Day 1

Day 1 saw our daughter Tayce deliver Anne, myself, Penny and Grant to the airport where we met with Ian and Linda. Our small group of intrepid travellers were excited and looking forward to this “trip of a life time”. Along with our group we met up with Keith and Jan Sandler from Coffs Harbour who will also be travelling through Egypt and Israel with us.

Our first step on this journey was to take us to Hong Kong. Ian and Linda were able to secure business class seats and so were up the front of the plane leaving the rest of our group in the more sociable and close feeling quarters called “Economy”. Being only an 8 and ½ hour flight we were feeling pretty good when we arrived at Hong Kong. Coming to the northern hemisphere spring weather we experienced a comfortable 29 degrees C and exited the airport Customs area with no checking at all. We purchased train tickets to arrive at our stopover hotel, The Kowloon Hotel. At this point I was beginning to feel surreal, in that, here we were in a foreign country, only knowing the general layout and directions of where we were to go. Grant was beginning to “worry” about which stop we were to get off at (there was only 3 and we were stop # 2). Anne who had organised this stop over had it to the minutest detail and it turned out that the train brought us to Kowloon Station where we were ushered onto a courtesy shuttle bus straight to the Kowloon Hotel foyer.



After we checked in we went exploring the sights, sounds and smells of Hong Kong. Penny had a desire to view the Harbour Laser Show, so we walked over and under the busy Hong Kong streets and as we followed a crowd of people we ended up at the harbour foreshore with the laser show just commencing. With the cloud cover that was there most of the time, the laser show was not all that spectacular, however I took the opportunity to take some happy snaps with our new camera. I hope you can get a feel of the atmosphere from these.





At the conclusion of this spectacular, it was dinner time. Surprisingly we ended up at a “Chinese” restaurant and were pleased to see what the strength of our Aussie dollar could buy.



More walking brought us back to our hotel where we bedded down for the night. Just a note on our hotel room, its just like everything else the Chinese do so well. The room is compact with just enough room to swing a “kitten”. On a more sour note, Anne and I discovered that I had inadvertently left our Ipod Touch on the plane from Sydney. How disappointing.

Well that was day 1.