Holiday Inn Hong Kong - Golden Mile

5 AM came quicker than I expected. You'd think that since I wake up around that time every day and have to force myself back to sleep, I'd be okay waking up for an early flight, but of course not. Natalie had the opposite problem; she woke up 5 minutes before the alarm went off in a panic. I still had a bit of packing to do before we headed out to the Pudong Airport, but we ended up making it with plenty of time to spare, due to the fact that we left before 6 AM and missed rush hour.

P...

On Wednesday, we woke up kind of late. It was decided that we would attempt to get to a beach, but the day was cloudy so we were in no big hurry. After getting dressed we headed down through Kowloon, fighting off touts, towards the harbor. We stopped at Starbucks for breakfast, where the staff had amazing British-tinged Engrish, especially the main cashier, who continuously said, "Herrooo, thank yerrr!" I asked him where I could find a book store, and he suggested the Harbour City Mall, so we...

Q: Where did we stay? A: Holiday Inn, Golden Mile, Kowloon (4 star rating) My rating of the hotel: I'll start with the negatives ... 1) Overall the look and feel is a bit tired (i.e. it's no longer in it's prime) and 2) There are no views to speak of. And that's it for the negatives .... and here are the positives .... 1) As they say in the real estate game "location, location, location". This Nathan Road address is within comfortable walking distance of public transport (including the MTR- M...

Well, after a relatively smooth departure from Cairns we finally are at our first port of call. To anyone claiming a GST refund of goods at the Cairns airport ~ look for Bernard at the TRS office, he's the one fast asleep at his desk, and when we eventually managed to wake him didn't bother to look at our RM Williams we were claiming the tax for!
Oh and be sure to check out the surly German barking at you at the Cafe. After buying a handy currency converter (as if we didn't already have en...

our second day went splendidly well. though we were not able to visit all the places in our itinerary, we were quite happy with how things panned out. though we slept late, we were up and about at 730am, and was out the door at 820, ten minutes earlier than scheduled. we were quite psyched for the secrets of pearl shopping talk at hari's bar in the holiday inn golden mile. but before we went there, we need to have breakfast first. we settled for a cafe de coral near our hostel, and we were gl...

we've been here three days. this is our fourth day, and all the endless walking and the sleepless nights were catching up to us. so today, we woke up late. since there was no bus waiting to pick us up and whisk us off to a fantasy land, we slept until about 8, and we had to be at hari's bar at the holiday inn at 930! strangely, we still took our time preparing, even had the gall to have breakfast, then headed off to tsim sha tsui. we arrived at alex chan's secrets of jade shopping class quite...

ayos

(Jim) Here's how Amy just put it: "Who'd have ever thought that you'd need a visa to get into the People's Republic of China?" Jack put it this way, "There was a Simpson's episode about China, Dad. You really are Homer." We got to the airport today nice and early, arriving at China Eastern Airlines almost two hours before our flight to Shanghai. Despite waving my printout of our itinerary at her, the nice woman behind the counter insisted our reservation had been cancelled. No matter, as it t...

(Jim) Today we got to the airport nice and early to check in for our flight to Shanghai and got bad news and really bad news. The bad news was that they had no reservation for us. This despite the fact that we had a printed itinerary showing our confirmed reservation. We could probably have sorted that out, but it turned out to be immaterial. Because the really bad news was that we also had no visas. The airline check-in agent kept leafing through our passports looking for visas. I made some ...