Traveling – don’t you love it? The airport traffic, trying to estimate how far in advance you should leave your home, long TSA lines, having to take off your shoes & placing your laptop in its own special bin. Once you’re past all that jazz, now you get to find your place in a line filled with eager fellow travelers replacing their current life’s goals with the mission of getting stuffed onto the flying tin can first. Now, all packed like sardines, you have to fight for overhead cabin space and reel back feelings of anger towards the smart individual who put a small gift bag up there before you and ultimately forces you to stuff your full-sized carry-on luggage under your seat to avoid having it checked in.
Once you’re past all the tossing, turning, leg cramps, neck cramps and lack of fresh breathable air, it’s all worth it! It took us 19 hours to get to our destination. Breathing in that Hong Kong air helped calm any tension from the journey. We checked into our Airbnb and set out to our first destination. No time for rest. First stop and then the rest ~
Goldfish Street (Tung Choi Street)
Also commonly known as the Goldfish Market. It’s the one stop shop for all things aquatic. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to get as much footage or photos as we would have liked due to the plethora of signs posted forbidding the activity. As we had skipped out on quality sleep for 24+ hours and didn’t rest prior to venturing out, we weren’t feeling particularly rebellious enough to do it anyway. As you walk down the street, there are too many shops to mentally process if it’s your first time. (it was my first time and my attention span was similar to a squirrel) They have anything and everything you can imagine from livestock, aquatic plants, equipment, fertilizers and gadgets for your planted tanks.
We stopped by a few well-known shops that carry ADA and browsed their wide variety of planted tanks.
1013MM x Copaze (Megabox)
As John is a car enthusiast, prior to our trip, he made some arrangements to host a local Hong Kong car meet with one of his friends. Together they hosted a car meet that was probably the largest that Hong Kong has ever seen. While it ramped up slowly, when all attendees had arrived, it was mental. Crazy packed with cars of all makes and models. By this point, security guards had given up and joined in. I don’t personally care for the modification of automobiles and as long as it gets you from point A to point B – I’m good, but I can appreciate a nice car when I see one and I think I saw one too many that night. Even a Hong Kong Taxi showed up lol. By the time we got back to our room, I didn’t know if I was partially deaf or just insanely tired from the event. We ordered DELIVERY MCDONALDS. Who does that? I didn’t even know it existed, but apparently, it does and it was a perfect food coma into a glorious slumber. (By the way, the photo below to the very right wasn’t from that night, but it’s John’s friend’s car and it fit the bill and it was taken in Hong Kong about a week after the meet so a car like that x500 more.)
As I’m writing this, I’m realizing that our trip was way too long to cover every single detail. If you’ve read this far – claps and snaps for you. I’ll keep things rather short because pictures and videos are always more fun than reading (at least until I get the hang of this whole blogging shindig)
If you’ve ever been to Hong Kong or are planning to.. the food is seriously one of the best things in the world or at least my world. If we didn’t average around 20K+ steps a day according to the health app on our iPhones, I’m positive we would have gained a 2 gallon planted tank each. I can’t stress enough how important it is to eat your fill when you’re traveling. It’s culturally enriching and just flat out a damn delicious experience. John is fluent in Cantonese but surprisingly enough, every place we went to had their version of an English menu. One thing to note is that we did catch a little something when we took a day trip over to Macau from eating some questionable street curry, but no harm done, it brought us closer.
We spent the next few days eating our way through Hong Kong. On one of the days, we decided to go on what we called our Instagram Adventure. Apparently, there are plenty of highly IG’d spots in Hong Kong that provide a perfect post for your social media accounts. We mapped our route and made a day of it.
Instagram Adventure
The photo on the left is a random shot John has taken multiple times throughout his trips in Hong Kong. The trick is to wait and time out the lighting on the building. (The lights change and different parts of the building are lit) He took this shot after we *tried* to visit the ever so popular viewpoint in Hong Kong but were jaded by the thick amount of fog present on that particular night. In a large crowd, he got down on one knee with camera in hand and waited. Ultimate tourist. The photo in the middle is the Choi Hung Estate. It’s a simple apartment complex, but the buildings are modeled after rainbows I guess and the most popular shot is from the basketball courts. We probably asked a few random people where those were and we found it, eventually. The last shot on the right is Quarry Bay. For this one, we walked around aimlessly for probably an hour before we found it. The view is worth it though and pictures honestly don’t do justice for any of these places. Highly recommended if you ever visit.
Hong Kong is filled with interesting architectural designs and even if we didn’t visit these spots, I think almost every corner in this city has something picture worthy. Another thing we had on our list was hiking. In all the time John spent in Hong Kong for school and how many times he had traveled back for leisure, he had never been on a hike or seen a beach. We figured it was also a good opportunity to see a different side of Hong Kong and possibly gain some inspiration from nature.
Dragons Back Hike
Our trek started with a bus ride that was super sketchy. If I stuck my pinky out of the window, I’d be able to touch the winding mountain we were scaling. We took directions from another blog online and it told us to get off at the stop that had the “red trash can”. This might have been more reliable if this was a newly written post but given that it was about 5 years old, we didn’t have any guarantee that the trash can landmark would still be there. Well, it wasn’t there but we picked a stop and got lucky – insanely lucky. We decided to hike the Dragon’s Back. It was highly recommended on many websites and looked amazing.The trail starts off on an uphill climb and you cross multiple types of terrain so wear good shoes! Another obvious tip is to take lots of water. I think by the end of it, I was slightly delirious from dehydration and I hadn’t seen anything but trees, winding roads, large boulders and the color green for quite some time. If it went on any longer, I probably would have thought we were going in circles. We were probably hiking, walking and climbing for about 3-4 hours before it finally spit us out onto a little beachside town. From there, it was a short walk to the beach where we relaxed, had a bite to eat and took in the scenery.
We did so many other things while we were in Hong Kong, but this post would get ridiculously long. I’m confident when I say I was reluctant to get back on a plane to come home to Los Angeles. The city is pretty wonderful and we’re hopefully planning another trip soon that will consist of some of the activities we didn’t get to do. (more fish stuff too of course) We’ll take our chances and wear good running shoes if we get chased down for our photos and videos.
Our final day in Hong Kong consisted of eating until we ran out of money. I’m still thinking about that bun I’m holding in the photos above. And yes, John is taking the photo of me midbite and you can see the sheer happiness as he approaches closer with that egg waffle. The photo in the middle is us on a bus. The bus that was taking us to our final plane that would bring us back home to Los Angeles. And yes, we wore matching face masks. They’re cheap on Amazon and cute.
End.
