Day 52 - 7th Apr 2009

Yet another early start as we left our hotel at 6:20 to get the bus to Chitwan. Taxi driver who took us to our bus didn't have any change so we had to mess around while he tried to find someone to give him some. Found the bus no problem, a little bit older than the one we took in Cambodia and the luggage went on the roof of this one. But the seats were comfortable enough and it went ok. The journey out of Kathmandu was slow. At times we just stood stationary for 5 minutes, I think because of the road being so windy that at places 2 buses couldn't pass. After 6 hours we arrived at Tandi the pickup point for the Chitwan jungle lodge which was to be our accomodation for the next three nights. We were met by a friendly guide and took a Landrover to the lodge. It was about another half hour along the road and then half hour off roading to get there. Lunch was waiting for us when we arrived which we were very ready for.

The lodge is quite unique in that is one of only 6 lodges which are actually inside Chitwan National Park which is a protected natue area. The accommodation was simple but nice with limited electricity (one small light in our bathroom until 10pm).

After lunch we got a briefing from the lodge manager and then it was onto our first activity: a jungle drive. This involved going out looking for wildlife in the jungle in the back of an open topped Landrover. It was only me and Liz on it along with 4 guides! We drove for about 45 to 60 minutes along bumpy tracks through the jungle and got to the point where we needed to turn back. By this time we hadn't really seen any wildlife apart from a few birds flying about.

Luckily on the way back we saw quite a bit more. First some monkeys with a baby, then 2 different types of deer, then the most exciting a baby rhino! Then a bit further up the road we saw 2 full size rhinos. At this point the guides said we could get out of the jeep and walk closer to them. This was a bit scary as they had previously just been telling us how dangerous they were. It was great to get closer though as you could really appreciate how big they were. They gave us a health and safety talk briefing about what to do if the rhino charged: run back to the landrover quickly!

After that it was back to the lodge for popcorn and a movie! Though when I say movie it was actually a tourism video for Nepal and in Nepali! Then it was dinner time where we met another English couple who were sat on the same table as us and who we got on with very well. The food was all pretty good and quite a lot of it, lunch was 3 courses and dinner was just 2 but you could help yourself to the main so no danger of being hungry!

Day 51 - 6th Apr 2009

Started the day early with a breakfast at our hotel and then headed out to explore the immediate vicinity of our hotel. The streets were really busy with people, motorbikes and cars and similiar to Georgetown everyone was sharing the same narrow strip of road. We were in search of an ATM machine to get some money out but with the streets looking so different to home it wasn't so easy. We spent about an hour wandering round and decided to head back to the hotel and take a breather.

We had seen a couple of ATM possibilities on our travels and so I headed back out to try one of them while Liz took a bit more of a sleep. Luckily the second ATM I tried worked and we had some money.

Next we needed to phone up the people who we had booked our next three days accomadation with and get our tickets and pay the balance. This involved walking to their office which was about 15 minutes away. We found it without any problem and got our tickets.

Then we stopped in a cafe for lunch, where interestingly all the waiters were deaf... Luckily we didn't want anything more complicated than what was on the menu, so some pointing sufficed.

After lunch we headed down to Durbar Square, yet another UNESCO World Heritage site. It's quite interesting in that it contains lots of different temples from different periods of history and in keeping with the rest of Kathmandu wasn't actually very square. More of a crazy 20 or so sided maze of an open space dotted randomly with the temples. By the time we had looked round them all we needed a break again from all the bustle so headed back to the hotel.

We asked the freindly manager's of the hotel if they could reccomend anywhere for dinner and they directed us to a Nepalise restaurant owned by the hotelier's uncle and told us to show the hotels card and ask for the 'special'. What we got was a taster of lots of differnt Nepalise food, we'd eat one thing and they'd be on the way with something else! Some of the courses were nicer than others and a couple were a little odd, but overall it was a great experience.

On returning to the hotel we found that there was no electricity on. It seems that there is some sort of power issue, which we never quite got to the bottom of, that means there is a schedule of when your electric will be off each day. Not something you could ever imagine back home. So the hotel was lit by candlelight until partial lights came back on at 8 which was enough for us to pack by ready for our early start the next day.

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!

Technical Issues

Regular followers of the blog will have noted that the website has been down a bit recently. I can only apologise and say if it doesn't work just try again another time. The reason for it is that I use a free service to host the site and like most things in life you get what you pay for...

Day 49 - 4th Apr 2009

Decided to skip the hotel breakfast today and instead headed to MacDonalds for something a bit more appetising. Unfortunately both of us had upset stomachs this morning which we think is down to the anti-malaria tablets which we are taking for Nepal and India. Liz had felt a bit funny the two previous days.

We looked for some shops which were mentioned in our guide book, but they didn't seem to be where it said. Luckily for me the toilets were as I still wasn't feeling very good.

Then it was back to the post office with our things to post home. But when we got there it was closed! We heard some people in front of us talking and apparently it was a public holiday! This wasn't great news as we didn't really have space for the stuff we were going to post home. Luckily we dicovered that there was a downstairs section of the post office which was still open, although the que was huge. We eventually got our box packaged up and Liz filled in all the paperwork to send it on it's journey home.

I still wasn't feeling very well so Liz thought we should go and have some lunch to get some energy into me. We found a Chinese fast food place and I sat at a table while Liz negotiated the again slightly confusing ordering process. I was very grateful for the help!

After lunch, with my energy supplies somewhat replenished, we headed to the Hong Kong Museum of History. This has an interesting display which traces the story of Hong Kong from prehistoric times to modern day. It is very well done contains some impressive full scale replicas of differnt types of buildings and at one stage a whole reproduction street complete with a tram! We really enjoyed looking round and learnt a lot about Hong Kong.

For dinner we went to pizza hut near our hotel. Not so adventurous I know, but with our funny tummies it was just the ticket!

Day 48 - 3rd Apr 2009

Started the day with a bit of a strange breakfast in, with keeping with our room, a very small restaurant.

We then caught the underground to Hong Kong Island where we had planned to go up the peak and see the views, but the weather seemed rather misty so we thought we'd leave it till another day.

So first stop was the Post Office to investigate postage costs for parcel number two back to the UK. Luckily they are a little bit cheaper than Austarlia.

We took a ride on a tram, which are quite interesting in that that are double deckered and very narrow. Got off near the Happy Valley race course and had some lunch.

Then we headed to the Bank of China tower where you can go up to the 43rd floor for free and get a nice view over the island. Then we took the Star Ferry in the opposite direction to the day before to look at some shops and we brought some headphones and a splitter cable so now we can both listen to my iPod at the same time.

We browsed a few more shops before heading to a Chinese restaurant which was in our guide book. So we asked for a table for 2 at the door and were given a piece of paper with 2 written on it and told to go upstairs where we were seated by someone else who didn't really seem very interested in our piece of paper. We got the menus which had english tranlations (good start) and a piece of paper and pencil which was to put our order on. So you put the number of the meal you wanted and how many of each one. So we went through the menu worked out what we wanted, filled in the piece of paper and... now what? Nobody seemed to be paying us any attention and we were the only westerners in the place. So we waited and waited... Eventually the lady who was sat at the table next to us helped us out and said that we needed to be a bit more forecful in getting the waiters attention and give the order to him. So we did and everything we ordered turned up. We had some really dim sum, a beef satay noodle dish and some sweet and sour prawns. All very nice. Luckily we had watched other people paying and realised that you had to get up and pay on your way out. So no more waiting.

We then started to walk back to our hotel and on the way looked at the temple street night market. You can buy all sorts of things here from knock off hangbags to Mahjong sets. Liz bought me a new wallet and I bought her a cuddly toy and a Mahjong set.

Then Liz headed back to the hotel while I went to a cake shop to get Liz a birthday cake. I also stopped in to the supermarket and managed to find some cake candles. So we had a slightly belated birthday cake in our hotel room which was very tasty! (Comment from Liz - it was perhaps the best chocolate cake I've ever had, and we shared a nice strawberry french style cake. Hong Kong has good cakes.)

Day 47 - 2nd Apr 2009

It's my birthday! Although it feels kinda strange to be spending it in Cambodia and then Hong Kong. Adam has been carrying cards for me from home so we start the day by opening them and some presents. To be honest it makes me miss everyone, but only 2 weeks left now so it'll soon go.

The hotel in Phonm Penh is really nice and they do a good breakfast, nothing fancy but the eggs are cooked well. Plus the have free computers to use so that's great for emailing. We then got our taxi to the airport, it's a bit weird driving around the city with motorbikes, cyclists and taxis whizzing all around whilst we're feeling really safe in the car. Adam had some issues getting through security, on the bag scan they thought they'd seen a knife so searched his bag only to find there was no knife, however they did find his sellotape which they confiscated for being dangerous!

Arrived in Hong Kong at about 3pm, decided to use the airport express train to get into town and then use the MTR to get to our hotel. Only problem with this was that it meant changing lines twice and the last train was pretty busy, anyway we managed. We started walking to the hotel and turned down the road which it's on only to find a busy fruit and veg market going on, plus we're not sure which along the road we need to go. Luckily we picked the right direction and manage to negotiate the crowds of people.

When we get to our room we discover it is the smallest room there could possibly be! It is basically the width of a double bed, with a tiny space down one side, not really big enough to walk down. There's a wardrobe, well a tiny cupboard on the wall which you can hang shirts in, but 90 degrees to the way they would normally hang! Anyway I guess you get what you pay for...

Whilst deciding what to do with the rest of the day I received a birthday phonecall from Duncan. It was great to hear from England, I'm looking forward to getting home.

We then headed out, first we took the MTR to the last stop in Kowloon. As soon as we got out of the subway station people were hassling us about getting suits made and shirts etc, we soon decided to turn off the crazy busy road. We walked around a bit a then watched the light show. We looked over to Hong Kong Island from Kowloon and they played music whilst some the buildings did a light show. It was kinda entertaining although I think seeing it once is enough. We then took the star ferry over to Hong Kong Island. It's crazy how cheap it is, about 23p one way!

For dinner we eventually found a weird pizza bar. The beer was pretty nice although fairly pricey and pizza was good. The street it was on seemed quite 'interesting' some nice ladies trying to get business in some bars! We finally made it back to our hotel, fairly late and pretty tired! Unfortunately by time we got back to our tube stop the nice cake shop was shut so no birthday cake for me today...