Sunday, 15 June 2018

Adam: Our final full day of this Asia trip is back in Hong Kong. We’re staying in Discovery Bay on Lantau Island – a small, isolated expat community a ferry ride out from the center of town.

Tomorrow (Monday) we leave HKG in the morning and arrive into Sea-Tac a couple of hours before we left. Then, another flight will get us back to ATL before midnight tomorrow.

That’s it for me and my posts. Thanks for reading this summer.

Brenda’s working hard to get her blogs written and updated while everything is still fresh. The memories fade quickly.. we were reviewing photos from the beginning of the trip and it already seemed like a lifetime ago.

Everyone had a wonderful time, but we’re all ready to get home and burrow in for awhile. This summer, like many of our previous trips, was “too much of a good thing” and now we need to get home and recover!  The kids start back to school just 15 days after we get home.

Final trip map:

Josie, Brenda, and I walking to breakfast in the rain. Hong Kong has continued with its rainy season the entire time we were away. The kids appreciated the cooler temperatures, though.

Sunday breakfast at a cafe. Everything is in walking distance in Discovery Bay. In fact, private vehicles are banned from the village.

The community has capped the number of licensed golf carts available to 500. As a result, the cost of these golf carts now exceeds US$255,000.  For those on a smaller budget, you can rent one for about $9,000/month. See, this is what I hate about HK (a place I really like..).. it’s impossible to actually live here.

As I said, everything is in walking distance and we walked.

Public bus routes are plentiful and cheap. We left Discovery Bay and went to a fishing village, Tai O, on the far western part of Lantau.

Tai O is known as the “Venice of Hong Kong” – and has become a tourist spot.  Many of the buildings are on stilts to allow for the tides.  Most traffic through the town is managed via boat.  The day we arrived, after so much rain, many of the streets were flooded.

We walked around as much as possible, but often our routes were blocked by standing water, forcing us to double back and find other routes.

The village is full of shabby looking seafood restaurants and small shops selling all sorts of un-identifiable (to us) items and creatures drawn up from the depths.

Mahjong game in session.

Flooded street emptying into one of the canals.

Discovery Bay has a beach, ritzy waterfront shopping district with many al fresco dining restaurants, and a direct ferry link back to HK Island.
Rich (is there any other?) foreigners live here and commute by ferry to downtown.

View of our condo building. Most are ugly on the outside and not all that great on the inside, either.  Even so, 600sq.ft. apartments typically rent here for about US$3k/month. Buying that same condo starts at US$3.3MM and goes up from there.

Monday, 16 June 2018

We flew from Hong Kong to Seattle, where we had a 7 hour layover before our connecting flight to Atlanta.  Fortunately for us, our good friends Rita and Randy live in Tacoma.  They agreed to pick us up, take us to see their new house, and have a lunch together before we had to return to the airport for our last flight.

We five were exhausted after a 12-hour flight and a severe time-zone change but were thrilled we got an opportunity to see Rita and Randy.  When we walked into their house, Rita had a huge bowl full of grapes and another bowl full of blueberries and strawberries set out for us. She knew we’d been fruit-deprived and that Josie, in particular, had been craving grapes.  Josie fell on the grapes like a thirsty man finding water in the desert.  Rita also had put out towels so we could take showers and refresh ourselves.  It was heavenly and so thoughtful.

We loved their new house and got to see all of the home improvement projects they’ve been working on. Their daughter Angela and her two children were able to come over, as well, for a really nice lunch and we got to meet her son for the first time.  (Her kids are so cute!!!)

When Rita and Randy dropped us back off at the airport, we realized that not ONE of us had thought to take even a single picture.  We were all so excited about seeing each other and visiting that we just didn’t think to get out the cameras.  So — Rita, Randy, Angela THANK YOU for giving up your day to spend a few hours with us.  We love you guys.

We arrived home without too much trouble.  Those 24-hour travel days are really hard, but when we get to feeling sorry for ourselves, we make sure to remember just how special it is that travel like this is even possible.  In Japan, we visited the ship Hikawa Maru — it took 13 days of notoriously rough seas to get from Japan to Seattle as recently as 1960 and cost a fortune.  Today we made an even longer journey than that, with a combined air time of a mere 16 hours. (12 hour flight from HK to Seattle, 4 from Seattle to Atlanta.) What a luxury jet lag is in comparison to two solid weeks of sea sickness!

Until next time!!

Brenda