Last August, Peter and I took the plunge and bought tickets to fly to Hong Kong. This has been a trip we’ve talked about making together for years. Maybe since we first started dating seriously. We talked about going before we had kids but ended up spending a month travelling through Europe instead. We talked about going after we had kids but decided to wait until they were a bit older. And then the day came when we felt that they were ready. Old enough to deal with the unknown and to be flexible. Old enough to remember but young enough to be excited about so much family time.
Some will know but others may not have guessed that I was born in Hong Kong and moved to Canada when I was still pretty young. (No, I’m not a Hong Kong citizen. No, I don’t speak Cantonese.) I’ve been back twice, most recently in 2006 and obviously Hong Kong has changed a lot over the years. (I’m older than 28 so I was born pre-turnover.)
Peter and the girls had never been to Asia. In fact, Pearl and Rose had never left North America and Rose had never been on a plane before. We flew to Cranbrook when Pearl was a year old, which is about an hour and a half flight. We felt that a 14-hour direct flight from Vancouver to Hong Kong would be a perfect introduction.
Because we live where we do, we made a last minute decision to book a hotel in Vancouver for the night before our flight. We flew out at 12:30pm on a Monday and so decided to eliminate the stress of ferry concerns by going the night before and found a decently cheap hotel downtown.
We decided to have a very North American last dinner and got takeout from 5 Guys. (Joke’s on us though because turns out there is 5 Guys in Hong Kong too now.) The next morning it was an easy Skytrain to YVR.
Fun fact about me is that I always, always get chosen for extra security screening. This has happened on every flight I’ve been on since 2002. Well, this flight broke the pattern! Except that I might have just passed it on because Pearl got pulled aside to have her hands swabbed.
I don’t have flight anxiety but I do have airport anxiety and so I don’t really relax until I’m on the plane and then we had 14 hours to watch movies and try to sleep. We left on Monday and arrived in Hong Kong on Tuesday around 5pm. Our route from the airport to our hotel was fairly simple. Hong Kong has a fantastic public transit system with the main part of it being the MTR, a linked series of rapid transit trains that go all over the city. The easiest way to use the MTR is with an Octopus card, which you load money on and can also use to pay in numerous stores across the city. As foreigners, the primary way to add value to an Octopus card is with cash, which we knew before leaving Canada, and so we came prepared. We did find that we were able to buy our Octopus cards at the airport using VISA, with a pre-loaded amount on them and that got us from the airport to Kowloon. (Kids need Octopus cards too though their fares are cheaper.)
We stayed in 3 hotels total during our time in Hong Kong and we decided to go from least touristy to most touristy. Our first hotel was in an area of the city called Kowloon, specifically a neighbourhood called Mong Kok. We stayed at the Dorsett Mong Kok and I would recommend them over and over again. While we looked at cheaper options, we eventually chose them because of the location, breakfast included, and the ability to book a family room which included one queen bed and two twins. (Our kids don’t love sharing.) The hotel was clean, well-equipped, and the service was fantastic. And the buffet breakfast! Amazing. So much food and such great variety – both Western and Asian.
Our big goal for our first full day was to visit the apartment I used to live in. (We lived in one other when I was a baby but this was the one I remember.) We lived in an area called Shatin which, back in the 80s, was kind of way out of the main city but today is easily accessible via MTR. We were pretty hot and tired that day but it was amazing to revisit and share with my family.
There is still a park across the street from the apartment though it’s been updated more than once since I lived there. It was pretty cool to watch my kids play at the same spot.
Mong Kok is known for its markets and we spent much of our time there simply wandering the streets and peering around us. It’s different in almost every way than our little West Coast Canadian town and we loved poking in shops and taking it all in.
That evening we headed to Temple Street Market, looking for some cheap and delicious street food, which we found with ease.
For our second full day, Peter had been up early and scouted out a harbour front park so we headed over there and the kids enjoyed playing on another playground. We were really impressed with the parks, which were many and varied. They all included a playground as well as an exercise area for seniors. Many had public washrooms, wi-fi, and even water-filling stations. (You shouldn’t drink the tap water.) The parks were clean and well-maintained and they were all always being used.
We did a circuit through Mong Kok, discovering a quieter, more old-fashioned park not far from our hotel. This one had architecture in an older style and a pond full of koi and turtles.
After all this walking we stopped for ice cream – specifically a type of ice cream I saw at a 7-11 and had a sudden memory of eating as a child – and ate it in a third park, this one directly across the street from our hotel.
While we were eating our ice cream, we had a brief conversation with a young woman sitting nearby. We also realized that the building next to where we were seated was a large, indoor market. The first floor was a wet market full of meat and live animals – fish, crab, lobster, frogs, chickens, and probably more. The second floor was dry goods and more fresh vegetables. The third floor was a large, open restaurant. We strolled through each floor and when we got up to the restaurant, we found that the woman we had chatted with in the park was at work there. We decided to have lunch there and the food was plentiful and fresh. It felt very much like a spot where locals were coming on their lunch break.
For that evening, our goal was to view the Harbour light show. This is a nightly event (though it will actually come to an end by the end of this year) where the large skyscrapers on the harbour front light up in time to music. The best place to view it is from the Avenue of Stars, which was much busier and more touristy than our area of Mong Kok. We also found that there weren’t many options for food right there so ended up backtracking and picking up sandwiches from 7-11 and then taking them back to the waterfront. There are a lot of options for high-end shopping though, if you’re looking for Hermes, Louis Vuitton, or Cartier items.
The light show itself was fun to watch though perhaps a little less exciting than expected. (I saw it in 2006 and had remembered it being cooler.) Nevertheless, a fun thing to witness.
Next up: our time on Hong Kong Island!
And, for fun, a few pictures taken by Pearl and Rose:
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