The Return to Hong Kong
So, after almost five weeks in Australia it was time, with rather heavy hearts, to say goodbye and start to head home. Considering the last properly long haul flight had a William Danger Rating of almost Catastrophic we were fairly apprehensive but, as it happened, Wills was brilliant!
This time we were staying on Hong Kong Island itself rather than Kowloon as previously, so as to get a different perspective on things! We met up with an old friend, Simon, who now lives in Hong Kong and he took us on a great child friendly tour around some of the sights that we hadn’t already seen the first time we visited which was a great distraction from feeling sad about having to leave Oz.
“Child Friendly Tour of Hong Kong” is a fairly loose term, however, as HK Island isn’t the most pram friendly of places to go — the roads are so steep that most have steps on the pavements (meaning lots of carrying of prams) and there are hardly any drop curbs or easy places to cross (meaning quite a bit of dodging of traffic). Strangely, there seem to be children’s playgrounds on almost every street corner, so quite how parents get around on a day to day basis I’m not sure!
We started the day off by visiting the Man Mo Temple which was really interesting but very smoky from all the incense being burned — William insisted on lighting some himself before going outside and having a play on the playground opposite! After this, we had a walk through the antiques district, another play on a different playground and then hopped on a tram into the central business area. One of the strange phenomena of a Sunday in Hong Kong is that it is the day that all the predominently Filipino housekeepers/nannies get off. They all congregate in the centre of the city to go to church, socialise, chat and eat and the central square outside and underneath the HSBC building was absolutely packed with people!
Our child friendly tour of Hong Kong continued into Hong Kong Park and the Botanical Gardens where we had a lovely walk through an enclosed aviary, had some more time on another playground and saw orangutans, racoons, bearded capuchin monkeys as well as two very vocal siamangs.
After lunch in a delicious veggie Chinese restaurant we got a taxi and then a metro train out to the Chi Lin Nunnery, a Buddhist temple complex about 30 mins away in Kowloon. William hadn’t been to a playground for about an hour at this point and kept on asking, and asking, and asking to go to one! So, we got a fairly crazy minibus ride over to the other side of Kowloon to the area around Simon’s apartment complex where there was a large playground. After being in Australia and their very adventurous playgrounds, it did make us chuckle a bit that the playgrounds in Hong Kong had 4 foot high slides accompanied by signs saying “designed for children aged 5 to 12”!
We had a bite to eat with Simon and his wife Lisa back in their apartment a dizzying 48 stories up (including fireworks from Disney World in the distance), before a brief trip to the amazing kiddies soft play in the basement of their apartment complex. After that, we got a cab back to our hotel and went to sleep very tired but all quite happy after having a great child friendly tour!
