Hong Kong Island: walking among skyscrapers

After wondering through the streets of Kowloon the day before, our second day was planned entirely on Hong Kong Island, starting with Victoria Peak, from where the entire city is visible on a clear day.

Most travelers advise to visit the peak as early as possible, to avoid smog and crowds.

We started at 10am by taking the subway to Central.

Outside, the weather was even sunnier than the day before and we were really looking forward to the awesome panoramic view of the city. 

Once at the Central, we went directly to the low tram station hoping that the place is not crowded yet. It was easy to find with all the people going the same way. 

The cue in front of the ticket office wasn't bad, but inside there was already quite busy.

All together it took us about 30 minutes to board the tram. All info I read about going to the peak insisted to sit on the right hand side for better view. May be that was the case before, but now almost the whole way up is closed with side boards or bushes, so there is no view among the skyscrapers anymore. 

Once out of the tram, we still need to go to the very top of this building.

And being true to Hong Kong philosophy they made yet another shopping mall out of it. We lost the floor count after the 5th escalator up.. :-)

After spending good 15 minutes riding escalators, we were finally able to see THE VIEW!

And even squeeze in to make a pic with both of ours :-)

Although it was already getting a bit smoggy, we still could see all the way to the harbor and beyond.

... and a close-up pic. 

Some people choose to walk downhill from the peak, but with only two days in HK, we thought that we should use our time wisely and took a tram back.
Once outside, we understood that what we saw going in wasn't a crowd at all. By the time we returned, the waiting line was so long, that half of it was already waiting across the street!

Next to the tram station there was an entrance to HK park and we decided to walk though to get to the promenade.

Inside we stumbled on a large bird sanctuary... 

and I couldn't resist testing my new lens! Sorry for so many bird pics, but they were so fun to photograph :-)

After leaving the park, we got a bit lost and a map we had wasn't very helpful. It had all the unusual scrapers on it but not the streets.

At first we couldn't figure out how to get around these two, because on the street there were no sidewalks available, just the car roads.

It turned out that people don't use sidewalks, because all the scrapers (well at least in the business district) are connected by escalators and bridges.

The whole business district is extremely clean, modern and shiny. You would think that there isn't much to do here and at some point it will get boring, but somehow it just doesn't.

Once we figured out the connections between the scrapers, finding the way to the promenade became easy.

Here there were protests and demonstrations just a few weeks back, but now the government apparently "cleaned" them up and all what is left are a couple of tens of enthusiasts still camping in front of the government building. 

A couple of hundreds meters further people were busy enjoying picnics and celebrating the coming holidays. Even in this, HK is a perfect example of how the opposites can perfectly co-exist next to each other. 

From the promenade, Kowloon is well visible on the other side.

This photo with residential scrapers of HK Island in the background is actually about 40 minutes, 3 kilometers and 1 quick lunch in the park later :-)  

That's about how long it takes to get from the promenade to the independence square. We didn't really like it, but judging by the number of people on it, the place is almost a sacred and a huge "must see".   

When researching the places to see in HK I came across something that was called a Time Square. Naturally, I imagined that it will be like the real one only in HK, so we went looking for it. 

It turned out to be quite far away. So far in fact, that the shiny business district finished, giving place to not-so-shiny residential scrapers.

It felt almost like Kowloon's Mong Kok, but then with scrapers and wider streets.

We loved the double-deck trams, they really bring up the authenticity of the place.

Finally, after half hour of searching and asking around, we found the Time Square... and were majorly disappointed, because it turned out to be another shopping mall. 

The positive side of finding the damn square was that it also had a subway station in it and we could take the metro back to Central from here. 
For the way back to Kowloon, we decided to take a Star ferry instead, to see HK from the water. It took a while to get to the central pier from the station but it was worth it because we passed this:

The ferry goes every 10 minutes so we didn't have to wait at all...

... and for just 30 euro-cents we got to see both island's awesome views.  

The ferry ride was just 7 minutes, which is a bit disappointing because it was very nice to see HK from the water.

Once on Kowloon, the streets were busy as ever...

Crowds of people and one happy clown!

By the way, we noticed earlier lot's of people on the street walking with suitcases. At first, we thought that these are tourists coming in or going out of the city, but we were so wrong. It turned out that quite a few of them just shop (!!!) with a suitcase, instead of a shopping bag. Shopping 1-2 suitcases at a time!! There is definitely no economic crisis in HK!

In the evening we had dinner plans with a couple of friends living in HK. It was an absolutely great evening, thank you guys!

To finalize this part of the trip and to walk off the food we went back to Mong Kok to take the pics of the Portland Road at night. 

The next day we had plans to take the ferry to Macau.

Next: Macau