Day 50 - 5th Apr 2009

Today we're heading to Nepal. Our flight isn't till 6.55pm though so we have another day round Hong Kong first.

After packing our stuff for what feels like the billionth time we catch the underground train to the airport express. At the train station they have a cool system were you can check in for your flight anytime during the day, so we got rid of our bags and headed off.

We decided to try and go up the peak on the tram, so we bought a sandwich from subway to take with us as a picnic. When we got to the tram though there was a really long queue and anyone who knows me will know I'm not one for standing in a queue so we changed our plan and went to the park instead. At this point we were really hot so decided to get ice creams, Adam went to purchase them and came back with a vanilla cornetto type thing and a lolly which he wanted to be orange flavour. It looked pretty red though so we thought perhaps strawberry or cherry, it turned out on closer inspection of the packaging to be red bean flavour! Kind of like a kidney bean flavour ice lolly! Surprisingly we soon threw this away. The park was actually really good, there's a walk through aviary which in many ways was better than the one we paid to go round in Kuala Lumpar. The walkway is elevated so you can watch the birds as they sit on branches and fly about. It was a nice change from the usual busier Hong Kong and also gave us chance to practice photographing wildlife before our time at Chitwan in Nepal. Also in the park there's a tea museum which is also free so we thought we may as well look round, we learnt how to make a cup of tea and how tea is produced. I also managed to spend some of my birthday present money in the gift shop!

Surprisingly it was now time to get the train to the airport so that's the end of our Hong Kong experience.

The flight to Nepal was longer than I thought and weirdly their time is 2 hours and 15 minutes difference to Hong Kong, I've no idea why it's 15 minutes but that's what we were told! On arrival we had to apply for a visa which is really just a case of filling in a form and paying some money. As we tried to collect our bags a man come over with a trolley to help us, he looked like he worked at the airport although I suspect not as he then said we needed to tip him. It's weird how up front he was about it though he was just like you have to tip me! He picked the wrong people though as we didn't have any Nepalese money! We then meet a man holding a card with our name on so we went with him to a car and then he said we had to tip him so this time we gave him a $1 note, him seemed fairly happy and left. Our driver got in and said that he was also going to take another person to a different hotel first, this seemed kind of weird as he was meant to be from our hotel so I'm not sure why he was taking someone to a different one. Anyway it all worked out fine and we eventually made it to our hotel, after driving down some very dubious looking roads and at one point I was sure we were driving across a building site! I'll never complain about English roads again. When we got to the hotel we greeted by the owners who were really friendly, almost suspiciously so, they gave us a beer each and we sat and had a chat with them. Went to bed exhausted and were woken at about 3 am by loads of dogs barking!