It's here, our final full day of travel and adventure and it's going to be capped off with a trip to Tian Tan Buddha (Big Buddha as the tourists call it). Big Buddha is located on Lantau Island, in the Ngong Ping region of Hong Kong. Unfortunately it required a bus as the touristic cable car was shut due to some festival that was being celebrated in China. After a brief stint on the MTR that took us to Tung Chung station we joined the back of a very long queue ...

Waving goodbye to Sara as she dropped us back in Kowloon for the last time we lugged our bags towards our accommodation, the fruitily named 'Apple Inn'. Naturally, it was a hole with eye stingingly green and yellow walls but our bunk mate was a pleasant Chinese fellow, on business from the mainland, and he smiled genially in an unperturbed fashion as I swung my ass into the top bunk. Today was destined to be an exciting but leg-aching day. The plan was to see S...

It must be said that Hong Kong's MTR service is superb. It jets you almost anywhere over the island (even to the airport for a slightly larger fee - dirty) in around twenty minutes and at a leisurely cost of roughly 80 pence. On the trains I noticed that hundreds of the Chinese women are wearing contact lenses that make their pupils appear huge and alien. You don't realise how much you rely on small, visual cues to read a person's thoughts and opinions and to h...

I was surprised to see that Hong Kong is plonked inside high, green mountains and the glittering South China Sea. I expected buildings to stretch as far as the eye could see but the district of Kowloon hides the rest of mainland China behind its mountainous curtain. Kowloon translates to nine dragons; the 'nine dragons' represent the eight mountains that pen in Hong Kong, the ninth represents and the emperor that resides there. I have quickly realised that in H...

Hanoi airport, NoiBai, is clean and efficient and nibbling on my last banh mi roll with mystery meat we queued up for our flight to Hong Kong. Amusingly, everyone (and I mean EVERYONE) had a North Face puffer jacket on due to them being ridiculously cheap as knock-off from the factory based in Hanoi - we looked like a North Face catalogue come to life. In our slightly cramped cabin in seat 11F and E, I had a grade three faffer in front of me. He was up and down...