Tuesday 28th April

Today we checked out of our hostel in Shanghai and then headed out to the main train station to book tickets for Hong Kong. As they only leave on even days we were very hopeful that there were some tickets available! On arrival at the station we headed in the direction of the ticket office! But the chinese being the way they are, there was another ticket office that wasn't sign posted and was accross the road in a completely different building! Of course why didn't we think of that!! So by this point we get too the English speaking counter only too find its now their half hour lunch break!! Well what more too do than treat ourselves with coffee and a donut! We headed back over after this to find the Chinese much prefer the English speaking line (obviously because its shorter!), after a small wait we got too the front and thankfully there were plenty of tickets so all bought and sorted! With a few hours to kill we headed back to the hostel too pick our bags up and use the computers. Thankfully Caroline had read that because it was an international journey we needed to be there 90 mins before. Huge que when we got there but moving very quickly. Very strange to be getting on a train with Passports and imagration. All went very smoothly and quickly!
We were on hard sleepers again and this time the train journey was 20 hours!! It left at 17:09 and arrived in Hong Kong at 13:30 the next day. We did treat ourselves this time too dinner on the train with a beer. Good food and fairly cheap. Also spent some time chatting to a Chinese guy who lived in Hong Kong but who had worked in USA for a while. So good English! Slept well and got to Hong Kong with no problems!!

Wednesday 29th April Hong Kong

The train arrived just after one and after going through immigration it was time to suss out the local transport! First thing to do was to get money out as neither of us had any Hong Kong dollars. We then headed off to get a Octupus card (used on all transport and in some shops!). Once we had this in our hand we made our way via the subway too the hostel. First things noted were sign posts are so much clearer and lots more English around. We found the building the hostel was in and straight away felt like I was back in Birmingham! The hostel had also warned us about fake hostel owners, we were offered several different hostels just whilst walking through! The building consists of three differents blocks on 16 different floors! We arrived at our reception to discover this was like no other hostel we had been in and really does not deserved to be called a hostel! But with no where else to go and the owner telling us that all the different named hostels were all hers and the one we had actually booked was just a name and didn't really exsist but its ok! We found ourselves in a twin room (no bigger than a shoe box) but we were lucky we didn't have too share a bathroom as they would throw the en-suite in for free! Its about the size of a small toilet cubicle with the shower over the toilet! (Dad imagine your downstairs loo and half it!). Think we may have to stand on the toilet to have a shower:-(

By this point it was either laugh or cry!! Crying would have been easy! So we just keep reminding ourselves its just for sleeping in and were only there for 2 nights!

We headed out for a walk up Nathan Road (Kowloon) and then in search of a tourist information office we took the bus down too the harbour. After getting a map and seeing whats on we then went for a walk along the harbour along the avenue of Stars (included a statue of Bruce Lee). Whilst here we also had a very expensive coffee and a less so expensive beer! It was getting late by now so in search of dinner we settled on a Thai dinner on one of the squares slightly in land. They also had 2 for 1 on drinks. Very nice but Hong Kong is certainly alot more expensive than China!!

Thursday 30th April Hong Kong

After getting ready in shifts this morning due to the room being so small for both us to get ready at the same time, and surprisingly we didn't have to stand on the toilet to shower thank god!! We decided to go and find the vietnam consulat as we still need to get are visa for there, very impressed with ourselves as we found it very easily only to go inside and find it closed for a vietnease public holiday (Bloody hell). So after a quick lunch of very british food (too embrassed to tell you where we eat but bet you can all guess?) we headed to ocean world in the Aberdeen area of Hong Kong. Here we saw are second lot of giant pandas and red pandas so we now have even more pictures to bore you all with!! We also got to see a dolphin and seal lion show, a very impressive aquaruim on 3 levels (I have never seen such big fish!!), and several different types of Jelly fish which where also impressive. Also they had theme park rides here but we only went on the log flume due to being short of time and we wanted to see the animals more.

After getting the bus back to the tube station we headed to the water front to see the lights of Hong Kong laser show it happens nightly at 8pm, we were actually very dissapointed it wasn't half as good as the guide books or tourist leaflets describe it as being. So from here we went to get something to eat and found a vietneae noodle bar which was very nice and cheap for Kong Kong standards. After we had eaten we then got the boat back to Kowloon where we are staying as we were still on Hong Kong Island, found a internet cafe which seem to be sparse in Hong Kong very surprising, and then back to our shoebox and bed.