Touchdown in Hong Kong

So after 12 hours (it seemed like quite a bit longer) arrived at the bustling city..err I mean airport of Hong Kong – the city is actually a fair ways from from the airport itself. I had heard that the airport was actually on a man made Island but it was indistinguishable from the rest of the landscape so no good photo ops presented themselves.
With legs feeling decidedly cramped and strained hobbled through the airport wondering where the heck I should be and what my next move was, originally I had planned to spend my 10 hour layover wandering around Hong Kong a bit and maybe take in a few sights and window shop – however due to flight delays the layover was now about 6 hours.

This was a bit on the uncomfortable side as if I happened to get lost anywhere along the way I would be in danger of missing my connecting flight and that wasn’t too appealing. To slightly complicate matters my boarding pass for the next flight didn’t have a gate number attached to it and the departure wasn’t listed on the board yet… and not knowing the airport too well – you get the idea. Finally after about 15 minutes of wasted indecision (and about 10 min trying to finding a washroom) threw caution to the wind and dutifully lined up at immigration for Hong Kong visitors. After about another 20 minutes in line, got to the counter and presented my shiny passport and boarding pass. The clerk did a slight double take as he noted the departure time on the ticket and asked me to clarify if I wanted to exit the airport (I’m sure he wanted to check to see if I wasn’t another silly foreigner lost in the wrong line, which was nice of him to do), I explained my intentions, not sure how much he understood but stamped an entry visa and sent me on my way.

Now still feeling quite a bit unsure of my bearings tried following the signs for MTR and sure enough saw “CITY TRAIN MTR” signs pointing the way. I changed some of my cash to HK$ and purchased a same day return train pass to Hong Kong it was $100 HKD roughly $15 CAD. The trains arrive every 12 minutes like clockwork and take about 24 minutes to get to the city, given that I still wasn’t sure what gate my plane was at as well as time to get through security I estimated that I had about an hour of gawking time before I had to find my way back to the Airport.

The train was truly brilliant, clean, comfortable, and pretty darn fast. In what seemed like no time at all passed by a few stops and finally at the HK station. Deciding to follow the crowd (I’m being generous here, there were only about 10 people) went up a few escalators and ended up in a mall – oh joy… a very western expensive and pretentious mall… joy. Unfortunately I decided that I only had time to explore the mall a bit so walked around seeing if there was anything interesting or a nice local styled place to eat. Alas if I was shopping for designer clothes or looking to sample exotic ‘western’ food such as McDonalds this would have been a great place to stop by… as it was a bit of a disappointment. With time running out I braved the outdoors in search of anything remotely local, so took a walkway that seemed to lead to a promising location.

Aside from a few nice pictures of HK city, there wasn’t much at the end of the walkway, a few tourist gift shops and a Baskin Robins (they still have those?). The heat was now getting too me and combined with the 12 hour flight I had truly ‘expired’ (see Russel Peters for reference) so went back to the mall which was called the IFC standing for ‘International Finance Centre’. Tried to see if I could find a cheap T-shirt place without luck, then got something to eat at a chique little coffee place called LGB (or was it LGF?) a veggie sandwich and coffee came to about $60 HKD, not exactly cheap or particularly local but decent nonetheless.

With time running out I made my way back to the station and right beside it found the food place I was looking for – a local busy chain kitchen serving rice with BBQ pork, fried cutlets and other fast food goodies, all for less than $30 HKD, *sigh… oh well. I took note of it for any future trips and made my way back to the airport well within time to catch my flight. Even found an overpriced T-shirt to wear for $150 HKD (it was either that or be very uncomfortable for the next 9 hours… or buy the $900 HKD designer shirt), with that my brief yet fun visit to Hong Kong was over, on my flight back definitely plan to spend a few days there seeing the sights and acting liking a foolish American tourist - just kidding ;)