Singapore to Hong Kong

Sunday August 21st.
I see I have been doing things upside down, and a quick re-arrangement is necessary!
We were sorry to leave our lovely Singapore river view - and even more sorry to leave it at 5.30 in the morning!

Our flight was at 8, so were at the airport by 6.

Hong Kong has changed so much in the last 35 years it is hard to recognise much - starting with the new airport and a very fast Airport Express into town. Everything was very efficient and organised, so we now have the octopus cards (like London's oyster) to pay for public transport, supposing I can find a bus map. Our hotel, which is in mid levels, had a shuttle bus from the town terminal. However, in this hotel, we can only have one network connection per room so at the moment it on the iPad so I can post on the blog. Paul's laptop is very slow, and combined with the slow speed of the network connection, would probably mean a lot of time trying to get on the web at all. Using the iPad means no pictures, as I don't yet have a camera connection for the iPad, so we need to make another attempt to buy one. Sightseeing will also be shopping this evening!

Later, I bought a camera connection for the iPad, but I'm still in difficulty posting the pictures - the network connection is just too slow.

Paul didn't mind the shopping expedition as it means we get out of the heat and go into air-conditioned malls. It gave us a change to recover from the hair-raising ride up, and then down, from mid-levels. We had forgotten just how steep and twisty the roads are - when we lived in mid-levels ourselves, 35 years ago, we had no car anyway, and we only stayed 3 months before moving out to the New Territories.

After shopping, we had time for a bit of exploring round the streets and some use of the metro system, before finding the escalator back up to mid levels. Yes, escalator. From central Hong Kong, you can ascend on a series of linked travelators and escalators up to mid levels, half way up the Peak. The whole journey takes 20 minutes - there are a lot of escalators! Our hotel is not quite at the top, so we get off after about 17 minutes, and stagger several hundred yards up a very steep street back to the hotel, where we are on the 22nd floor!

Saturday 20th August
We decided to visit Sentosa, a resort island to the South of Singapore. We took the metro to the Harbour, and from there you have a choice of ways to get to the island. There is a moving boardwalk, (which we couldn't find) a monorail, or a cable car. As I had travelled by cable car 12 years ago, and Paul didn't want to, we went by monorail and had some wonderful views of the harbour on the way. It was dull early on though, so the photos aren't great.

Sentosa continues to be developed, and a spa resort and casino have recently been opened, not to mention Universal Studios.

We made for the much quieter beautiful beaches at the south of the island - you can walk or take the beach tram, the tram being the better option on such a hot day.

There is a tiny island off one of the beaches which is billed as the most southern point of continental Asia. It is reached by a plank and rope suspension bridge, which is worryingly wobbly.

The water is shallow and clear, and there are plenty of palm trees for shade. Shade was very necessary, as it was a bakingly hot day. We had views of the amazing amount of shipping lying off Singapore - I had no idea there would be so many ships.

The beach also had a wildlife attraction, and we saw some wonderful birds, mostly very colourful loris and some parrots and cockatoos. They are all birds which have been rescued from inappropriate cages or occasionally from predators; some can be released back into the wild and those that can't be are kept in large aviaries. We watched them being fed - they all eat fruit.

Later, we met a little monkey which sat on my shoulder. It was a delightful little macaque with a very gentle manner and little soft hands. Paul tried to take photos, but none was very successful.

As we were very hot and tired, we went back to the hotel for a snooze before dinner. We tried the food stalls in the local shopping mall, but found the food wasn't as good as the one we found on the edge of Chinatown. Singaporeans are very fond of their food, and many food stalls producing just a few dishes are situated in a 'food court'. This one had quite a selection of chinese, korean and japanese food. Afterwards, I had a very interesting dessert - something called a strawberry milk ice. Very cold shaved ice is mixed with condensed milk, which causes the condensed milk to freeze in granules. There are strawberries and strawberry sauce on top.