We arrived in Hong Kong from Ho Chi Minh City by plane on Chinese New Year Eve and went straight to our hotel. Our ‘room’ is a studio appartment in a large appartment block which must be about 8′ x 12′. In that space is a bedroom, bathroom and kitchen - this is true Hong Kong living!

We were in Hong Kong for the 3 day Chinese New Year public holiday so the city was much quieter that it would usually be. Our travel guide book warned us about the horrendous traffic but the roads were a dream compared to South East Asia! Cars stopped at traffic lights and there were pedestrian crossings - bliss!

Chinese New Year is a chance for families to get together and they decorate their houses with lots of plants and flowers so we went to a flower market on the night we arrived to see lots of orange trees, blossoms, flowers etc for sale. There is also a lot of what we could only call ‘tat’ for sale and that was going down like hot cakes! Things like inflatable hammers shaped like a pig, bad red and gold pictures, helium balloons etc, you get the picture. It was really interesting for us to see another culture celebrate it’s biggest national holiday.

As it was a public holiday, a lot of the city was closed down which limited our choice of restaurants quite a bit. The only people walking around the city were tourists like us. We went up Victoria Peak on the fenicular railway for views across the island and walked back down via the world’s longest covered escallator which goes through the city’s Soho region - it must be about 1.5km long! That evening we watched the New Year parade which involved lots of floats, dancers etc parading around but wasn’t that impressive.

The next day we took the bus to Stanley which is on the other side of the island from the famous skyline and is basically a suburb by the sea that attracts a lot of tourists. After that we went on to Aberdeen, a bit further along the coast which isn’t much to look at but we had to go just for the name! We took a boat on the harbour which, as it was New Year, most of the boats were moored up so it was packed. All very interesting.

On our last evening in Hong Kong we picked out our spot at 4pm and sat tight until 8pm for the famous Hong Kong New Year firework display. We were not disappointed. The display went on for 21 minutes and was spectacular! The streets were packed out so we were glad that we had arrived early. After the fireworks we made our way through the crowds to Pizza Express (sorry but there’s only so much rice and noodles that we can take!)

On to Shanghai tomorrow…