Although I quite like our room, I'm not a huge fan of the shower. The shower head is great, but it goes downhill from there: the water temperature is very touchy, with a teeny-tiny difference between "skin-melting hot" and "polar bear cold". It also drains slowly, so we were ankle-deep in water within the first 30 seconds, and it leaks, requiring five minutes of mopping-up after each shower.
The Jia puts on a small buffet in the lobby, with cereals, fresh fruit, pastries, Chinese style buns, juice and coffee. The coffee is fine, but the milk tasted slightly off. Oddly enough the milk we'd bought and kept in our room overnight was also off. I think Hong Kong cows must have sour personalities.
Keith and Leona stopped by around 11am, and we took a taxi the long (scenic) way around the island to Stanley. There is still a great deal of untouched land in Hong Kong, which makes sense when you understand most of the island is made up of volcanic and granite rocks, and it seems most of slopes are around 45 degrees. Or steeper.
We wound our way over the hills into Stanley, an expat-heavy enclave on the south side of the island. It's basically one road in, one road out, so there aren't a large number of options for people in Stanley who wish to commute to Hong Kong. It's not a drive I'd like to make each day - although, as was pointed out to me, the people who live in Stanley don't have to make the drive each day. Their drivers do.
After a stroll through the Stanley markets, and a quick look in a taoist temple, we had lunch at the Boathouse, drawn by the promise of frozen mango margaritas. These were followed by a not-very-Cantonese meal of Mexican quesadillas, Greek salad and New York style cheesecake. It was sorta kinda authentic Hong Kong food, if you consider expats an authentic part of the Hong Kong experience.
This is when the Adventure! and Danger! began.
We caught a taxi from Stanley to The Peak. It's fair to say that Hong Kong taxi drivers don't believe in driving slowly, and not prone to letting little things like sharp curves with 300 foot drops cause them to drive any less enthusiastically.
Making things worse the ride to The Peak had more twists and turns than the one into Stanley, and our new driver probably would have considered our earlier driver a wimp.
Finally factor in that Emma doesn't like winding roads, especially in the back of a car, and even less after lunch and a few drinks...
Personally I'm not sure telling a taxi driver that he's a maniac is the best way to encourage him to ease up. It certainly didn't seem to help.
We made it, intact and vomit-free (although I was glad Keith had been sitting between Emma and me, just in case), and did the appropriate tourist "oohing" and "ahhiing" from The Peak - so named, as you'd expect, because it's the peak of the mountain. The name is uninspired, but fitting, so I suspect it may have been named by an Alaskan.
The tram down the mountain doesn't try to hide the steepness. There's a reason the seats require passengers to sit backs to the ground, namely to keep them from taking the ride nose to the floor. Great fun.
Back in Hong Kong proper we walked through Hong Kong park, our favourite feature being a spectacular aviary. It's a single massive structure, filled with birds (oddly enough), and with a treetop walkway to allow visitors a birds-eye view (pun intended).
By now it was late afternoon, so we took one of the rail trams to the west end of town. Hong Kong trams are cool: they're double decker electric trams, and they're dirt cheap ($HK2.30, or about 70 cents Aussie/US).
We had beers and wines in a bar on the water in Kennedy Town, managed by an Englishmen who'd been in Hong Kong for 20 years. Keith was delighted to discover two Germans sitting next to us were rail engineers, which was incredibly lucky as he'd just been talking about a new high-speed railway in China that had to cope with temperatures ranging from -40 t0 40 degrees C, and now had someone who could explain how.
Then dinner at a famous and totally unpretentious Chiu Chow style restaurant, featuring goose, beef, and seven stomach/twelve lung/ten-thousand brain (something like that) fish. Interestingly the restaurant was one of three side by side, all owned by the same family. If one is full the staff just shunt you to another one, and waiters have been known to bring dishes from one restaurant to another.
This was a great time to collapse, so after a HK$50 taxi ride - I mean AU$7 taxi ride - we returned to the Jia, getting ready for the next day of grinding torture in the shopping hell-hole of - Kowloon.
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