rocks and taken piecemeal high up into a trio of giant trees.

Up close the details on things didnt quite stand up to reality, so taking photos of anything serious wasn't really worth it, but there were plenty of opportunities to take funny photos and I only wished that I had brought along a friend or a child and also that my battery had not given out before the end of the day.

After a quick run around Tarzans treehouse I just got back in time to watch the final nights showing of jungle theatre where they reenacted the highlights of the Lion King in stage production form, which was great especially with the fire dancers and acrobat suspended by a high wire. Timon and Pumba were there, acting up exactly as you might expect and the singing and dancing of the whole cast was amazing and well choreographed, plus again it was all included in the admission price.

Without a live camera battery I didnt worry about fighting to get a great position to watch the final firework show that they had over the main castle, but it was still spectacular and ended a wonderful trip that may be meant for kids but will stay with me for a long time.

When you add it all up, the history, the interactive scnenery, the free rides, the free stage performances, the chance to get signed photos of your favourite heros, the free fireworks display and all for around £30 it does actually work out to be a cheap day out and one that any child from 8 to 14 will love. I'd say teenagers too, but they would first have to leave their teenage temper tantrums and attitude at the entrance and remember they are still children before they would enjoy it properly.

The place closes at 8pm and so that is when we all bundled into the MRT train and came back to civilization, or in my case my hotel. Not fancying nightclubbing or going to a fancy restaurant and having already missed sunset, not that it would have been spectacular as it was a little too grey for that, and feeling that a cinema trip two nights in a row would be overkill I headed back to my hotel and began the long task of soritng out the photos.

A day in Hong Kong

I love the Hong Kong metro system, I really do. Ok so Hong Kong is small, but it has the following. Clean, tidy and air conditioned platforms and trains. Platforms where you can see the entire network on a touch screen that only requires a single click to select the destination you want and then insert the note or coins required. All the maps, routes and information announcements are made in both Chinese and English. The trains are all air conditioned, with a complete network map in each carriage with red lights flashing lights showing the route it is taking, green arrows to show which direction it is going and which is the next stop and an amber light to say which side of the carriage the doors will open. It is always on time, it has frequent trains running in both directions and it is cheap.

I have been on plenty of metro systems on my travels and while many are close I feel that none beat the Hong Kong system, it just has everything you could want and more.

Anyhoo, ( please forgive the blatant advert but it really is a great system ) after finding my hostels station I picked up a few tourist guides at the metro station, changed all my remaining Thai, Cambodian and Vietnamese notes into Hong Kong Dollars and then went to find my hotel.

Despite not having any sleep last night, or so little as to be almost none, I still wanted to see a bit of the city tonight so as to not waste a day here, especially as I only had a couple of days here before returning to China.

I tried to find out which pier the Twilight Dragon Cruise left from, but it was no longer a main feature of the tour brochures and everything on the internet was out of date. I tried to find out about the Chinese State Circus with their Shaolin Wushu martial arts display only to find out that right now they are in the UK on a world tour of their own, so perhaps I can visit them when I get back as they will still be showing in London for a week after I am due to arrive.

What I did decide to do was visit the Nan Lian Gardens, a place of created natural beauty that had with a wooden pagoda in the calssic style along with a pair of twin red bridges overcrossing a beautiful lake with plenty of trees and stone outcroppings. Best of all, was that though selective hidden speakers throughout the park you could always hear feint yet audible the tones of their guqin, a kind of flat guitar played while seated, as the melodies drifted by and in the middle of the garden with nothing but the music and nature it is easy to get lost in thought and forget where you are for a time.

I stayed there until around closing time, and then headed on over to the shopping mall where I spotted a few tour / travel agencies who I thought would be able to tell me what is going on in Hong Kong at nighttimes. Sadly I was dissapointed as they were only interested in selling me complete day tours, which finish around 6pm, book me a hotel or arrange a flight, none of them had any idea of what a tourist could do to amuse themselves during the dark hours.

Giving up on the third attempt, I went to watch a movie, a thing you can almost always do at night, and it was the new super hero flick 'Watchmen', which I give a hearty 8 our of 10 for, a little overdone in places but still good fun and everyone does exactly what you hope they will, or at least in my mind they did.

After the film I was very glad that I had not booked anything longer, as my energy levels were rapidly flaging and I barely had enough energy to grab a McDonalds and scoff it on the way back to my hotel and was asleep even before my head hit the pillow.

Guangzhou airport and train station to Hong Kong

The flight eventually took off at 1:10am, over an hour later than originally planned and so by the time we landed it was around 2am and the point of staying in a hotel near the airport shrunk. It shrunk even further when we had to board a mini bus upon exitting the plane and it seemed to skirt the entire airport and twenty minutes later we were still riding it.

By the time I managed to collect my luggage and find the airport hotel it was already gone half past two and so it was a complete shocker when the hotel night receptionist smiled sweetly at me and said that the cheapest room we had for the night was 800 CNY. Realising that that was more than double the cost of my flight and that I would be there a total of less than five hours I did try and haggle but he seemed quite firm and was not going to budge even a hundred. The good news was that he spoke great English, the bad news for me was that 800 was too much for so little time, all of it spend fast asleep, so I made the hard decision to spend my second overnight stint in an airport in China.

I found that ths airport was huge, the security guards took turns sleeping in the waiting areas while their buddies circling the building and that the only place open 24 hours was a tiny restaurant that was called the Kungfu and had large images of Bruce Lee as its main advertising logo.

I tried to doze a few times but the circling mosquitos seemed to find me wherever I chose to lay down. In the end I came up with the solution to cover my head with a t-shirt to avoid getting bitten while sleeping on my rucksack against a corner, which did indeed prevent them from biting my face but I forgot to double up my socks and so my upper ancles were bitten to high heaven and it occured to me that this was the other reason to have chosen the hotel was to get a proper heated and bug free hotel room.

A little after 4am I finally managed to fall asleep only to be rudely woken by the airport lights coming back on around 5:45am as the airline staff all came in preparing for a new day, getting breakfast and open up shops.

I made the mistake of going to a airport cafe for breakfast and spent more than the cost of a room elsewhere for a simple ham and two eggs plus a moccachino and I although other places around the world have got behind different varieties and brands of coffee and tea they are still a long way behind Europe when it comes to hot chocolate!

Unlike Guillin city, there were plenty of people here in the airport that spoke enough English to help me that worked in the restaurants, pity the information desks were not so similarly multilingual. It took me over an hour, three seperate information desks and two managers before they finally understood that I didnt want to fly to Hong Kong but simply get to the train station.

Eventually I was given a post it wrote with the directions written on it for the bus driver, had to wait at platform 6 for a bus that goes to the train terminal ( at a cost of CNY 20 ) and then another 50 minutes for the coach to reach the station.

There were are a few signs directing me to the ticket office and ultimately it was very easy to buy a ticket that went from here to Kowloon for 168 CNY, which then just needed  trip up to the 4th floor before passing through immigration and then boarding. Unluckily I was sat opposite the fidgitting child who loved to move about, bash my legs at every available opportunity and make lots of high pitched screaming so even with ear plugs there was little to no chance of me getting a bit of kip before arrival.

The two hours flew past and so did customs at Hong Kong, which then allowed me to pick up some leaflets and feel a bit sick as there in plain view was a way to take a train direct from here to Shanghai, with me only yesterday night buying my non-refundable flight ticket. Doh, oh well, how was I to know that while China was as disorganised as a centipede trying to do up his shoe laces Hong Kong is as organised as a cheater on exam day with a copy of the answers in his back pocket.