We stayed in a rather overpriced hostel on Hong Kong Island on the first night which set the tone for most of our time there. The hostels here are different from other countries – due to lack of space everything is built 'up' and the hostels are spread over different floors and different buildings in the same area – our hostel reception was on one street and the room on another. On our first evening we walked around our local area, full of shopping malls and teenagers beat-boxing/rapping on the streets (that photo is taken at night, believe it or not, it's 24/7 hrs 'daylight' here!)
The next day we decided to move to Chung King Mansions in Kowloon (the mainland across from the island and only a couple of tube stops away from the island) where the accommodation is much cheaper, although very basic and the beds as hard as a rock. Great area though, alive with markets, shops, restaurants and lots and lots of people.
One thing we noticed about Hong Kong is that everything looks great from the ground, but when you look up you notice the real state of the buildings which contain apartments, restaurants, guesthouses or small shops.
On New Year's eve we had a couple of overpriced Hong Kong beers:
and then headed down to the river to see the fireworks. Hong Kong island looked amazing from across the channel, the skyscrapers were illuminated with bright neon lights and there was an air of festivity. 
Al and I bought a couple of beer cans from the local 7/11 (we seemed to be the only people drinking which was a bit weird) and squeezed through the crowds, dodging policemen who were attempting to send people away, to get a good view. The fireworks were a little disappointing... we were expecting something to blow our minds, instead we got a few shoots of light from the tops of the buildings, the biggest building (with a few more lights) being hidden from our view.
Should have stayed in Sydney maybe, we saw their display later on TV and it looked amazing. But hey, it was great to be in such a vibrant, colourful city for the start of 2009. The next day Al decided that he wanted to buy a professional camera, and where best to buy one that in Hong Kong?! We spent much of our time over the next couple of days like this:
and traipsing round various camera dealers – until we realised that there is no such thing as a good bargain in Hong Kong. Al went into one shop on Nathan Road, was offered a ridiculously low price for a camera, accepted and asked to see the camera in the box before he handed over his credit card (to check that a). it was there and b). it was the right camera). The shop assistant started to get angry and shouted at Al calling him a fraud! Needless to say Al had a lucky escape from this con-artist. Another place he went into offered him the camera at a good price but it turned out that they didn't have it in stock and then they wanted to try to sell him something else at a higher price. Ridiculous, we wasted an hour of our time in that shop waiting for them to get the camera that they didn't have. All the recommended shops we went into offered us the camera at a higher price than Dixons online, so after all the searching and bargaining Al decided to leave it until he gets back home. The lesson learned – people who say Hong Kong is good for buying cheap electrical goods (especially cameras) either haven't been to HK or got ripped off and still don't realise it.
On one of our walks round the city we saw hundreds of people camped out in a cardboard city, eating noodles and chatting with their neighbours. It didn't look like they were homeless people as many of them had Louis Vuitton bags, it seems they were just waiting for the train
We also saw an anti-communist protest - controversial!
On New Year's day we caught the ferry across to HK Island
and headed up the mountain on Hong Kong island by tram to get some great views of the city: 
And that night we went to a non-English speaking restaurant for some (Japanese) Shabu Shabu – you are given a pot of boiling stock and a plate of raw meats, fish, tofu and vegetables. you place the raw food into the boiling water and it cooks in front of you – genius! The staff were more than happy to help us choose the most expensive type on the menu of course ;-)
On our last night we went to the night market, strolled round looking at the various stalls and restaurants and had some nice noodles.
The next day we decided that we needed to move on from Hong Kong, to somewhere a bit more economical. We jumped onto the tube and headed up to Shenzen which is the frontier between HK and China. We just about passed through immigration – I was stopped at passport control as they didn't believe that my passport photo was a convincing enough look-alike... I haven't had any problems at any other countries so was surprised about this. They asked to see some different ID and as my driving license was in the bottom of my backpack I took out my PADI diving card and showed them the photo on that. He looked at it, looked at me... and waved me through! Entering China using my PADI card – not bad!
So we entered China at Shenzen, checked out the big communist square
walked round looking into dentist surgery windows (oddly enough)
and found the train station. We queued up at a machine and (with a bit of help from the lady behind us) bought a train ticket to Guanzhou... please bear in mind that everything here was written in Chinese symbols and we managed to find our way around with the smattering of English that was on the ticket machines and the numerical system (Chinese numbers are thankfully the same as Western numbers so deciphering your train departure time, carriage number and seat number is actually possible even if you can't translate any of the writing on your ticket!).The express train was pretty comfortable and we gazed out of the window at the beautiful communist countryside...
haha! Luckily not all China was like this, we saw some pretty spectacular countryside, but that's in the next chapter...
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