More Pictures From Hong Kong, Part 2

Here's more pictures from Hong Kong, starting with our trip to Victoria Peak.

The closest buildings are on Hong Kong Island, but the rest of this picture is of the Kowloon side of Victoria Harbor.  You can see how the mountains are really looming all around the massive city.

Clouds were settling in around the peak next to us, and there were some below us as well.

Here's a picture of Victoria Tram climbing towards the peak station.  It has just come out of almost a 90 degree turn; you can see the track at the far left of the picture.

I can't tell if this super-zoomed picture of distant islands is cool or not.  I offer my sincere apologies if it is, in fact, lame.

There was an extra fee for coming up to this very top part of the Peak Station building, but it was pretty cheap.  It was also worth it, as you get a clear, unobstructed view of the whole city.  There was a mini-museum set up behind the camera to show what Hong Kong used to be like.  The writing was in English and Chinese.  Very few people seemed to notice; I guess the view is a valid excuse.

We also had a great view of the other mountains in the area.  The weather was great during our time on the peak, although it was still stiflingly hot and humid, of course.

I challenge anyone to show me ANY evidence that there is an escalator with a cooler view than this.

I like framing pictures using trees, caves, and buildings.  There were plenty of other pictures like this one.

Chinese graffiti!

I told you already...I like photos framed by trees.  I could quit them if I wanted to...

When we mentioned the creepy staircase in the middle of the woods that we decided to climb, I'm not sure that we emphasized how far we went on it without seeing any other people or any signs that there was anything at the end of this path.  You can tell from Maura's tired expression that we haven't been spending too much time climbing long staircases on hiking paths lately.

Most of the time on that stone staircase was spent surrounded by dense trees, but the trees thinned out the higher we got, and there was occasionally a glimpse over them of a view like this.

I don't usually have a lot of luck with pictures of trees, but this one came out okay.  These trees were definitely unlike any that I've seen at home.

This is a view in the opposite direction of the city.  The "lake" in the foreground is actually Pok Fu Lam Reservoir, from which Hong Kong get its fresh water.  The tap water in Taiwan and much of mainland China is not safe to drink, so the fact that it is in Hong Kong is a nice perk.

We found this view towards the end of our hike.  Kowloon (including Tsim Tsa Shui, the area in which we stayed) is on the far left, and Hong Kong Island is on the right.

This is that platform that we took a million pictures from when we first got to the peak.

Maura's face basically sum up how she felt about a steep backwards decline down a mountain.

There may not be a lot going on in this picture, but it's the best one at showing the angle of decline.

I took a few pictures of these twin skyscrapers.

We stumbled upon this little park by accident.  When we got to the bottom of Victoria Peak, we knew that we wanted to head to the Star Ferry, but we weren't particularly sure where it was, so we wandered towards the water.

There's a fairly shocking number of these foot-long-or-so fish in most of these ponds.

You know I like framing pictures with trees.  I also like taking pictures of the reflections of buildings in other buildings.  I don't actually remember this coming up much in my life, but it was a short-lived obsession in this city.  Don't worry.  I'll just post this one.

Again, a random park we stumbled on on our way through Hong Kong Island.

It was starting to get dark (a process that seems to take very little time over here) during our walk, so the lights started to come on.  Hong Kong is all about brightly colored lighting on their skyscrapers.

This is probably my favorite picture (that doesn't have Maura in it) that I've taken in a long time.  These small, old-fashioned junk boats sail around Victoria Harbor with the huge urban sprawl as a background.  I loved it.

This is post-torrential-downpour.  We may have been soaked to the bone and unsure if my wallet and all of our money was destroyed, but we still had to walk the mile or so back to our hotel.  At least, as I found out at this moment, my camera still worked.

Don't ask me why, but our hotel had a random art exhibit (modern art?) that depicted a couple of rooms with...things...for some reason. 

I don't know if this monster fish was available for purchase if you had a party of 50, but it was hanging out in the tanks of fresh fish and shellfish in the lobby of the restaurant we ate at on Sunday night.

More to come, unless there is a groundswell of, "get over the Hong Kong trip and move on with your blogging life, Tom!"

More Pictures From Hong Kong

If you haven't already read our original Hong Kong post, you should definitely do that first.  I just took so many pictures (292 that I kept, although that was limited by the fact that it was raining for most of the weekend) that I wanted to share some of the ones that I didn't think fit with the excellent narrative of our trip that Maura wrote.
Here's part 1:

We were on the 17th floor of our hotel, and this was the view down.  Not a nice view, actually, but kind of cool for a non-city-dweller like me.

This is what all of the streets looked like at night, pretty much.  There were signs on top of signs on top of signs as far as the eye could see, and we could read about 1% of them (so, hundreds).

I put the picture of Bruce Lee's awesome statue in the first post, but this is his star in the Avenue of the Stars.  There were a lot of other stars like this for actors we didn't recognize (and a very small number of ones that we did).

This is a view of Stanley Harbor.  The pier you can see behind the tree is the same pier as the one from the original Hong Kong post from a different angle.  The big building in the second is a historic building called the Murray House.

This is the outside of the Tin Hau Temple in Stanley.  It doesn't look as nice as most of the temples we've seen, but it was built in 1767 to worship Tin Hau, the goddess of the sea.

There's lots of statues like this at the temples.  I'm a fan.

Inside Tin Hau Temple in Stanley.  The fruit has been left as offerings, and the sticks in the mini-cauldrons are incense sticks left in prayer.

This is Maura eating lunch on that pier from the earlier picture.

The whole Stanley area was really nice.  Taichung isn't on the ocean, so we haven't spent much time around water this trip.

This tiny temple is built right above the water near Stanley.

There was a sign that indicated that these trees actually help keep the cliffs and walls from collapsing. 

I like this picture.

We stumbled onto a Buddhist monastery that wasn't listed on our map towards the end of our Stanley nature walk.  This statue of a goddess standing on a sea serpent was there, and you can see a few people praying to her in the picture.

This much smaller sculpture was there as well.  Some people had left coins in the serpent's mouth.

This was one of the better picture's taken out of the bus window on our trip back to Hong Kong.

Also out the bus window, this is a picture of a Ocean Park, a big amusement park/oceanarium.  The cable cars are one way of getting to the park, and I can only imagine how great the view is during the ride.

Another shot of the cable cars on their way to Ocean Park.  This picture is kind of ruined by the reflection from the bus window.

We saw a few of these cemetaries.  It's hard to tell, but the graves are very tightly packed in, and they ascend in many layers all the way up a cliff face in the distance.  Literally, they line the shelves of a cliff with as many graves as will fit, and there are lots of shelves.  This cemetary was Catholic, but we only saw it from the bus as we drove past.

More to come, when I get the chance.

Comments & Whatnot

Hello everybody,

First of all, thank you to everyone that has read our blog since we left on our big trip, and thank you especially to those of you that have sent kind words about the content of it.  Some of you have told us that you have been unable to leave comments on the posts, and we just discovered that that was totally our fault.  It's fixed now, and anyone should be able to leave comments, including anonymous ones (although make sure to tell us who you are!).  Also, we learned that we could add a link to the side of the page that allows you to "follow" our blog, which I'm pretty sure means that you should get an email whenever we make a new post.  If you're someone that eagerly anticipates our new posts (Hi Mom!), then you should definitely check that out.  Finally, if you are reading our blog NOT because you know us, but because you are planning for a trip to Taiwan (we have 30 page views from Russia in the last month, as well as several from all over the world), then feel free to leave questions in the comments; we'll do our best to answer them as helpfully as we can.

Thank you again to everyone,
Tom & Maura