Hong kong Day 3

Well, I am back to the hotel earlier than expected. It was a real adventure today! I set out this morning from Causeway Bay and took the subway to Central where I made my way to the Mid-Level escalators. This is a series of escalators that get you up a very steep hill, in my case, to Hollywood Street. I browsed the antiques along that street until I reached Man Mo Temple. This temple is known for its spiral incense sticks that people buy and hang from the ceiling for goodluck. I do not do well in incense and the thikness of the smoke in this building was not something I could do for long. I did find one dated from last September and it still had a lot of coil to burn. Wow! From here I went to Cat Street where there are more antiques and some jewlery stalls. Afer purchasing some trinkets I grabbed lunch at a Subway and then headed to the bus terminal. I managed to get on the correct bus to Aberdeen, where you will see photos from my experience on a junk boat, but from Aberdeen, I got on the wrong but to Stanley and ended up in Kowloon. Not a big deal as this is an area I am familiar with now and was able to hop off and head back to the hotel. When I arrived at the hotel they were stripping the wood floors in one of the rooms near me and the fumes were terrible. It really made me feel ill but the staff brought me an air purifier that I think I have working properly. Chris keeps telling me I have to just go with it here, but I could not go with the fumes and I was definitely too tired to go away from the hotel. All's well that ends well, I say. Enjoy todays photos!


This is my super cute Junk boat driver. He has a local to pick up when he took me out so we went riding through the parked boats in the area. I say parked because they were not docked. After he picked up a lady from her Junk, he hit two other boats and got caught on someones anchor rope. I was a bit worried about going into the water at that point. I can swim fine but it was very dirty with the trash the water residents throw in.


I am pretty sure the rules of boating are universal but no one in this harbor seemed to know. This is not the most compelling photo in the world but the fact that all obejects in it were moveing at fairly high speed made it a very compelling moment for me. I was totally compelled to send up a little prayer asking to make it back to land safely. When the old lady we picked up jumped off the boat, I tried to go with her until my little old man pointed out we were on the other side of the harbor!



Though his boat skills are a bit questionable, he did a great job snapping a photo of me as he managed the boat controls with his feet! My smile is so big because it was as much from fear as fun! This may also be the only proof I have that I did not just download all the other photos that you see here! :)

Final photo for the day: anytime I am in a moving vehicle here, I stay in a constant state of amazement that there are not more crashes. They literally have one to two inches between vehicles a lot of the time. This is from the upper level of the bus I thought was going to Stanley. The bus rides,all by themselves, were a lot of fun and were a great way to see a lot of Hong Kong Island in a short amount of time.