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Day #7: Hong Kong Disneyland

Mar 15th, 2013 by

We left Macau early this morning on the ferry (once again catching an earlier boat). As before, the journey was pleasant and uneventful. We docked in Hong Kong around 8:30 and hopped in a taxi to Hong Kong Disneyland. That’s right… “you’ve just returned from Macau, what are you going to do now?” I’m going to Disneyland! Actually, this was Libby’s idea. She’s always wanted to visit a foreign Disney park. So, why not take the opportunity when it presented itself?

Libby @ Hong Kong Disneyland

Upon arrival at Disney, we stored our luggage (Disney provides a luggage check service), bought our tickets (about 50% of the price of a Florida 1-day admission), put my electronic gear in the lockers on Main Street USA, and headed off for a day of fun and compare/contrast. The park is physically smaller (or at least has less on offer) than the Magic Kingdom at home, though they’re building out new areas. In fact, Toy Story Land (2011) and Grizzly Gulch (2012) already opened. Mystic Point—which will house a Hong Kong version of the Haunted Mansion—opens later this year.

Aside from some differences in food options (though standard American fare is on offer), there’s relatively little “Hong Kong” in the Hong Kong Disneyland. This was a bit disappointing to us as American visitors, but I suppose it’s actually what most visitors would want/expect from their Disney experience. The biggest difference we noticed was that all of the buildings seemed to be much smaller in scale. For example, the iconic Sleep Beauty’s castle—when standing in front of it—looked to be little more than “one up, one down.” I don’t know if this was as a result of adherence to Feng Shui or something else, but I thought it may have lost a touch of the magic as a result.

All in all, we had a good time. I’m glad to have seen it. Would we go back? Maybe with Emerson some day in the future, if she expressed an interest. Objectively speaking, Hong Kong Disneyland is more-or-less a typical Disney experience (good, bad, or indifferent). So, unless it’s meaningful for you to visit as a Disney aficionado, I think it could be safely skipped.

We left Disney in the late afternoon and checked into our hotel, the Marriott Hong Kong SkyCity. It’s a fairly unremarkable business hotel at the airport. We enjoyed a free suite upgrade and dinner in the executive lounge. And, it was perfect for our early morning flight home, but it’s not a great place to stay on a visit to Hong Kong.

Posted in Hong Kong, Macau | 2 Comments »

Day #6: Macau

Mar 14th, 2013 by

Today, Libby slept in until nearly 9am, and we spent a leisurely morning at the hotel. This worked out well as the morning was overcast and a bit drizzly (on what’s been an otherwise dry trip). After lunch, we went out exploring more of the historic center of Macau. We’d contemplated going over to the Cotai Strip, which is home to many of the resort casinos. But, really… why would we bother with that? If we were interested, there’s plenty of gaming, fine dining, and high-end retail right here.

No, ‘old Macau’ is more for us.

We happily passed a number of hours meandering through the narrow streets of the city to find churches, theatres, libraries, and homes. As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, many of the more modern apartment / condo buildings are fairly charmless. Yet, amongst them, you find cheerful squares or vibrant streets that are uniquely Macanese. Here are some examples:

Macau Cathedral

St. Augustine's Church

Shopping in Macau's Historic Center

We also stopped at Margaret’s Café e Nata for some delightful Portuguese egg (custard) tarts. A few years ago, we first encountered these delightful tarts during our visit to Lisbon. We had them from the shop in Belem that’s been making them for over 175 years. Margaret’s version was very respectable… perhaps a little less sweet and little more “eggy,” if my taste memory serves correctly.

Egg Tarts from Margaret's

Tomorrow, we return to Hong Kong in the morning. At Libby’s pleading / urging, we’ll be paying a visit to the Hong Kong Disneyland, which has the benefit of being en route to our hotel near the airport and offers luggage storage. I’m not sure it’s really a great use of our time, but I suspect it will be interesting to compare/contrast it to its American counterpart back home.

Posted in Macau | 1 Comment »

Day #5: To Macau

Mar 14th, 2013 by

We left our hotel around 9am in order to catch our 10am ferry to Macau. I’d strategically picked our hotel due to its proximity to the Macau Ferry Terminal. This enabled us to get there, collect our tickets, pass through immigration control for departures, and be ready to board quickly. In fact, we did all of this in about ten minutes. As a result, the TurboJET representative in the SuperClass lounge (I’d booked premium tickets) invited us to board the 9:15 ferry to Macau instead. Thus, we found ourselves arriving in Macau 15 minutes after our planned departure time. Nice!

The ferry trip itself was pleasant and uneventful. In SuperClass, you’re offered an included meal and drinks. In addition, you’ll find the seats are more spacious, you can bring aboard more hand luggage, and you get priority embarkation and disembarkation. For the extra $20(USD) per person, I think it’s worth it.

Once at Macau, we passed through immigration and customs with alacrity. We then found the Wynn’s courtesy desk, which directed us to the hotel’s free shuttle bus. A few moments later, we were at the hotel and checking into our room (which wasn’t yet ready due to the relatively early hour). So, we dropped off our baggage and ambled around the local vicinity before having lunch at the Wynn. For lunch, we ate at “Red 8,” which specializes in dim sum and was excellent. Yes, this was the Chinese food experience we’d been looking for: steamed barbecue pork buns, potstickers, pan-fried pumpkin cakes, pork rice rolls, etc. Delicious!

Wynn Macau

After lunch, we got our room key and dropped off our stuff. We’re up on the 14th floor in a spacious room overlooking the hotel’s petite Bellagio-style fountain, downtown Macau, and the bridges to the outlying islands. It’s pretty swank digs, but it’s suitable for this upscale hotel. That said, the best part of the Wynn Macau (and the reason I picked it) is its proximity to the city’s historical center, which is a UNESCO World Heritage site. Within a 15 minute walk of our hotel, you can find yourself standing in a square that looks like Lisbon… or at least China town in Lisbon (assuming it even has such a thing).

Libby and the ruins of St. Paul's

Macau or Lisbon? You have to look closely...

Macau’s just a fascinating place. It’s unlike any place we’ve ever been. No. Let me correct that comment. It’s actually like some places we’ve been… only we’ve never seen those individual elements mixed together in this way. What do I mean by that? The historic city center (which is very attractive) and the surrounding hodgepodge of urban buildings (which is not so much) remind us a lot of Buenos Aries. Of course, Macau has a Portuguese—not Spanish—heritage. Thus, you have to stir in a healthy dose of Lisbon. On top of this, you basically have Las Vegas grafted on to the city with many of the same hotel/casino resorts (our Wynn, plus outposts of the MGM Grand, Venetian, Sands, and Hard Rock to name a few). Yet, all of this exists in China, and the city is chockablock with people from Hong Kong and (most prominently) mainland China looking for a good time. In fact, the irony of watching “communist” Chinese mainlanders play the part of degenerate gamblers and luxury shopaholics isn’t lost on us. Indeed, given the seeming wealth of our fellow vacationers, I’m starting to wonder if the phrase ‘capitalist dog’ hasn’t taken on a whole new meaning? :-)

Today’s box score: +1 country (Macau)

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Day #4: Hong Kong – More Explorations

Mar 12th, 2013 by

I’m writing this at 2:30am on Wednesday in Hong Kong. Needless to say, we’re keeping odd hours. After a good night’s sleep following our arrival, I struggled to go to bed on Monday night and remained awake until after 3:00am. Libby, who’d gone to sleep at a decent hour, woke up around 2:00am and didn’t fall back asleep until around 7:00am, which was when I got up. I finally roused Libby a bit before 10:00am to ensure that we had some time for sightseeing. Last night, we both fell asleep by 9:00pm. Libby’s still sleeping, but I’m sure that I’m up for the day. So, on balance, I think we’re adjusting…

On Tuesday morning, we headed for The Peak, which provides vistas overlooking Hong Kong from an elevation of around 1,400ft. To get there, you take the Peak Tram, a funicular railway dating from 1888. The journey starts on Garden Road in Central and ends at Peak Tower, an oddly-shaped and somewhat ill-suited contemporary structure that opened in 1997. Ironically, it replaced the equally unsympathetic original Peak Tower, which dated from the 1960s. The building contains a number of restaurants, gift shops, and tourist attractions (e.g., an outpost of Madam Tussaud’s), as well as a viewing terrace atop the building. The views from The Peak are astoundingly good, albeit a bit hazy during our visit.

View from The Peak

After visiting The Peak, we headed back down to Central and explored the SoHo area, which is known for its restaurants, art galleries, and antique shops. By mid-afternoon, we made our way to the Man Mo Temple in Sheung Wan, which was built by Taoists in 1847 for the worship of the god of literature (Man Tai) and the god of war (Mo Tai). Being our first visit to a Chinese temple, we were a little unsure of what exactly was going on. It seemed that worshipers were generally making offerings to a variety of gods, spirits, and ancestors primarily in the form of fruit and incense (though,
I also witnessed more creative offerings, such as a bottle of beer and take-out food).

Man Mo Temple

We then headed to the IFC Mall to find an outpost of Tim Ho Wan—reported to be the least expensive Michelin starred restaurant in the world—for a late lunch / early dinner of dim sum. Sadly for us, this didn’t work out very well. To start, we couldn’t find the place (it’s buried under Hong Kong station and has no English signage). Once found, it was packed with people waiting for who knows how long to eat. However, we quickly realized that waiting the hour or more would be rather fruitless as the dim sum order sheet was only in Chinese – no helpful pictures or trolley of delights to point at for us! In the future, I’ll be better prepared and will try this again. However, we raised the white flag and had our meal at an excellent French café on this day. After dinner, we found the place I’d shop for groceries if we lived in Hong Kong. It’s called “city’super” and is a Whole Foods / Fresh Market type of place – a real foodie’s paradise with delightful offerings ranging from local/regional (including an amazing sushi/sashimi bar) to the presumably more “exotic” for Hong Kong people (including Rick Bayless’s Mexican Frontera products, which means I could live in Hong Kong).

As noted, we made an early night of it. We’ll be heading off to Macau on a ferry in the morning.

P.S. For our fellow cruising fans — Holland America’s Amsterdam is docked here overnight. She’s on her 115-day around the world voyage, which embarked from Ft. Lauderdale, Florida on January 5 and ends there on May 1, 2013. If you’re interested in this sort of thing, you might want to check out this blog.

Posted in Hong Kong | 2 Comments »

Day #3: Hong Kong (Finally!)

Mar 11th, 2013 by

Technically, we arrived in Hong Kong late on Day #2. Our Korean Air flight—aboard the ginormous, double-decker A380—was very pleasant. The cabin service, even in economy class, was impeccable. Indeed, it’s sad to say, but they really do put US carriers to shame, including my beloved Delta. We certainly wouldn’t hesitate to fly them again (whether connecting in Seoul or not).

Korean Air A380

Our hotel in Hong Kong is the Courtyard Marriott Hong Kong. It’s located on Hong Kong Island to the west of Central near the Sheung Wan neighborhood. The hotel is very modern and overlooks Victoria Harbour. Unlike the sleek, modern glitz of Central, Western is a more traditionally Chinese part of town. Here’s an exercise for you: imagine the best “China Town” you’ve ever visited. Now, multiple that experience by a factor of 100. That’s Western. Our walk to the nearest MTR station (about 15 minutes) takes us past innumerable shops selling (and smelling of) dried seafood and unknown herbal ingredients/remedies/both. Snake bile wine? Edible birds’ nests? Perhaps, some deer penis? Check. Check. And, check. Of course, globalization is here too: there’s a Starbucks around the corner. :-)

Our adventure for the day involved taking the MTR (Hong Kong’s metro/subway) out to Lo Wu (also written as Luo Ho), which is one of the handful of land-based border crossings into mainland China from Hong Kong. This, of course, involved using the MTR, which necessitated figuring out how to buy the tickets and navigate the system. We managed to do this with minimal trouble and no mistakes, thereby finding ourselves at the Lo Wu border crossing in about an hour. Crossing the border into the People’s Republic was a breeze with our newly minted visas. Tip: unlike a lot of countries, Americans can’t get a visa for China on the spot at border crossings. If you’re in Hong Kong for more than a couple of days, it’s easy to arrange the visa from here; if not, either take a group tour (which provides a group visa), or pay a bit of premium by arranging the entry visa from home (as we did using VisaExpress.net).

After crossing the border, we found ourselves in Shenzhen, the first “special economic zone” (SEZ) created in the 1970s as an experiment to integrate Western-style capitalism into socialist/communist China. Needless to say, I suspect you know how that’s worked out. As a result, Shenzhen (as our travel guidebook says) “has gone from gulag to Gotham City” in only a couple of decades. However, aside from some kitsch tourist traps sights outside of town and the Lo Wu Commercial Center (a multi-story mecca of low-price Chinese merchandise), Shenzhen offers little for leisure travelers. No, to really appreciate mainland China, we’ll have to come back and visit places like Shanghai and Beijing.

Shenzhen

We returned to Central in the late afternoon, exploring the modern architecture and swank shops, such as the Landmark Centre. Having eaten little all day, we were ready for dinner by 6pm. One of our guidebooks suggested a place in Central called Jimmy’s Kitchen, which is famous for its “comfort food” (no further description provided). So, we tried it. Jimmy’s menu is a hodgepodge of English and Hong Kong favorites… a sort of upscale version of what’s called “Soy sauce Western” around here (e.g., flash fried Camembert cheese coated in breading and sesame seeds). We were hungry. It was good to good enough. But, I probably wouldn’t return or recommend it.

After dinner, we enjoyed a leisurely 30 minute stroll back to our hotel (about 1.5 miles).

A little "local color"

Today’s box score: +2 countries (Hong Kong and China)

Posted in China, Hong Kong, Korean Air | No Comments »

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