Death of a Flip Flop

  Hong Kong, China
Monday, July 14, 2008

i actually started off trying to put all the pics up here thats ive spent the last 2 hours putting up on facebook.  unfortunately this laptop doesnt let you download the activeX thingy so you can only upload 5 pics at a time which is rubbish cos i had over a hundred!! anyway i got to here and its the same situation, the activeX controller is blocked.  i will do them when i get home but in the meantime heres the link to the pics on facebook (you'll need someone with a facebook login to see them - sorry!!)

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=134102&l=021d2&id=553535575
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=134105&l=497f5&id=553535575
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=134107&l=8affd&id=553535575
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=134122&l=8c3a0&id=553535575

right and now for the blog

well here i am in hong kong, my last port of call in asia after 8 incredible months.  i dont think theres any other city i would rather spend it in either its so lovely.  like new york but prettier and more laid back. im sure it must be my favourite foreign city after buenos aires... the views of hong kong island from down the bottom of kowloon are just spectacular as is the light show that is projected off many of the buildings in the evening.  ive done a load of touristy things as well as a load of shopping sprees and now im just trying to figure out what else there is to do that doesnt involve money!!!

so last thursday i got up out of bed at 5am if you can believe it (still in yangshuo now) and got a minibus with jen and talkative-liz to the pickup point for our sunrise hot air balloon trip.  im sure those of you who know how much i loathe flying are wondering why i chose to do something like that? but it was kind of a nazca lines situation where you have to weigh up how nervous you are vs how amazing you think the views are going to be and the views won.  there was us three, another chinese dude and then our balloon child-controller. we set off up into the sky and its so weird cos you dont notice anything (apart from the intermittant roar of the gas fire thingy and the subsequent sweat that pours down your back cos its RIGHT behind you - it was a tight squeeze with 5 of us in the basket and i shudder as to think how phileas fogg went around the world in one....). anyway.  up we went just drifting and my goodness but it was just spectacular.  the karst landscape you can see when you are on the bottom but when you're up in the sky you can appreciate it a whole lot more.  actually im going to put in a phto just for illustrative purposes.  anyway we floated around the yangshuoian skies for well over an hour and then it was time to come down.  all the while our child-controller is in contact with our chase-van on the ground.  the chase-van houses 4 dudes in luminous orange boilersuits whose job it is to grab us when we land. (us = the balloon not us individually.)  anyway each time we spied a potential landing spot the van wound drive as close as possible and then the balloon dudes would leggit out across the fields.  unfortunately the wind was less than nothing so we ended up with 2 near lands in a mud field and a river respectively and also 3 more aborted clear-area lands.  attempt number 4 was successful and we touched down from one of the coolest things ive done on this trip.



that night we caught the night train to shenzen which is the last part of mainland china before hong kong.  the elderly people got the bottom bunks (you know who you are) and i had the pleasure of the upper-upper bunks where the straightest you can sit is a 45 degree angle.  but it was clean and comfy and id a great nights sleep.

next morning we got in around 11 and struggled through immigration and back into the land of un-censored facebook, non-mao lovers and general mroe relaxedness. we caught the train to tsim sha sui where we stayed one night in the west hotel in mid-town kowloon.   we walked down to the light show on the avenue of the stars and it was cool. we then caught the tram up to victoria peak but alas the clouds had blown in sneakily so the view wasnt as good as it couldve been.

next day nikki and i moved for one night to the stanford view hotel where we had 2 tellies, 2 bathrooms and even an entertaining room!!! i went out and invested a large amount of euro on a really nice digital SLR camera and then we chilled out on the boat across the harbour.

last night after nikki left for the airport i met jen down by the avenue of the stars.  we had the most random weird experience which i truely would have expected to happen in many other places ive been but defo not here in hong kong. we were sitting there talking about cameras (she has the same one i bought so was teaching me) and this dude from the middle east somewhere came up to us and was like talking half in english and half in his native language and he just started abusing us and calling us european/american terrorists and who the f*** were we coming here to asia etc etc. i was like lets get out of here so we just got up and walked off and he was there for like 5 minutes screaming abuse at us getting louder and louder as we walked further away.  i was a bit of a nervous wreck then so we calmed ourselves by going for a lovely drink in the sky lounge of the sheraton which looks out over the bay and it was SUPERB!!!!.

today i just mosied around and looked in shops and walked and walked and it was nice.  ive moved to a place called the mingle hotel which those of you nerdy folk would like.  free wifi everywhere, free internet, fingerprint door opening (if you sign up for it). HUGE flatscreen telly in every room with big long speakers, hundreds of free on-demand movies, telly in the shower.  the main telly also has like a 3D map of the room in the menu that shows which lights are on and roatates around (like in a james bond movie or something) and as you turn lights on and off it shows up on the mappy thing!!! its so so cool.  small and super cheap relative to pretty much everywhere else but just so so cool and i defo recommend it if youre coming to hong kong.

well i think thats about it for now apart from one piece of very sad news. i was walking up nathan road today and my flipflop fell off, or so i thought. looking down i realised it wasnt the case.  the little bit that sticks into the bottom bit that goes between your toes had actually broken off. and it was my favourite favourite pair of havi's, the pale green ones with the lilac straps.  and aside from my sadness there was also the practical fact that i was downtown hong kong essentially in my bare feet!!!! so i had to buy a replacement pair but theyre not the same and im sad that ive lost my most beautiful havianas. *sob*

right time for a shower and a movie and then some dinner.  hope you like the pics. 
bye for now
me x