Asia Trip 2/4 - Hong Kong, China

After visiting my relatives for 5 days, we stopped by Hong Kong for 4 days. However, because the first and the last days were used for travelling, we were only left with 2 days of actual sight-seeing. After consulting with a taxi driver and my ex-roommate (born and raised in HK), we decided to use one day for Ocean Park and the other morning for the Peak Tram.

First thing's first, you should definitely go to one of the MTR stations and buy an Octopus Card. It is basically a cash card that allows you to take public transportation, make calls from public phone booths, and buy things from 7-11 & other major convenience stores. By using the Octopus Card you can sometimes get discounts at attractions and convenience stores. You can return the card with $10 service fee and get the remaining cash back when you are at the airport.



Accommodation

Basically as long as you live near an MTR station, you're fine. Research did tell us that living in Tsim Sha Tsui  is the most convenient place, but even 3-star hotels would've costed us about $300 per night, so we decided to live in CityView Hotel located in Yao Ma Tei instead. I purposely avoided the weekend and booked our stay to be Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, so the total cost came to be $3600 HKD (~$450 CAD). Despite being a 4-star hotel (some websites say they are 3-star), the room was quite small, but it was Hong Kong, so maybe that amount of space was decent. The room was well-maintained and the cleaner even helped us to fold our clothes, so I was satisfied. Please note that Hong Kong has different AC plugs, so you can ask the front desk for an adapter with a deposit on the room.


Sight-Seeing

We used the first day in HK to go to Ocean Park. This link tells you how you can get to Ocean Park via various methods. I actually tried Googling whether Ocean Park would be worth going since we have the Vancouver Aquarium, but I couldn't find much information so I will try to do a comparison here (based on my fuzzy memories):

	Vancouver Aquarium	Ocean Park
Price	$23.52 (tax included)	~$35 Cad ($280 HKD)
Animals	Penguins Fish Birds Jellyfish display Sea lions, seals, walruses Dolphins Whales (Beluga, Killer)	Penguins Fish More birds (some aren't in cages!) Jellyfish display Sea lions, seals, walruses Dolphins Land wildlife (foxes, pandas, deer, rhinos, lions, bears, etc.) Bugs
Shows	Dolphin Show Feeding Shows 4D Theatre (can see, hear, feel the wind, feel the chairs move	Dolphin Show (longer, has storyline, in 3 languages) Feeding Shows Choreographed Shows Light show in the train that takes you from one part of the park to the other
Interaction with animals	Can touch sea urchins, starfish	Can touch starfish Designed to make you feel like things are swimming around you (pictures later)
Amusement Park Included	No	Yes
Educational	Very	Not much
Finish in 1 day	Yes	No, massive amount of land

I had a really good experience in Ocean Park and I think the money was very well spent. As mentioned above, you can't really play everything within one day, so choose wisely if you are only going there once! Since I am not a fan of roller coasters, Mr. Lilasaur and I only went to the animal exhibits and managed to go to all of them, but we did miss most of the shows. The shows are shown multiple times throughout the day, but the park is so big that you cannot just run to them as they start, something that we were able to do for the Vancouver Aquarium. Another thing to note is that you MUST arrive early for the Dolphin Show, because we went on a WEEKDAY, 10 minutes early, and only the far corners had seats available. Here are some of the photos of Ocean Park:

I love this picture of Mr. Lilasaur, looks like a movie poster :) As you can see, there is glass above your head so you can see things swimming by as you walk through this "cave"!

I really liked this hat, but my head is too big :'(

Gondola: one of the options to get to the other part of the park. The other option is a train.

Birds outside of cages

The glass separating tourists from penguins is approximately 185 cm, so tall people can easily take pictures like this :D

Ignore Mr. Lilasaur's weird pose. This is still within the penguin exhibit. All the glass on the floor is to allow you to see penguins swimming to other rooms. 

Beautiful tunnel, and very hard to get a picture without other people

In terms of sight-seeing, the only other thing that we did was to take the Peak Tram, since nobody really recommended Disneyland. The ticket including return trip was $40 HKD (~$5 CAD) but if you buy the tickets with the Octopus Card it was $36 or something. When at the peak, you can get an overview of HK and it was quite nice, but we had to line up for 1.5 hours to get on the tram, so we didn't think it was worth it. People got so impatient by that point that they started to shove and swear, so it wasn't a very pleasant experience.

Since it was lunch time, we also tried one of the restaurants there, Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. It was quite disappointing. We ordered Shrimper's Heaven and Fisherman's Combo Bucket (I think), but the shrimps tasted like they were fried with really old oil so they tasted a bit bitter. In addition, our waiter did not explain to us that we were supposed to put up the "Stop Forest Stop" sign in order to get served, so we sat there for a while before we got any service. The meal ended up being approximately $500 HKD (~$60-70 CAD), with 15% obligatory service fee, so it was only a bit cheaper than International rate with a view like that. Here are the pictures:

Contents are: fish, lobster/crab balls, and shrimp. I think this was the Fisherman's Combo Bucket, except it didn't come in a bucket, so I'm not too sure.

Shrimper's Heaven. This heaven wasn't too crowded with shrimps.

Other Foods

Hong Kong is famous for their fish balls and claypot rice. I don't know where you can get really good fish balls, but there was one store near our hotel and we just ate there. The price for a stick of 5 balls was $10. It was too touristy to take pictures of fish balls, so we didn't. Here is a picture of the claypot rice that we tried in a restaurant near Temple Street though:

Left to right: deep-fried oyster cake, salty fish & chicken rice, sausage & ribs rice

This place seemed quite popular, there was a line outside and there were tons of tourists as well as locals, so I'm sure tourist books also mention this place. I just don't remember what the name is. After eating the rice, we went across the street and tried cow organs...

Person making cow organs

There were tons of locals eating this, but it really wasn't our cup of tea so we threw most of it away. One plate consists of tendons, lungs, stomachs, and other parts that I cannot name. Mr. Lilasaur claimed that he almost threw up.

This was the night with my ex-roommate, so she did bring us to a famous dessert place called Hui Lau Shan (in Traditional Chinese, no English version available). This place is famous for their mango desserts and has more than 45 stores in HK, so if you ask your hotel or just the locals, I'm sure they would be able to direct you to one nearby. And even if you don't have time to visit one, there is a store in the airport as well :)  I am a big fan of mango so I LOVED this place:

Mango Trio:  mango ice cream, mango glutinous ball with mango slices, and glutinous balls in a mango sauce

Sweetened mango cream with grapefruit and a fruit bowl

This concludes the Hong Kong trip. After summing up all the costs, we ended up spending about $1000 CAD (including accommodation) for basically only 2 days of playing and barely any shopping (bought 2 stuffed animals at Oceans Park). We both agree that HK is quite expensive so we don't plan to go again.