Day 26 - Farewell Vietnam, Hello Hong Kong

I awoke this morning at about 4am, not ideal, I knew I would be waking at around 5:30am in order to get ready to head to the airport, I ended up just watching some shows until wake up time and then had a shower before heading downstairs for breakfast. After breakfast it was a drive to the Airport of about an hour, and then about an hour getting our ticket and passing through immigration. After borading the plane ai sat down and waited until whoever my seat neighbour was going to be arrived, I was the isle seat so I knew I was going to get up again. Turns out it was a lady with her newborn, oh man, last thing I was wanting was to sit next to a screaming child. As it turns out, the baby hardly screamed at all apart from take-off and landing, unfortunately I had to put up with the baby's nappy being changed right next to me after the plane had landed and you couldn't get up, why they just didn't wait 5 minutes until we were off I don't know.

We arrived at our pickup location where the driver Mike had organised to pick us up from wanted us to be, I suspect it was to avoid a fee at the airport as we had to walk through certain areas and down an elevator to get there, but it wasn't too hard to find. On the drive to the hotel I couldn't really see much due to some blinds covering the windows in the vehicle, but one of the things I could see is just the height and share volume of the buildings. After about and hours drive we made it to our hotel drop off spot, when we exited the car and the first thing I could smell was fish, it turns out the street we are on is basically full of fish stalls, I was a bit worried at first thinking we were in a dodgy part of town, but thankfully that doesn't seem to be the csse. It took us a minute or two to find out place, turns out it was a few meters down the street down a side street. We are both on the 11th floor although the hotel does have 24 floors in it. 

After a short rest we decided to hit up Hollywood Road and just browsed the streets. There wasn't much to see at first until we got a lot further down the road. The further down the road we got the more artwork we found painted on the walls . We popped into a restaurant called Ho Lee Fook to see if we could get a booking, unfortunately the earliest bookings for the next 3 nights was 9pm, so we just carried on to browse the streets. One thing I'm suprised about is how many forengiers there are here, we would be walking down the streets and you could just hear an American, or British, Australian, you would generally pass at leadt one or two within a block. I guess as English is one of the official languages here it's not surprising there are so many foreigneds.  We looked around to find something to eat, if worse came to worse, we could ha e always just popped into 1 of the 10-15 7Eleven shops that we passed, they were everywhere in the area we were walking, I said, what's the bet we passed one right outside out hotel as a joke, little did I realise we did. Finally found somewhere to eat at a Cafe that we were passing, our meals came out pretty quick and we waited for the cutlery to come out, turns out, it's tucked away in the tables in a drawn built under them. Very cool idea, never seen it before, although I'm sure it's probably rather common over here.

We made our way towards the waterfront to take a look around there, on our way there we spotted one of their trams, a cool looking double decker tram, apparently they are something worth going for a ride on, so who knows, we may head out on one in a couple of days. We got to the bay and the view over the bay was pretty nice at night, but what I noticed more was the amount of runners that were out running along the waterfront, I would say in the 30 minutes we were there would have been over 100 people if not more run past, it makes sense with hear being a bit cooler at 28 degrees at this time of night, a much cooler temp than the 32 degrees during the day.  I've got to say, I really had some FOMO going on.  We ended up making our way back to the hotel passing a Japanese store, Mike and James wanted to try and track down some japanese wasabi  chips, they couldn't find the exact ones they wanted, but found some others that they figured they would try.