I’ve been in Hong Kong now for several days. I arrived on the 15th after two great nights in Taipei and went straight to the HPG office from the airport to say hi to Sue and Pete. They showed me around the office - I can’t believe how fast they’ve expanded and how busy everyone is over there! They are working on a hotel and casino project being built in Macau, the scale of which is mind-blowing. I’ll be visiting it sometime in the next few days.

Soon after I showed up they offered to let me stay in one of the empty company apartments - several employees are out of town at the moment. Now I’m staying by myself in a beautiful apartment in central! I can’t believe it! Too long here and I’ll be completely spoiled…

I’ve been having a great time exploring Hong Kong Island and Kowloon. Today I took the ferry to Lantau Island and saw the giant buddha. Interestingly enough, I read one of the plaques inside the visitors center and learned that the statue was inspired in part by the Daibutsu in Kamakura, which I had just visited while in Japan. The statue is relatively new, having just been built in 1989. I hung out around the island for the whole day, but still missed a huge art installation that I want to go back and see.

I’ve finally gone back and filled in a few journal entries and uploaded some photos from the past month! The travelogue map is now up to date as well.

I just returned from a failed geocaching mission that took me out to Sai Kung in the new territories of the Hong Kong S.A.R. It ended up being a good adventure regardless, as part of the mission was a little walking tour through the town.

I took the MTR out to Choi Hung and then a minibus to the prescribed GPS coordinates in Sai Kung. From there, I followed the first 3 steps of the mission, obtaining the coordinates for each one from clues based on landmarks along the way. When I got the final point, however, I couldn’t locate the cache! It did put me right next to a really cool fish market along the waterfront, though. I watched a bunch of fishermen who had docked their dinghies alongside the pier sell their fresh fish to the crowd on shore. Someone would shout down an order and the fish were killed, scaled, clean and filleted on the spot. Then it was bagged up and handed up in a net pole to the customer.

I hung out around town all afternoon and then rode home to central…

It was bound to happen sooner or later. For the past few days I was feeling something in my throat - just a little tingling. Yesterday morning I woke up with a fever and continued to get worse and ended up not sleeping last night. Today, though, I’m feeling much better and can actually think straight. I’m guessing it was triggered by a combination of a few things:

• Cigarette smoke (2nd hand) and alcohol (1st hand)
• The disgusting air-quality here in HK
• The lack of fruit and vegetables in most food here
• Swallowing a couple gulps of ocean water while trying to surf on Sunday

One more day at rest and I should be right as rain! I can only waste so much more time with TV and MySpace anyway…

Thanks to Joe for this great link: Weird Meat.

After spending several days indoors resting up and recuperating, I went back to Big Wave Bay with Pete and Simon to surf on Sunday. Instead of nice small friendly waves, though, the sea was angry. There was no way I was going in, and Pete and Simon decided against it as well. The three of us ended up sitting out for a few hours to just watch.
Afterwards Pete and I met up with Sue and Steve at a bar and formed a plan to meet in Shanghai in April…