Hi guys,

Well it's time for the second instalment of our Hong Kong leg. We spent the first 2 days here exploring Hong Kong itself but we decide we would spend the 3rd day exploring Lantau Island where Sandra lives. This also allowed me to visit the Buddha statue and ride on the cable car I've heard so much about from Katie's family.

We didn't set off overly early as Katie was suffering from an upset stomach, the first slight illness we have had on the trip so far, but she manned up mid morning and we set off out. We got the bus up to Ngong Ping and as soon as we arrived I got my first experience of mass Chinese tourism. This mainly consist of large tour groups following a bloke with a flag shouting things which me a Katie found quite amusing but made sure we stayed well clear in case we got trampled by the flag following line. This was a fascinating place to visit and I'm not going to pretend I Know anything about Buddhism but the sheer size of this Buddha statue was amazing (it must be about 25 metres high). We climbed the ridiculous number of steps up to the statue and took a lot of photos before climbing back down to visit the Po Lin Monastery in the same area. The temple of the monastery was pretty cool with a few of the resident monks kicking around and large amounts of incense being burned around the site. When we were there a large building project was taking place behind the temple which we discovered was an additional larger temple which in traditional Hong Kong Style you could donate large sums of money to help build. The donation would buy things like gold pillars etc, they're not dumb these monks!

After exploring the temple etc we then headed down to the cable car that would take us across the hills of Lantau to Tung Chung. There is now a little village that accompanies this cable car selling all sorts of tourist junk and even included a Starbucks, more signs of how mass Chinese tourism was taking over. The cable car ride was pretty cool; we got to look over the airport and large area of the national park on the way down. Once we arrived at Tung Chung we changed from the cable car to the MTR (mass transit railway) Hong Kong's underground and headed over to the mainland area of Kowloon.

Kowloon is on the main land part of Hong Kong and is just over the other side of the harbour from Hong Kong Island, this is where most of the people who work in Hong Kong live. Kowloon is in fact the most densely populated area on earth and it certainly felt like it. Form the moment we came up from the underground the streets were packed full of people and we were quickly disorientated. Eventually we got our bearings and headed over to the Flower market we came to see. The market was really cool with shops selling all sorts of flowers at what seemed to us like really cheap prices. After we had finished here we then followed the street along and went to visit the bird market. We really did feel a little out of place here as most of the people there were older Chinese men who had clearly come to show off/trade their birds, but we wondered through regardless just to have a look at some of the most colourful birds we had seen.

After the 2 markets we followed one of the main streets down to the harbour front. This was an enlightening experience one of the first things we saw was a hotel that advertised not only a nightly rate but also a 2 hour rate, so you can guess the kind of part of town we were in. As we walked we further towards the harbour the area quickly improved to hostels and then eventually passed what seemed like a ridiculous number of jewellery shops, further highlighting the amount of money in this city.Eventually near the harbour-front, we came across the Peninsula hotel. Although from the outside it did not look amazing I quickly checked out the cars parked around and some of them must be worth more than my house at home!

From Kowloon we got the old fashioned star ferry over to Hong Kong Island. These were quite old and smelt a lot of diesel but it was nice to ride on a more traditional side of Hong Kong while crossing the harbour and looking up at the new build sky scrapers on the Hong Kong skyline. Once we arrived back at central we then changed to one of the more modern ferries and crossed back over to Sandra's island where we started out.

The following day we set out with Sandra to Ocean Park, this is Hong Kong's major theme park but main reason we wanted to head there was the are now Giant Panda residents there. They were amazing and looked so cute; most of them seemed to be asleep but one or two were tucking into some food when we saw them. We also saw the Red pandas again (my new favourite animal), we randomly had seen them at Toronto Zoo but these were much livelier and we luckily arrived at feeding time. Ocean Park is really good and is made up of 2 large sites connected by cable car or train.

We did manage to hit a new low at lunch in the park, we went to the terrace bar at the top of the cable car because it looked nice and had views across the bays on the south of Hong Kong, but for some reason the service was awful. We only ordered 2 burgers and a club sandwich but it took forever. We had also ordered a bottle of wine to share which eventually turned up after we had eaten, very disappointed about sending that back! Apart from lunch we had a great day wondering around the park and managed to see most of animals and even got on few rides.

On the Saturday we headed to the neighbouring Island of Cheung Chau which is a regular visit for Katie's family and friends. This is a lovely small island which is mainly made up of a beach on the far side and a fishing port. We had a walk around the island accompanied with a few beers to get out of the heat (for some reason it was really humid that day). Mid afternoon we followed Sandra back over to the port and had lunch at the harbour front. This was a regular occurrence for Katie as they always visit this restaurant but the food was lovely. We had clearly over ordered but took most of it home for dinner (midnight snack) etc. Once we got back, after a bit of a chill out, I dragged everyone down to the JK club (the local bar in Sandra's village) to watch the city game.Had everyone cheering and singing all the city songs by the end of the match!!

Unfortunately we are off to Penang in Malaysia today; we would both like to have stayed a bit longer in Hong Kong (think we are getting used to the home comforts again) but the adventure continues.

Will keep you all updated with how we get one, we are back to moving on to another place every couple of days for a while so expect the blogs to come thick and fast as we make our way down to Singapore.Have already checked out Sumatra's FA cup final watching potential!!!

Lots of love Martin and Katie