China

Helen: Apologies for the lack of posts for a while. This has been due, unusually, to lots of late nights and drinking. It's mid-day now, and our party of 4 has just about surfaced and made themselves respectable, so you see what I mean...
We're in HK at the moment, staying (in the tiniest flat - it makes London living look palatial) with Mike, an old friend from school, and he is doing a fabulous job of showing us around. It makes such a difference having a guide - we've been to so many places we just wouldn't have known existed (bars and restaurants (and a gym)) that are on the upper floors of tower blocks - they have no signs at ground level to let you know what's upstairs, you just have to know! And often to get to a bar, you have to enter through a shop in a mall. But, usually the view is worth it - we had drinks last night from the balcony on the 8th floor with the HK skyline lit up behind us.
HK has been a true delight - I was expecting just the skyscrapers, and was only coming here to visit Mike. We both figured that it would be another Singapore or KL and we'd want to leave after 2 days. But we've just booked our train tickets to Beijing and we're staying over a week because we're having so much fun. It turns out HK isn't just HK island - there are lots of outlying islands, the whole of the New Territories and it's easy to escape to the hills. Yes, hills. Well, mountains really. Yesterday we climbed Lantau Peak, which is a Munroe at 934m. It was steps all the way up. Hard work at the best of times, but especially bad the day after a session at the gym (Mike goes regularly and C really wanted to go, so I went along for a laugh. Now everything hurts. My stomach. My quads. My neck for goodness sake.) The hill was awesome. At the bottom there is a 'giant buddha', a disney type village with a starbucks and hordes and hordes of tourists. But we only saw 5 other people on the trail. Was blissful. It was like Arthur's Seat in as much as you could look one way and see the airport, but if you looked the other way it was as if you were well and truly out in the countryside. Wonderful :) And today we're going to Macau, which is supposed to be totally different again - long Portuguese colonial history, forts, cafes, pastries. Will report back.
Hx

PS. Hmm, don't seem to have mentioned China at all yet - we only spent 3 days there before coming to HK - was ok - rained a lot! Had a few language problems, but the people were super friendly and we were always helped out by English students who wanted to practice with us (in fact, we've just got an email from one we met in Nanning who wants to be our penfriend). The landscape was pretty similar to N Vietnam - we went to see some stunning terraced rice fields. Oddly, the other tourists on the trip weren't western backpackers, but domestic Chinese tourists from Beijing. They travel en masse and all buy the same souvenirs and take the same photos. Very bizzare. And, at the top of the hill...there was ice cream and beer! We always joke when we're hill walking in Scotland that there will be beer and ice cream at the top (an insipring thought when it's cold and wet and you're wondering what you're doing on the hillside). Of course there never is. But in China, oh yes. And postcards, souvenir shops. The works!