Our Chinese adventures concluded with our two day visit to Hong Kong. Although it was showery it did not put us off and we were very excited to be able to spend overnight in this Chinese Manhattan.

Hong Kong was given back to the Chinese from the British in 1997 but still carries a weird British charm muddled up with an oriental flavour. The city is very compact but enormously tall, the apartments and office blocks rival anything in Manhattan and because it was overcast they just seemed to go on and on into the sky. We were lucky to have a Friday and Saturday stop in Hong Kong, so the streets were "slightly" less crowded than on a workday but busy enough for us.

We headed to the longest escalator in the world to take us up into the sky and into the hilly residential areas for our views of the city. The escalator only works uphill in the afternoon so after what seemed 10 million steps downhill, we arrived back down in the Central district.

The Central district is a mix of old style Chinese businessess alongside the big corporation high rise office blocks. The old market is still as it was from the beginning, the stall holders selling their fruit, fish and meat alongside the road with the suited businessmen walking by to their offices.

We had lunch with the locals in a Chinese fast food restaurant, we gave the McDonald's and Outback Steakhouse right next door a miss until we get back to Florida.

Hong Kong is the only place in the world to run a public tram service with narrow gauge double decker trams and this was a must do. The trams are old and rattle just like they should, there is no passenger limit, if you can fit inside then you're on the tram and each stop was fun to see how many more we could squeeze onboard. The tram we picked took us on the Happy Valley route to the racecourse just on the outskirts of the city. On the return journey we had to wait while a van was shunted out of the way of the tram ahead of us that had hit it, much to annoyance of the locals heading home.

We took the Star Ferry over to Kowloon on the opposite side of Hong Kong Harbour. Kowloon has every retailer in the world there and you could spend a month shopping, fortunately Stuart wasn't too much into shopping today! Phew!

Our friends onboard had recommended a visit to the Peninsula Hotel in Kowloon and to have a cocktail at the Felix bar on the 28th floor, because of the views from the restrooms! The pictures tell the story. We headed back to the Avenue of Stars, the Chinese version of Hollywood Boulevard to watch the laser and light show across the bay and above the high rise buildings, we couldn't appreciate it because of the misty weather but we'll come back and watch it again in the future.

We had arranged to meet our friends Nick and Sue for dinner and they picked a perfect Chinese restaurant, the Shamrock, full of locals enjoying their Friday night out, we were the only tourists there. The food was very nice and we were all too full to head back for the ship, we needed to walk off our dinner. The restaurant was only a few minutes walk to the night markets, full of tourists here and the traders selling the fake goods and souvenirs. By accident we ended up in the Red Light district and the badly translated signage amused us greatly! It was now 1 am and we were getting weary, we headed for the Hong Kong Metro, a quick ride on the very clean Metro got us back to the port, we spotted the Metro line to Disneyland Hong Kong only 25 minutes ride away but we didn't have time this trip to make a visit, another reason for us to come back!

On Saturday our early tour started with a harbour tour and the junk boat came right alongside Queen Mary to take us from the ship. We visited the whole of Hong Kong Island and headed to Aberdeen for a ride on a sampan boat around the house boats and harbour. After lunch at the 5 star Mariners Club we boarded the cable tram built in 1888, at a very misty Victoria Peak for the ride back to the Central district.

Another tramcar ride followed to North Point and we were definitely amongst the locals, the tramcar was full of chinese heading to the street markets. We walked back to Central, a good few miles and it was early evening already, we didn't have long before we needed to be back at the ship so we found Time and Zoobar for some cocktails with the "locals" who were very friendly and excited about us being from the Queen Mary 2.

Our Sunday will be at sea followed by our next port of call at Nha Trang at Vietnam on Monday.