The Journey Home // Hong Kong edition …

Well I’m back in the motherland, and it’s a little strange. We first knew we were actually back in New Zealand when we exited the plane and walked into the Christchurch arrivals. A huge photo of the mountains was covering one of the walls, Poi E was being played over the loud speakers and 90% of the people in the waiting lounge weren’t wearing shoes. We were definitely home.

But before we made it that far, we stopped off in Hong Kong. We left England on Friday the 3rd of January, and went to Cheung Chau island, Hong Kong (with a short stopover in Dubai) on Saturday. We stayed in a Christian retreat centre that we used to go to when I was about 5 years old and we lived in Mongolia. Despite it being up three ginormous sections of hill (I am so unfit!), it was really nice to go back and see the place I knew as our holiday destination back in the day. I had bits and pieces of various memories from those years, but it was really great to be able to actually see and remember more. The swing set that I learnt to push myself on was still there, so that was cool too.

The island is just under an hour’s boat ride from Hong Kong itself, and it’s a little fishing village really, though lots of people from Hong Kong go over for the weekends, as it has little markets and some really beautiful walking trails, one of which we did (and huffed and puffed our way up the hill once again).

On the Monday, we caught the boat back over the Hong Kong itself and met up with a friend that we’ve known for years and years. She took us out for Dim Sum, and it was so delicious! I remember as a kid having Chinese pork buns, so she made sure she ordered some of those. We were super glad that she was there with us, because she is fluent in Cantonese. If she hadn’t been, we probably would have ended up ordering some super weird things that we didn’t want to it. As it was, we saw several plates of chicken feet wander (not literally) past our table, and threw up a little bit in our mouths. Seriously. Gross.

The rest of the days were mostly spent on the island, having a bit of sleep catch up, a bit of a wander, and trying to find sugar cane to munch on. Alas, we didn’t find the sugar cane, but it we did look through the wet market, and had to stop ourselves buying all the turtles and seahorses and freeing them back into the ocean.

Despite only having a few days, that was all we needed, I think. If you haven’t been to Hong Kong before, it’s full of high rise buildings and bridges everywhere, connecting the island to the main land, and out to the new airport, which is quite new and sits on another island. The smog, though, my word. For someone who likes to see everything all of the time, the smog in Hong Kong was infuriating. And terrifying because we would be on the boat minding out own business, and then suddenly, out the mist (very fantasy-novel like) appeared a tall looming ship. Argh! But they seemed to have at least some sort of system, and needless to say it was all fine.

 

The picture on the far right at the top there…yeah, I thought that rock looked like Jesus, so I had to take a picture. And why is there a photo of an ant? Because they were really huge!

On Wednesday night we dropped out luggage at the train station in Hong Kong (they have a check-in service in town, which was terrifying and I was sure we were never going to see our bags again…) and then got the train to the airport. We then spent 9 hours on the plane to Sydney.