Keeping it in Kowloon…

Our third day in Hong Kong started after a wee bit of a lie-in following our late night in Lan Kwai Fong and Wan Chai. We had a relatively quiet day planned which would involve seeing more of this side of Hong Kong (Kowloon side) rather that hopping back over to HK Island.

We spent the afternoon in Mong Kok – a district about two metro stops from where we are staying which is known for being quite a lively area. We wandered the streets there noticing just how densely populated that whole area is compared to most of the places we have walked around so far. The pavements and roads were littered with people and it was hard to walk more than 3 steps before we had to stop again! The whole place had a real buzz about it and each street seemed to have a different ‘theme’ – i.e. ‘trainer alley’ where every shop was a sports shoe shop. There are also a couple of nearby markets, such as Ladies Markets which had loads of shoes and clothes and handbags for sale! I didn’t buy anything though, despite a few high heels catching my eye! (probably not the most practical of purchases for a trip like the one we’re on).

One extremely practical purchase we did make in Mong Kok however was a camping stove! We’ve been looking for one since we left Europe so that we can use it to cook our noodles and other food that will tide us over when we visit SE Asia and this is the only place we’ve spotted one! We got a mini cooking kit with it and are looking forward to being able to brew pasta or soup whenever we want! We’ve found that we often spend a bit too much money on going out to eat, so are hoping that we’ll now be able to save a bit of cash!

One thing we were also advised to try in the Mong Kok area was some of the street food. There are stalls down pretty much every street, either stand-alone stalls or ones belonging to local restaurants selling all sorts of dim sum, noodles and other snacks. We opted for some pork dumplings, skewed duck and something that looked like beansprouts wrapped in bacon on a stick! The dumplings were great, duck okay but not cooked enough and the beansprouts thing…interesting!! We were worried that we might wake up dead the next day however due to the amount of red bits and blood still left on the duck, but thankfully we didn’t!

Despite the market atmosphere of Mong Kok we did notice that the main streets could almost be a carbon copy of every single main street in Hong Kong. Every road almost looks the same and you are guaranteed to spot a Louis Vuitton, Prada and Gucci shop on every corner, along with a couple of shopping malls and chain restaurants wherever you are in HK!

Later that night, we went down to the Avenue of Stars to watch the Hong Kong Island ‘light show’ – this is apparently the biggest permanent light show in the world and happens at 8pm every night. Basically, a selection of the most eye catching skyscrapers across the harbour flash their neon lights in time to music. We were looking forward to seeing the light show as we thought it was be quite impressive, but to be honest we were a bit disappointed! The music that was pumped out over the water was really cheesy and the buildings that were flashing away were not actually that noticable! The best part of the show was the green lazer lights that occasionally beamed out of the tops of the biggest buildings, but they didn’t do nearly enough of these lights!

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Slightly bemused at our light show experience we headed over to Kimberley Road in Tsim Sha Tsui. Behind the main road lies a really cool, but slightly hidden bar street called Knutsford Terrace. This was another one of Joel’s recommendations and we would have never found it otherwise! We went to a bar called All Night Long – a sister venue of Dusk Till Dawn in Wan Chai – which has more live bands! We stayed for two of them – the first one was singing the HK ‘live band songs of choice’, i.e. Bon Jovi, U2, Kings of Leon etc (we’ve noticed that they all sing almost exactly the same sets as eachother in every bar!). The second band played more poppy RnB songs like Beyonce and the singer was really good.

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We preferred this bar street to Lan Kwai Fong as it just had a better ‘feel’ about it – it was very upmarket and had some great looking restaurants there too. With this came the price tag however so we couldn’t stay there as long as we’d have wanted!

We headed back to the hostel to get a good nights sleep as we wanted to get up early the next day so that we could head over to the railway station and find out more about how we can get to Vietnam overland!…