When travelling just as in life in general we all have days when everything that can go wrong does. This was one of those. I have always maintained that as a tourist destination Hong Kong does not have much of interest. Well anyone would think that I had set out to sabotage the day to confirm this. I promise that I did not. It just seemed that we were always on the wrong side of the clock.
The 1 hour ferry took us to Hong Kong Island and I had neatly planned out an itinerary but I should have started out an hour earlier to get it all in. A ten minute walk takes us to the world’s longest outdoor escalator A bit of a lame attraction but the ride up does take 20 minutes straight up hill through HK suburbia.
It is then a 17 minute walk to the Peak Tram terminus and my travelling companion decides to throw the towel in. Hot and sweaty she is suddenly dizzy and short of breath and cursing her “tour guide”. She maintains that we have been walking for 2 hours. That is when we left our hotel, 2 hours ago, and minor details such as we spent 1 hour sitting on the ferry and 20 minutes on the escalator are inconvenient truths. In among the angst she points us inn the wrong direction and adds an extra 10 minutes walk. We arrive at the ticket office to confront a veritable “zoo” of people and time ticks away. I manage to move our lunch booking over to relieve the time pressure and we eventually are on the top of Victoria peak. Unsurprisingly it is foggy and we see almost nothing.
Lunch at Honjo was superb and we made a major dent in their offer of unlimited French Champagne. Bouyed by the booze we set off for a booked harbour cruise but again we underestimate the time to get to Kowloon Island and we miss it. As a compromise I take us to the Hong Kong “eye” for a view across the harbour. Again the queue is horrendous but I persevere in an attempt to salvage something out of a pretty ordinary day.
