24 hours in Hong Kong...

Hooray! The holiday has started at last! Right now I'm sitting waiting for my flight to New Zealand at Hong Kong airport after an excellent stopover in the city. Am writing this on my blackberry - so sorry for typos!

Had a great flight over with Air New Zealand - their in-flight entertainment system was packed full of All Blacks rugby games, documentaries about New Zealand, and, of course, the Lord of the Rings trilogy - so I was more than occupied for 12 hours. Even managed to get some sleep which was a bit of a record for me.

All in all, I felt great when I arrived in Hong Kong. Which was good as I'd booked the smartest hotel I've ever stayed in - so didn't want to waste my time there sleeping :-)

When I arrived at the hotel, I looked quite different from the rest of the clientele - don't suppose they get many guests in hiking boots and carring massive rucksacs! But they certainly didn't look down their noses at me - got whisked to my stunning harbour view room where I speedily changed into my swimming gear, donned the complimentary gown and slippers and headed to the spa!

A couple of hours later, after an incredible aromatherapy massage and spell in the sauna, all the stress and exhaustion of 2007 had melted away :-)

After a pretty restless night's sleep (most of which was spent texting and calling matt trying to sort our his flights - more on that later...) I headed out into the city on a 5 hour tour of the highlights.

A completely loopy guide called Crystal introduced a small group of us to Hong Kong post separation from Britain. Its an incredible place - on the one hand, its so forward looking with enormous high rises, neon lights, blatant technology and a very fast pace, but dotted around the place are tiny temples with lots of superstition, subsistence fishermen living on boats, and old trams in the streets.

Our first stop was "Man Mo" temple where local people pray and send wishes in burning incense to the Gods of literature (Man) and war (Mo). It was a beautiful temple, and quite overwhelming as the burning of so many sandlewood incense sticks almost choked you! There were very old local people who pray in there for hours every single day.

To get some fresh air, we headed in the unbelievably steep cable car to The Peak - the highest point on Hong Kong island. It was a pretty amusing trip as the cloud cover and pollution smog was so bad, you literally couldn't see anything from the top! On a good day, you can see almost as far as mainland China! Oh well, it looked great on the postcards.

Next stop was Aberdeen harbour - a typhoon shelter bay where people stil live on houseboats. We took a tiny boat around the moored boats, driven by a very tiny old lady! The boat driver was almost as crazy as the local taxi drivers, so I'm still a little shocked that we managed not to fall out of the tiny unstable boat.

After looking at a small jewellery factory (no I didn't buy any more diamonds, Matt), we moved on to our last location - Stanley Market. Its an incredibly tacky, tourish focussed market where you can buy plenty of fake Gucci, Prada and Rolex! Managed to while away an hour looking at tat, before heading back to the hotel for a poolside lunch.

Now I'm back at the airport waiting for the Auckland flight - very excited about finally getting to New Zealand and can't wait to see Jo again. Bit of a nightmare with Matt though - his plane out of Bogota had a technical problem which delayed him by a few hours. So he missed the connection to Auckland from LA. There's only 1 flight a day, so he's hanging around LA for 24 hours and getting to Auckland the day after me.

Oh well - I've waited 3 weeks to see him, sure I can survive one more day! Plus, Jo and I can have a nice girly catch up before he arrives :-)

More from me soon - and I'll try and post some pictures from Hong Kong when I get to Auckland....

Pamela