Hong Kong [Singapore 2018]

After the excitement and activity of the past two weeks, we had one last whirlwind day before settling in for the flight back to New England. We left Singapore after midnight, landing in Hong Kong at the bright and early time of 5 am with a thirteen-hour layover ahead of us. This long stop was intentional, because if you’re in Hong Kong for less than twenty-four hours, you don’t need a visa. Thirteen is less than twenty-four, so yes, we left the airport. We cleared customs, then had a breakfast-snack at the one restaurant that was open at 6 am before setting out on our adventure.

We took a train from the airport to Central (Hong Kong Island) and walked from there to the tram that goes up Victoria Peak. The tram is a funicular (cable railway), which the internet says has a maximum steepness of 48%. For reference, US highways can have a maximum of a 7% grade, and the maximum grade for a railway without cables or rack rail is 13.5% for the Lisbon tram in Portugal. So we took the tram up Victoria Peak. It was steep. On the way up, we got the first overhead views of Hong Kong. From the ground, you get a sense of the busyness of the city, but from above, you can see how built up it is. It’s all skyscrapers packed into a narrow strip of land between water and mountains.

Views from Victoria Peak, descent on the tram

Once we got to the top of Victoria Peak (552 m), we first had to find our way out of the tram station, then we took a walk around the peak along the Hong Kong Trail. It’s fairly flat and paved, so not difficult, but it’s nature-y, and you get views of the surrounding hills, Victoria Harbour, Central, Kowloon (across the harbor), and mist/fog/smog. It wasn’t the clearest day, but not as bad as the time we were at Acadia hiking up Cadillac Mountain, got caught in rain, and saw nothing but fog and clouds¹. We still got some nice views and pictures, complete with hair/dust/lint on my camera lens that magically disappeared later. It could have been a sleep deprivation-induced hallucination, but I can still see the hair/dust/lint on my pictures now, so it was probably a hair/dust/lint.

After completing the loop around Victoria Peak, we took the tram back down and returned to the train station to have dim sum for an early lunch. We still had six hours until our flight, so next we left the station again and took the ferry across Victoria Harbour to Kowloon. We spent some time walking around Kowloon, found a park, then took the subway back to Central, where we caught the Airport Express to the airport. There, we went through customs and security, bought some cookies, and found our gate all the way at one arm of the airport. Never travel with me if you’re in a hurry. The bus I’m trying to catch will inevitably go out of service as it passes my stop, my plane connections are at opposite ends of the airport, and if things are going smoothly, the train will pull over to restart the electrical system, but don’t worry, everything’s fine. All mostly true stories.

View of Central from Kowloon, Kowloon Park, sculpture in Kowloon Park, Somewhere over Canada

Again, the flight between Hong Kong and New England was long, but bearable. I got chicken and strawberry ice cream for dinner/breakfast [8:00 pm HKT/7:00 am EST] and yet more questionable eggs for breakfast/dinner [7:30 am HKT/6:30 pm EST]. I rewatched Frozen for Sven and the trolls, and saw both Mamma Mia! and Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again, so yes, I had ABBA stuck in my head for the next two weeks. No regrets. And then, fifteen and a half hours after leaving Hong Kong, after crossing half the globe, we returned to the cold caresses of New England. We were back.

¹For the record, I was the only one with a rain jacket, because be prepared. You never know when it might start raining, or the temperature could drop twenty degrees suddenly, or you might have to catch and subdue a bird.