Markus’ Blog

Looks like our friendly southern neighbour has yet another hurdle improvement in mind when it comes to travelling.

Starting January 2009, all citizens of visa waiver countries (yep, that includes me) will have to register with the US government online three days prior (!) to travel. The site is already online, but I think it’s voluntary to use it, right now.

The whole procedure is supposed to give authorities enough time to detect and deny entry to “terrorists”. Somehow, I am having a hard time imagining that there’ll be many evil terrorists amongst the citizens of Andorra, Austria, Belgium, Brunei, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Monaco, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, San Marino, Singapore, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.

I dare barely say it, but there could be a minor positive side-effect. Instead of having to fill out I-94W forms on the spot — they are only valid for three months and especially painful to fill out at a land border crossing — these online forms are valid for two years.

Now, it depends, of course, how they’ll handle it, whether this will be an actual improvement or not. If they do it right, it’ll save me pulling over and going inside at land border crossings, which I have to do now if I don’t already have a valid I-94W in my passport.

In the end, I guess, this is another development that has to be filed under the “oh well” category. If I have to travel for business, I have to travel for business, regardless of how much I like or dislike the rules. As for pleasure travel, that’s of course my personal choice. It sure seems to be getting less and less attractive to go, though. The we can seize your laptop/gadget for no good reason rule certainly isn’t helping, either.

Yum! And yes, that’s tours as in “more than one”.

It’s great times when upcoming vacations are getting close enough to book cool stuff to do. We are already practiced winery visitors (see the Napa adventure, the Victoria adventure, as well as the Niagara adventure). It’s still fun doing it, though (one might think we are big lushes :-D), especially in Canada and even more so in BC, where we can bring home as much wine as we please (not a measly two bottles per person you get to bring with you from the US).

This time around, my parents will come along, too. It’ll be their first time in the Okanagan, which prompted this whole trip-idea to begin with. Since my parents and I come from a wine growing region back in Austria (the region is officially know as the Weinviertel — and we have tons of Heurigen there), they should get some good times out of these tours.

We’ll be doing the Signature Wine Tour by Discover Okanagan Tours and the Nothern Bench Winery Tour by Wildflower Trails & Wine Tours.

Happy September 4 and 5 to us!

…and with lots of time to spare. That’s nice. We’ll go for lunch in an hour, hang out in the lounge for a bit and then take the shuttle bus to Kowloon train station. Then, onto the Airport Express and to the airport.

The only thing neither one of us is looking forward to is spending 13 hours on a plane. Yuck! But at least we got decent seats this time, or so we think. Window and isle (no middle seat).

The morning of the last day was spent checking out the Tsing Ma Bridge. A visitor centre and a viewing platform were created to allow visitors easy access to the bridge and to learn about its construction. Unfortunately, one doesn’t get to see as much of the bridge as I was hoping. In fact, the visitor centre allows one to take pictures of the Ting Kau Bridge, not the Tsing Ma span (both bridges are part of the same road, though).

Afterwards, it was off to Aberdeen to take a look at the floating restaurants.

The bus ride back to Kowloon offered some pretty nice views:

Now, it’s time for us to start saying good bye to Hong Kong. We’ll be leaving tomorrow, May 17, at 16:35 local time. We’ll arrive in Vancouver at around 14:00 the same day, i. e. two and a half hours before leaving — the joys of crossing the date-line.

Thursday we spent in Macau. In order to get there, we took the TurboJet ferry from Hong Kong Island. The trip there was a bit bumpy at times and lasted about 70 minutes.

Once there, we first explored Fisherman’s Wharf. Parts of it were cheesy (the amusement park section), parts were nice (the restaurants and stores).

Thereafter, we embarked on a 1-hour long walk to Senado Square — except that we didn’t know it would be 1 hour long and there would be litterally nowhere to stop along the way to have a cool drink and a bit of a rest.

Fortunately, the walk turned out to be worthwhile. The square was quite lovely, and we finally found a place to cool ourselves down with some iced coffee (at Starbucks, no less).

We made our way to St. Paul’s Cathedral and up to the Museu de Macau.

The view from the museum square is quite nice:

Afterwards, it was time for some (window) shopping — we didn’t buy anything, though. Finally, we took the bus back to Fisherman’s Wharf, where we had lovely Portugese dinner.

This great day was concluded by a smooth boat trip back to Hong Kong Island. Conclusion: Macau definitely has a Caribbean touch to it.

We made a trip to the island of Lantau today. To get there, we took a ferry from Hong Kong Island to Mui Wo on Lantau, followed by an adventurous bus ride to Ngong Ping: narrow, winding road with a speed limit of 70 km/h (at least in some spots).

On the bus, the scenery was just flying by.

At our destination, we visited the big Buddha, wandered around, enjoyed the scenery, had vegetarian lunch at the monestary, explored the temple, and generally had a good time.

And, finally, we made our way back by gondola and train. The gondola ride was pretty cool. Awesome views of the landscape and the Buddha, the airport and the sea.

Good stuff. A highly recommended day trip for Hong Kong visitors.

It’s been a few days since my last post, and not surprisingly, we have seen and experienced a few more things since then.

We went shopping, Brigette mainly looking for stuff for herself, and ended up buying two shirts for me. The story of our lives. lol We rode the traditional double-decker tram from Central till almost Shau Kei Wan, making a stop near Happy Valley.

Took a few shots from Causeway Bay over to Kowloon

Rode the tram back and went for Thai food.

We had high tea at the Peninsula Hotel, which was quite lovely, with a few musicians playing. We shopped some more. We admired the night view of Hong Kong Island from Kowloon.

Watched the Symphony of Lights performance (I’ll post a video of it, it was impressive) and finally had dinner at PJ Murphy’s Irish Country Pub on Nathan Road. Interesting experience seeing a pub menu in English/Cantonese with photos of the dishes — presumably, because the translation may not mean all that much without a picture to go with it. It tasted very authentic, though — as much as a Canadian and an Austrian can classify Irish cuisine. lol Bottom line is we liked it and we got home way past our bed time.

Update: Here is the promised Symphony of Lights video:

We started our day by crossing the harbour in a ferry rather than via subway. The wind made the ride fairly “bumpy” (no comparison to crossing Burrard Inlet :-), and the views were impressive.

Then we made our way up to the highest point of Hong Kong today: the Peak. We took the tram up to get there.

The view was of Hong Kong Island and Kowloon, although very misty, quite stunning.

The lunch we had up on the Peak was, unfortunately, only mediocre (even though the price for it wasn’t).

After some more window shopping, we made our way on foot back into town. It was a nice walk, but we got a bit more than we bargained for. Not only was the path down quite steep in places, it was also quite long (90+ minutes to get somewhere near civilization again). Our calf muscles are sure going to thank us tomorrow. lol

Two things come to mind: exciting and humid. Exciting, because there’s lots of interesting stuff to see and humid, because it’s, well, freaking warm and humid. Like sit around, do nothing and sweat like crazy humid. — Not that I expected otherwise, but it’s even a little more extreme than I was anticipating.

Here’s one of the side streets off of Nathan Road:

And here’s Hong Kong Island seen from the Avenue of the Stars:

I am looking forward to exploring more of Hong Kong tomorrow!

We had a pretty eventless flight to Hong Kong. It was long, long, long, but otherwise not bad. We have certainly had way worse. I have to say, though, that I have only once before been as uncomfortable sitting on an airplane. We made the mistake of getting the first row of 3 seats in the middle (with 4 seats in front of us). That meant that our seats were narrower, as the tray table had to go in the arm rests and I couldn’t stretch out my legs due very well, due to the offset between the two rows.

Service on board was good, though, as was the transfer from the airport to the hotel (train + free shuttle bus). Finally we fell into bed at around 23:45 local time — and slept till about noon today (Monday, May 5). Now we are starving and will venture out to have some yummy food for lunch.