Hong Kong

We had a layover in Hong Kong on our way to Nepal, so JJ arranged for it to be extended and we got to have about 48 hours seeing the city/territory. We had no idea what a treat we were in for and we barely skimmed the surface of activities! First of all, Hong Kong is probably one of the top 5 easiest cities to go visit. It jumps to that ranking because it has excellent and easy to understand public transportation, plus a bus that takes you right to the city center from the airport for cheap and it has wireless internet on it! As we left the airport, we immediately passed some of the tallest high rise apartment buildings I think I have ever seen. Not only were they massive, there were about 25 of them in a row, all lining the coast on the South China Sea. Can you imagine how many thousands of people lived in those buildings?! As we went over numerous bridges, I realized that half of Hong Kong is comprised of islands, while the other half is actually connected to mainland China. When we got to the Canadian Hostel, right by the Kowloon Peninsula on Nathan Street, we were introduced to the typical South-east Asian dorm-style room. It was so tiny, you could hop from the bed into the bathroom and back, but it was cheap and had a great location!

It was pretty early in the morning, so we dropped our stuff off and set out for some exploring. We walked to the water on the edge of the Kowloon Peninsula and found ourselves on the Avenue of the Stars. Movie Stars from Hong Kong that is! This seemed to be exactly like the Hollywood Walk of Fame, by Sunset Blvd, but it was a walkway right on the water. We walked by many of the cement sets of handprints, but could not help taking silly tourist pictures of Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan’s handprints. We also had other tourists taking pictures of us! Apparently, many Asian people like to take pictures of anyone and everyone doing anything! Since we fell into that category, many random people snapped pictures of us, and so of course, we took some random people pictures too! After the Star Walk, we found a very helpful Hong Kong Information Office, and decided to take the Star Ferry across the causeway bay to the “central” area of Hong Kong Island. The nice lady in the tourist office gave us a few maps with walking tours and information included, so we embarked on our self-guided tour. First stop, dry seafood market! Ewww! Dried sea cucumbers really do look like turds in every size and color! Not only that, but we saw everything else imaginable from the ocean that was dried and treated to go in your food, hair, bathtub or whatever! We also saw a handful of places that just had hundreds of bags of shark fins lying on the floor. Sadly, we assumed that these were for shark fin soup, when we tried to take a picture of these fins, the people running the shops all freaked out! Does that mean they feel a little guilty? I hope so!

We continued along the walking tour into the herbal Chinese medicine market district, a very interesting herb garden with marked indicators of the herbs and their uses, and a beautiful Buddhist Temple. There was more sandalwood incense burning than I thought there should be without the fire department shutting the place down, but despite the all the fumes, the sights inside the temple were really beautiful. After leaving the temple, we wound up in a really swanky area that seemed like Soho in New York City. There were tons of cute boutique shops and restaurants and lots of foreigners! Although, I think the Hong Kongers dress more fashionably! Everyone is wearing different shades of black, grey, blue, and brown designer clothing and bags. It seemed like there was a common uniform to look stylish, have expensive designer taste, and wear dark clothes! We walked past art galleries, antique shops, and then past city hall to Dim Sum! We got a recommendation to eat at Maxims, one of the best places, which also happened to also be expensive and fancy, with fancy people, but hey, the food was great! Thank goodness we had our friend’s John and Jonathan show us how to go through many sessions of Dim Sum in Downtown LA before we got to Hong Kong! We knew exactly what to do and waved over the ladies pushing the carts of delicious goodies, while we ate and they stamped our card with some sort of Chinese (Cantonese) characters that said what we ate.

When we got to the lobby of City Hall, we were amazed to see a string quartet set up and playing classical music for a lunch concert. As we made our way back to the other side of Hong Kong on the Ferry, I took time to absorb all of the incredible sky scrapers and architectural masterpieces I had seen throughout the day. I have not seen any tall buildings that can match the grandeur of the ones in Hong Kong. They are truly a sight to behold! The weather was not very clear all day or we would have taken a trip up to the top of Victoria Peak to get a good 360 degree view of the city, but instead we took the metro subway to Prince Charles area for a walk around the flower market and bird garden.

I have never seen so many amazing orchids at one time! At the flower market, there were shops crammed full with gorgeous, exotic orchids. Too bad we could not take some with us! The bird market was set in a pretty garden, but all the birds in cages bothered me, so we wandered another direction into a veggie market with mountains of bok choy and other tasty greens. In South America, green veggies are not a staple in the diet by any means, so I was very excited about this!
We continued walking towards the Mong Kok area where we found the streets lively and full of people shopping, eating, and taking in the scene! From there, we walked all the way back to the Peninsula Area and staked out a good place on the Avenue of the Stars to watch the nightly Hong Kong laser light show across the causeway bay. Soon after, the music started and because it was synchronized with the lasers, the show was pretty cool! Colorful lasers bounced across buildings and the water to the music for about 15 minutes. Afterward, we exchanged picture taking with a set of software engineering students who could work a Canon camera like a video game controller and ended up taking an excellent picture of us! We took a survey for one of their classes and then walked to the night market. We had an incredible dinner right in the middle of the market. JJ had beef and Chinese broccoli and I had bean curd and mushrooms. Afterward, we went shopping at the night market, looking at imitations of everything imaginable, including: watches of all brands, movies, software, ipods, clothes, purses, you name it, they got it! Finally, we walked back, had an incredible sweet waffle on the way from a packed stand, and then made it into bed!

The next morning, we walked back to the Avenue of the Stars, where the rainy clouds from the day before had cleared and we got nice views of the skyline and Victoria peak in the background of the city. We took the metro subway to the “ladies market” where there was an entire street cut off from traffic and packed full of the same imitation goods. I guess there were a few more purses though, since it was the ladies market after all. For lunch, we went into a Japanese ramen restaurant where we enjoyed observing other people eating their food as much as the food itself! I guess the traditional way of eating Ramen is with a pair of chopsticks to pick up the goodies and a ladel for slurping up the broth. So you can imagine the sound effects were awesome. After we bought a few watches and ipod accessories at the ladies market, we took the metro back to our hotel and then transferred to the airport bus to make our way to Kathmandu, Nepal!

Our Pit Stop in Los Angeles

We only had about 8 days in LA between our trip in South America and our trip to Asia, but it was jammed packed full of awesome stuff. The first Saturday, we drove up one hour north of LA, to Ventura, where we went on a nice, long bike ride with Papa Joe (JJ’s Dad). It was a great ride through the hills of Ventura County and around Lake Casitas. We at lunch in Ojai (East of Ventura), at a fantastic health food market/restaurant/store, called the Farmer and the Cook. It was excellent and we really enjoyed our meal until we realized we had to ride our bikes all the way back to Ventura! But, it was a nice ride and a great way to spend time together, so we enjoyed every minute. That night back in LA, we went with our friend Josh to see the movie Gnomeo and Juliet. If you did not already know, I am a gnome fanatic and I loved every second of the movie and all 10 versions of “Crocodile Rock” that Elton John used as the music in the film. I think there may have been only one other song used, but who is counting?!

We spent the next week getting ready for the next part of our trip (to Nepal and Thailand) and hanging out with family and friends in LA. A few wonderful people, families, and JJ’s sweet Grandma Selma, all held birthday dinner/celebrations for us because we were turning 26 and the week before we left, JJ got a call from the Dean of the UCLA/Drew program that he was accepted to medical school at his first choice! YES! There are no words to describe how happy we both are to know that we will be living in LA while he attends medical school at UCLA! We are so glad that we got to spend some meaningful time with our family and friends in LA, it really recharged our batteries and reminded us how lucky we are to have them all! If we missed you, we will be living in LA the next 5 years or more, so let’s get together when we get back officially in June!

Flamingos and Penguins on Our Way Home

When we returned to El Calafate, we asked the receptionist at the campground to tell us where to get the best empanada in town. When we found the place, we knew it would be good because there were four people in a tiny open kitchen all busy making empanadas by hand. We got 7 empanadas to share and ended up leaving after getting a total of 12. Yes, they were that good! Actually, they were the best we had in Argentina. Next, we walked to a nature reserve in town where flamingos can sometimes be spotted. When we got there, all of the flamingoes were too far away to see, so we headed back into town to get a cup of traditional mate at a cool coffee/bar we saw. The waitress was really nice and helped us by arranging the mate in the cup for us and adding a bunch of sugar since the leaves or whatever it is made up of is really strong. She even brought us a cupcake! By the way, we heard that people in Argentina drink a lot of mate tea, but we had no idea that just about every person drinks mate all day, every day. So, I guess I was expecting it would be easier to drink since everyone is drinking it all the time, but no! It was so bitter that we probably added about 1 cup of sugar into the little cup just to drink it! The metal straw thing is also pretty weird, but JJ said he could get used to it. Later in the afternoon, we walked back over to the estuary area and found a whole bunch of flamingoes with our binoculars, but they were so far away, you could hardly make them out. We watched the clouds and sky change colors while we polished off a bottle of wine.

The next day, we took the early bus back to Punta Arenas, Chile, where met lots of interesting travelers camping there. Actually, about half of them had biked to Punta Arenas from other parts of Chile, South America, Central America, and Canada! We met a young guy from Colorado who was biking north from Punta Arenas along the West Coast of Chile. He found a riding partner and bought a tandem bike from people who had just biked down with their 10 year old daughter from Alaska over the past 18 months. To be very clear, he found the guy to ride with him, bought the bike, and made this decision all in one day! We spent the rest of the day walking around Punta Arenas and took a really nice walk along an ocean pathway that wraps along the coast. We took a detour to check out the municipal cemetery before we went wine shopping at the biggest grocery store.

The next morning, we took a bumpy 45 minute boat ride to La Isla de Penguinos Magellicos (Magenellic Penguins). We got to spend an entire hour walking around the colony that hosts 150,000 penguins! The penguins were awesome and we had a great time watching them sit on their eggs, swim in the ocean, or waddle around. We saw a sea lion pop its head out a few times pretty close to shore, but we couldn’t tell if it got a meal or not. After making our way back to the mainland, we had our last seafood dinner where I sampled the local king crab and JJ had Chilean sea bass. Then, we packed up the tent and made our way to the airport for a flight at midnight.
With our low fare tickets, we had to take a lot of connecting flights on the way home to Los Angeles. The plan was Punta Arenas, Chile to Santiago, Chile, to Lima, Peru to Panama City, Panama to Los Angeles in about 24 hours! Well, our first flight was cancelled and when we finally made it to Santiago, our next flight was delayed 5 hours. We missed our connection to Panama City. When we got to Lima, the whole scene was chaos, but finally JJ got the airline put us into a hotel and got us booked on the first flight out in the morning. I was nervous about the hotel situation because we had to be back at the airport in 9 hours and it was 30 minutes from the airport. But, when the taxi pulled up at a 5 star resort, I was sure that someone screwed up and we hit the jackpot! Delphines Hotel and Casino in the Miraflores area of Lima was the nicest hotel JJ and I have ever stayed at. We walked in wearing our hiking boots and total camper outfits, which seemed appropriate since we spent every night the last 3 weeks before that sleeping in our tent. After checking in, we were whisked away to the gourmet buffet. We were at the hotel on live dancing night and were seated on the stage with several couples of traditional Peruvian Dancers dancing right in front of us while we had some of the best food all trip. There was everything you could think of, including full ceviche bar! After stuffing ourselves, dancing on the stage with the dancers, and laughing hysterically (due to being overtired and the entire ridiculous situation) we made our way to our fancy room! They even had bathrobes!!! We only got about 5 hours of sleep, but the entire lay over experience was crazy! When we finally made it back to LA, 44 hours after leaving Punta Arenas, we were relieved and exhausted. It was amazing to see JJ’s Dad waiting for us in the airport and he whisked us away to our favorite sushi restaurant, Hide, to welcome us back.