Matt and Kylie

Rugby Snaps

Here are a few photo’s from the rugby… just to prove we were there haha.

Hong Kong, yay time to get the teeth fixed!

We landed in HK to temperatures of 29 degrees Celsius and about 250% humidity at around 6pm.  (The humidity might be slightly exaggerated).  We were feeling quite proud of ourselves though, because not only did we manage to fight an airport ATM and win, but we managed to catch a bus, get off at the right stop and find our hotel. We were stoked to see signs everywhere advertising a HKD$1500 instant fine for spitting.  After a month in China, that’s pure bliss!

The room was a little small but we slept well. The first thing on the agenda was getting my teeth fixed, we had managed to call a dentist from Kunming and make an appointment for 10am so we decided that we needed to leave the hotel at 8am to give us plenty of time to get there. We found a metro entrance near our hotel and bought an Octopus card (similar to snapper in Wellington and Oyster in London) and jumped on the train. We were outside the dentist’s front door about 20 minutes later… The Metro is awesome!!! In my relative stupidity I had booked a dentist that was miles away from where we were staying but we had managed to get there with a massive amount of time to spare because of the great train network. Once the dentist actually opened I was only in the hot seat for about 30 minutes and I had teeth again! Yeehah! They are not perfect and I will still need some work done once back in New Zealand but overall I’m much happier than I was for the week I looked like a redneck.

We were back to the hotel by 11 something and rather stumped with what to do as the dentist had been the sole focus for the day… we decided to head down to the water front and took in the Avenue of Stars, the Art museum and the Space museum.

We visited the jade market near our hotel before heading back to the waterfront that night to catch the Victoria Harbour light show. It was a nice way to end a pretty productive day.

Day two we had decided that we would visit Ocean park, we had heard that HK Disney was a bit crappy compared to the other Disney parks around the world and that Ocean park was the better bet. We were not disappointed. Its a pretty cool place, part theme park – part aquarium. The big roller coaster called the Dragon was pretty cool, slightly violent but I liked it, Kylie felt like she had been beaten up though because of the restraints being at head height so we only went on that once… the mine train, log flume and a dolphin show were the other highlights.

Once back to the hotel we attempted the Temple street night market but the big day in insane heat had taken too much out of me so we called it a night.

Lantau Island was the plan for day three, we once again boarded the metro and headed out to catch the Ngong Ping Gondola up to the Tian Tan Buddha. It’s pretty massive, we had seen the one in Leshan which is bigger but I thought this one was a bit better looking. We took our time climbing the steps in the heat and then took a look at the Wisdom path and the Po Lin Monastery before heading back into town. We stopped at the Mong Kok computer centre on the way, this time we actually found some pretty good prices on things (compared to the one in Chengdu) but eventually decided we didn’t actually need anything… I guess we came too organised haha. We then wandered through the Ladies market and back to the Temple street night market again to do it properly.

We noticed there were a lot more westerners here than to normally be expected but figured it was because the rugby was on the next day. We had already decided that we wouldn’t try to go because it was a little bit too rich for our budget. Kylie saw someone with an All Blacks top and started up a “Hey you’re a New Zealander” conversation with them… turns out they were part of the All Blacks supporters tour, pretty soon the conversation turned to tickets and that they had some spares due to people pulling out of the Hong Kong game. We turned them down but as we were walking off I was having massive second thoughts… It took about 10 minutes but we finally decided, fuck it lets do it so we ran back through the market. We bumped into former Masterton mayor Bob Francis and assumed he would be on the tour as well which was not the case, but eventually we found the group again and organised to meet them at their hotel the next day to pick up the tickets. We were going to the game!!!!

We turned up at the Supporters tour hotel bright and early the next day and got the tickets, we were really excited now! We had a few hours to kill so we caught the peak tram (Wellington cable car has got nothing on this thing) up to The Peak and took in the rather murky view before having a splurge lunch at Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. We then headed back to meet the supporters tour at their hotel to walk to the game with them. We became the unofficial photographers for the massive group with everyone handing us their cameras, it was insane. John MacBeth if you ever happen to read this we hope the photos came out ok!

The final result of the game was great, it made spending the money worth it and it was definitely nice to be surrounded be some New Zealanders for a bit again. I must admit I was slightly concerned by the score at half time but it worked out in the end. We caught the ferry back to Kowloon from Hong Kong island after the game and packed ready for the bus in the morning. We saw a ton of Hong Kong but its definitely somewhere I would like to go back to and we still have a few things left to do there yet.

P.S. Every city needs a metro!