how play

This will be the last entry for our China trip. We’re sitting in the Hong Kong International Airport, which is nice, but not as nice as the one in Singapore. Our flight leaves in an hour and we both wish we had more to say about Hong Kong, but I think our brains had already shifted into homecoming mode before we stepped off the train here, so we really didn’t give it the attention it probably deserves…

…as such, this post will be mostly some final reflections on the trip.

We slept in this morning, in our glorious shoe box room… which I found quite pleasant. I’ve decided when we build a house we don’t need a whole bedroom, just a sleeping nook.

We got some breakfast and then looked around at the shops, which is what Hong Kong seems to be all about. Neither of us are super shoppers so it was interesting, but we tired pretty quickly of the endless Indians trying to sell us Rolexes or tailored suits, and we headed off to the airport just after midday via the shuttle bus, which is about 1/5th the cost of the metro train we had originally planned to take.

Like I said, we didn’t give Hong Kong much time or attention, and that’s our fault, but I didn’t see much in our brief time here that intrigued me. It’s cleaner and more multicultural than China and it’s less sleek and modern than Japan, but it doesn’t have the quirky character of either. I wish I had more to say about it… on the plus side, it seems like a great place to buy suits, fake Rolexes or electronics goods… but only if you’ve done all of your research, know exactly what you want, and what you should be paying for it.

The trip to China was fantastic, and we both really want to thank you all for sharing it with us. It was harder at times than we expected, but we’re proud of how much we were able to go through without any real assistance. If anyone asked us what we’d recommend in China, we’d tell them to see pretty much everything we saw. Everyone sees the Teracotta Warriors and the Great Wall and almost everyone goes to Yangshuo. If you ever come here, get off the beaten track. See Tiger Leaping Gorge and the Rice Terraces… make the out-of-the-way trek to Juizhaigou and head up to Avatar Mountain… you won’t regret it.

Almost every western traveller we met in China was here studying, and they all spoke some (or a lot) of Chinese. In our second day at Zhangjiajie, when we shared the only minibus we could find with some local tourists, the Chinese girl asked us, in her broken English, which was a lot better than our broken Chinese:

“You come to China to Play?”

– We figured she meant “business or pleasure”, so we said “yes, to play”

“You… say…Chinese?”

– Do we speak Chinese? “no… none at all”.

“No Chinese? How Play?”

That’s when we looked at each other and said, “How play indeed”.