Coconuts to Crampons: Hong Kong and our new rice roll

We were in Hong Kong in 2008 on a layover to Nepal and enjoyed our couple of days here so much that we scheduled 6 days here this time around! The other reason for coming to Hong Kong was to get our Visas to travel to China. The process was supposed to be easy from here but it turned out to be a bit painful. It took us just over a day of running around to different visa offices where we were first quoted $1000CDN and then ended the day with a quote of $200CDN, which is obviously the price we went with. After that whole process we were free to finally enjoy Hong Kong!

The first thing we did when we got to Hong Kong was go for dim sum. The restaurant Tim Ho Wan (which has one Michelin star!) was recommended to us and it was amazing! Luckily we had english translations and pictures on the menu

We did a lot of eating throughout the week! We definitely gained a little weight around our mid sections which we now refer to as our "rice roll". There are just so many restaurants and food stalls that it's hard to just walk by without trying!

Beef and broccoli, Singapore style noodles, rice:

Gai lan, shrimp dumplings, noodles in a satay sauce:

Razor clams, clams, eggplant, morning glory, fried chicken:

BBQ meats - pork, goose, duck, chicken:

Coconut milk with red beans:

"HK breakfast" - macaroni and ham soup, toast with eggs and black tea with evaporated milk:

Bubble waffle:

If there's anything that rivals the amount of restaurants are the amount of stores. There are such a variety of places to shop, from streets markets like the Ladies market where you can buy clothes, wallets, purses, watches or cell phone covers to western style malls, with all the common brands you would see in North America.

There are just so many options and stores that you actually have to look up as you walk by buildings because there are places on floors above, sometimes up to level 10!

You can imagine after spending so much time in much less populated New Zealand we were craving to be in a quieter and less visually overwhelming place.

We found that Hong Kong was actually quite green and has many parks easily accessible from the city. One of these are the botanical gardens and the zoo.

One of the coolest exhibits is an aviary where they have over 600 local birds!

And then there are the mammal exhibits with the over weight orangutans, which I just found very sad...

As you can imagine, space in Hong Kong is at a premium. We experienced this at our hotel room in Mongkok where we stayed for our first 3 nights. It was very narrow and our washroom was a combined toilet and shower room.

When we were searching for places to stay, we couldn't understand why they were advertising windows and seperate showers. Now we know.

After posting the above picture on Facebook, we got a message from New Zealand friends who used to live in Vancouver, Brendon and Kirsty. They now live in Hong Kong! They were so kind and invited us to stay with them for the remainder of our stay. Lucky for us Kirsty is in between jobs right now so she was free to be our personal tour guide! We met some of her other ex-pat friends and went on a hike up to Mt. Victoria peak. Although it was a bit hazy, we still had some pretty good views of the city.

Kirsty also showed us the other side of the mountains to the south of downtown. We took a hair raising double decker bus ride up and over the mountains to Stanley, a quieter beach city.