Hong Kong & Macau Trip

I have always wanted to go to Hong Kong but didn't get the chance to do so. After much consideration, we booked the tickets for our trip on 25 till 30 January 2013 and stayed in Cosmo Hotel in Mongkok. Despite having to pay for the higher exchange rate, it was a worthwhile trip. Some of the places we went on our first day are Temple Street and Ladies Market. The Hong Kong food is good and the drumstick fried goose rice was memorable and coincidentally it's right opposite our hotel. They even sell deep fried piglets rice but often sold out before the lunch hour and sadly we missed out on that. We did try some of the more popular goose rice but tasted just average compared to the restaurant opposite our hotel.

There's no trip complete without a visit to the Avenue of Stars at night. The moment we reach there, it was already pack with people and interestingly there's quite a few buildings with the skyscraper facade light shows. However, capturing it without the proper setup of camera and tripod could be a bit tricky in low lights. After much walking, our stomachs are calling and we manage to grab some cuttle fish snacks from a kiosk there. It tasted quite good too. We also got a chance to have a morning Dim Sum breakfast at 'Dou Heung' the next day. It's quite a nice ambience and reasonable price restaurant. Our next stop is Causeway Bay, the so called Fashiion Walk area via the Tramp. Causeway Bay is crowded with people which reminded me Dongdaemon in South Korea. My destination is to go to UML Hobby but ended up buying my wife collectible Mickey and Minnie Mouse instead of mine.

Our 2nd day was a long one as we headed over to Victoria Peak. The main attraction here is Madamme Tussade Wax Museum and honestly our trip to Hong Kong would not be complete without visiting it. Upon queueing for couple of minutes, we manage to ushered ourselves into the museum. There's a Bruce Lee replica right outside the entrance and looking pretty awesome but the entrance is greeted by Jacky Chan wax figure and taking photos with this martial arts action hero will cost separately altogether which we passed. Since most of these celebrity figures are to scale, I'm pleasantly surprised by how 'midget' there are compared to their screen presence especially when posing with Jet Li, Aaron Kwok and Andy Lau. Some of the figures are very life like with wrinkles, hair and all the imperfections captured in the very minute detail form possible. It was an enjoyable fun visit to Madamme Tussade Wax Musuem and we sure will remember them for a long time to come.

Later part of the evening, we manage to drop by Harbour City Shopping Mall located at Tsim Tsa Tsui, Hong Kong. If you are looking for branded couture/boutique, this is a place that you want to be. My wife manage to get a Longchamp and a Guess bag which were value for money compared to what we can get back here in Malaysia. I also got myself a Guees sweater not that I'm into branded stuff which I'm not but after much consideration I had to buy maybe for a momento. 

The following day was pretty cool and decided to try porridge in Mongkok which is also around our place where we are staying. The porridge tasted so thick and creamy and we are rather surprised by how good it is compared to all the porridges we have eaten thus far. Our next excursion was to Lantau Island (Chinese: 大嶼山) and it was indeed a pleasing one. It won't be complete without a ride to the Ngong Ping 360, the gondola cable car from Tung Chung to Ngong Ping at about 5.7km within 20 minutes. There are 2 choices of cable car to take in order to reach Ngong Ping namely the crystal cabin and the standard cabin. We decided to try one of each cabin types with the crystal cabin (Glass Floor overlooking below) for a trip on our way down. The main attractions here are the seated Tian Tan Bronze Buddha at 85 foot tall and the Po Lin monastery. Disneyland is not far from here but we had to skip our visit to Mickey's castle this time around as we are short of time staying in Hong Kong.   

We headed to Macau Fisherman's Wharf early on the next morning to catch a glimpse of what it has to offer as a theme park. It was surprisingly deserted as there is practically nobody when we arrived but our intentions was not to have fun inside the amusement park but to take some photos. I later found out that the volcano roller coaster had an accident and was closed since then but not too sure about now. However, it was a nice outing especially the huge building structures with various kind of themes like the Tibet setting, 1,001 nights village, Middle East War setting and not forgetting the train ride, bumper cars, camel carousel, etc.

 Taken the above Panorama View while we were aboard the Ferry on our way to Macau.

 

 

Macau is always a must visit for any trip to Hong Kong. It is a territory for tourism, gambling and not forgetting manufacturing hub for various goods. Our visit here was merely 1 day and we sort of missed out on a lot of attractions where Macau has to offer. One of the 1st places which we visit is the Venetian Macau Resort Hotel. It is a very huge resort with a combination of dining, shopping, entertainment, accommodation, convention and exhibition facilities in one single location. We sort of sidetrack for 2 of the main exhibitions which was available at the time namely the Titanic Experience and The Human Body exhibition. Both are really impressive exhibitions and having visit both exhibits really kill off 1/2 of our day trip in Macau. The Titanic exhibition featured some of the highly detailed and accurate replicas of 400 artifacts recovered from the ocean liner’s wreckage. It also recreated various iconic sections of the Titanic ship. One of which was the ship deck exterior with the decking incline/sloping at one side with strong cold winds and night skies complete with stars. We have to cross this path to enter the door on the opposite side of the exhibit which was quite surprising as we need to balance our body to move toward the door on the other side. Some of the Titanic interior set pieces recreated are very accurate especially The Grand Staircase and The VIP room. The wood works and crafting are dead on precise to the originals. Unfortunately, we are not allowed to enter these areas to take our shots posing as Jack or Rose but we manage to take a few shots at these areas. The other interesting part of the exhibit is the obvious prejudice classification of society as the cabin/sleeping quarters of 3rd class to 1st class are glaringly obvious and similarly to the dining tableware which they used from ceramic plates to silver plates for any meals aboard the ship. Oh well, I believe it's no difference in present day life of the year 2013. However, based on the Class Life Aboard tickets, the 3rd class passenger cost about $40 (equals to $900 today) while the 1st class luxury tickets cost $2,500(equals to $55,750 today). I'm not sure what currency it depicts from the info as shown but if it's USD, it's one heck of an expensive trip! By the way, I'd  almost forgotten to mention that we are given a class life ticket aboard when we enter and it's the actual ticket depicting the actual person aboard the Titanic when it sank. We get to compare our tickets to see the outcome from the huge Titanic passenger list whether we survive or otherwise prior to the exit which was a surprising end to the show.

 

After more than an hour of info fun filled experience on the RMS Titanic ship, we continued our 2nd exhibit to the Human Body exhibition. Well, this ain't any more fun for us as it's eerily spooky truth of our human body. I do recalled that this exhibition was held locally here back in Malaysia Museum Negara some years back but I missed out on that one. Over here, the exhibit are not recreation of the artifacts but most of all we see here are actual real human body from the top of your brains till the toes of your foot's blood vessels literally. The interesting part which we manage to see is the dark speckles/spots development of dying cells on the lungs and forming of cancerous cells due to smoking. It also shows the development of the lungs of a heavy smoker in his later part of life with almost 70% of the lungs are mostly black/darkened cancerous cells! I think I'll probably show the photos to tell the remaining part of the story for this exhibit. *Gasp!*.

After triggering all our senses, we also had our lunch here with some pork steak rice and cuttle fish with meatballs. It was a reasonable lunch and later we proceeded to Rua De St Paulo street and it's pack with people along our way to the Senado Square, St. Dominic church and St. Paul Ruin landmark. Since Macau is also famous for its biscuits, we manage to buy quite a variety of them here including the famous almond flavoured ones which is called 'Hang Yan' biscuits. There are also huge amount of dry meats variety to choose ranging from ostrich, fillet, pork, beef, wild boar and veal. We bought a few of the dry meat combinations with one of it is wild boar. Frankly, I prefer the local Malaysian dry meat over Macau as the latter is rather stiff for my taste. Anyway, I guess that's only our taste.

The very 1st little landmark is the Senado Square. It has been Macau’s urban centre for centuries & popular venue for celebrations complete with wave-patterned mosaic colored stones paved by the Portuguese then. We eventually reached St Paul ruins after much walking along the crowded streets. It was practically the remains of the 16th century iconic stone façade. It also housed the Museum of Sacred Art and Crypt at the bottom of the ruins with many religious artifacts which we sadly missed out as we arrived at the scene by 6pm and it had already closed. Nevertheless, we are physically drained by the time we reached St Paul ruins and we needed to rest for a short while there. Actually, there are still a great deal to explore if only we stayed for 2 nights in Macau. There are much more places which we will try to cover in Macau on our next trip like the Macau Tower, A Ma Temple, Kuan Yin Statue, Wine & Grand Prix Museum, Guia Fortress, City of Dreams, Macau Museum and Camoes Garden.

For those who loved amusement fair, Ocean Park is a treat for any family outing. Frankly, quite a huge group of visitors are all queueing for the buses to Ocean Park early in the morning. As usual there are a lot of fun roller coaster rides. I might be too old for this but we selected the furthest circular saucer ride once we disembark from the bus which was supposedly a ride on a bucket spinning in circles only. Once we reached there, the ride deserted as suspected and there won't be any waiting time here and waited not long for the ride to start. Things get a bit tense when the ride starts spinning as the wheel is also tilting upwards slowly but spinning rather fast. As the speed catches up the wheel and our bucket seat has already tilted up at 90 degress and probably several storeys above ground and it was quite horrifying for some time. Thank god it ended but my head is still spinning in rhythm with the wheel even after we landed back on earth. The park also features the Grand Aquarium which have a lot of fish species to admire.

Our visit to Hong Kong and Macau were very interesting as it leaves behind lots of memories. It came to my senses that writing a blog about my own trip actually serves as a diary and we can recall some of those feelings when we were still there. It was hard to recall back our trip to Hong Kong and to even write this blog considering the time which has lapse for a while now but the photos which we have taken serves a good reference to finally finish this blog on Hong Kong and Macau. I do encourage others to write about their vacation in blogs as it does serves a bit of reference for people who wanted to planned their trips. My tips to write a blog are as followed :

1. Write down the planned itineraries of your trip as this will help to chart out your blog's framework before 
    blogging.

2. Take as much photos as possible whether it's a scenery, signboard, something funny, landmark, etc. and try to 
    categorize all your photos in folders on your PC based on the Date/Day and places. (E.g Folder can be 
    categorize as DAY 1/Macau/...)

3. Keep your entrance tickets to a show/event/exhibit, maps, food locations, expenditure,etc which can be a 
    valuable info for others.