So long mainland China and hello Hong Kong!

The mainland had given us a pretty good idea of Chinese society so we were interested to see what life was like in one of the SARs and boy, were we in for a treat.

After a hundred years of British rule and serving as a refuge for dissidents and melting pot of different cultures, Hong Kong has a character as idiosyncratic as it is cosmopolitan. Soho is full of Western flavours, from British Pubs to French Bistros to Arabian Souks and plenty of traditional Chinese restaurants to boot. Food was a big part of our time in Hong Kong, and after a month of Chinese food the choice was exhilarating.

Hong Kong has everything to rival any world city, great food, plenty of shopping and more skyscrapers than New York. But it also has plenty of Chinese weirdness to keep things exciting. For example, there is a huge escalator running up the hill through the central district, which surprisingly quickly becomes hard to live without. There is a chain of bakeries exclusively for dogs, with some ice cream stores stocking flavours such as cheese and beef. The pet obsession doesn't end there, as in Mongkok there is an entire street of pet shops, selling goldfish for pennies and turtles by the pound. Philippa wanted every puppy, but they cost considerably more than a fiver this time so I said no.

Hong Kong is alive. No other word describes it better. No matter what time of day, hustle and bustle can be found anywhere you look, from the daytime crush of the Mongkok markets, to the nighttime rush of Lang Kwai Fong. It is also a city of verticality, not just in its skyscrapers and the splendour of Victoria Peak, but also in the many elevated walkways, the mutifloor gadget palaces and of course, the aforementioned Mid levels Escalator. When the city could no longer build out, it built inwards, filling every space.

Hong Kong is an urban jungle in the truest sense, a seething, noisy, chaotic hive of activity and life. I loved it.

That's it for China now, bring on Thailand! First stop Bangkok...

To be continued...