Hong Kong! day 1

Alright, Hong Kong is awesome. Yesterday was quite a day, started off with an awesome hike up to Lookout Point at the top of Discovery Bay. It was a hot one and pretty humid, at 35C or 95F. It was a hike straight up the mountain, and pretty steep, about 1000ft up or so. The very beginning was all rock and dirt steps, got the legs burning for sure. check it out:


On the way down, we hiked into a valley which had an awesome stream with some cool rock pools. Hong Kong is amazing, huge high rise buildings right at the bottom of really steep mountains, and lots of thick forest which goes right into the Bay. Discovery Bay is right across the water from Hong Kong, and is sort of an expat enclave. It's really nice, and has the feel more of a beach resort than an actual neighborhood.





So, we cleaned up from the hike and took the ferry over into the city. HK is super impressive to look at, huge buildings shooting up everywhere, right on the water. The entire bay is surrounded by high rise development and then lush mountains. We walked around the city and saw the touristy sights. Took the Star ferry over to Calou and TST, which stands for something like Tsim Sau Tsui. Walked around checking stuff out, and came across the Hong Kong space museum, which just happend to be showing a IMAX movie on Kilimanjaro. What luck! So we saw that and it was awesome, I'm pretty stoked for Africa and Kili, but there's so much going on before then that I'm concentrating on now.
After the IMAX we hopped on the ferry again back to Central HK. Adam had gone to the airport to pick up Rob and Ashok, two buddies from Uni back in Austrailia. They had been on a two week holiday in London and Ireland. We meet up with them in front of the ferry dock in downtown HK, it was great to see them again. We had been good friends back at school in Australia. Ashok and Rob are some characters, and are usually up for a good time, and constant pranks.
The five of us, Adam, Matt, Ashok and Rob took an open top bus around the city and then rode the Tram up to the peak overlooking downtown HK and the bay. It was an amazing view.


While walking around the mountain top shopping centre we luckily bumped into Toby, the dutchman, who climbed Mt. Beerwah with Matt and I last week. Matt knew he'd be in HK while we were and organized meeting up at the peak. Pretty lucky we bumped into him when we did. Now the six of us hiked around the peak trail to find an awesome view of the city, to watch the nightly 8pm light show. A bunch of the skyscrapers have crazy lights that go off everynight at 8, the IFC (tallest) and the China Bank building look rad. So by this time we're all starving and hop the tram back down into the city to look for a place to eat.
Since Adam lives here, he knows the spots, we rolled into 'SoHo' in cabs from the tram and found this real nice chinese place for dinner. The feast was awesome, the bill was not! Our dining fiasco ran up to $1050 HKD, which is only about $150 USD, actually pretty reasonable dinner for six.
Toby took off and we set off to find some bars. A short walk from the restaurant district 'soho' and we're into bar spot: Lan Kwai Fong.



We found some cool spots and had some beers, then checked out this place Adam had been talking about. It was some russian bar with a giant freezer. You put on fur coats and drink chilled vodka in the freezer. So two rounds of shots later, we were feeling right good.










Heading out further and kept getting bumped into by these girls passing out free drink coupons. We had to give our email address and name, and bam, free drinks! So we each wrote down like three or four names and got a bunch of coupons. After this point, my memory is a bit foggy, but I remember some more bars, drinks, an all Hong Kong band playing Black Eyed Peas and wasted expats dancing like fools. It's amazing how many westerners there are here, mostly buisness types. After a long day, we rocked the ferry back to Dbay and crashed.

Going into the Stanley market today, more later.