Hong Kong, day three

As of Tuesday, August 5, I'd built up an impressive store of alcohol in Room 2504 of the ibis North Point Hotel. I nabbed a small bottle of White Horse blended Scotch the first night, and there was a bottle of Gambler's Gold (the Hong Kong Brewing Company's golden ale) and some Magners cider in our mini-fridge also.

I was sitting pretty.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. 

We awoke quite late and had a languorous breakfast at the hotel buffet: Danishes, toast, noodles, baked beans, runny scrambled eggs, hard-boiled eggs, sausage, pancakes, bacon, potatoes, fruit, yogurt, congee (rice porridge), cereal, tea, coffee, orange juice...everything but blood pudding. Miss H and I had were pigging out on it every morning. It cost about HK$66 ($8 US), so we had to get our money's worth. 

We were foiled in most our plans today. We wanted to ride the cable car or trolley or whatever up to Victoria Peak, but last night Jeff had warned me that it would be crowded as hell up there, and the lines would be ridiculous. We thought next of taking the open-top bus tour, but upon arriving at the terminus at Central Piers we discovered that it cost HK$400—fifty U.S. dollars a pop. No way, Jose. We briefly considered the Star Ferry harbor tour, but that was eighty-three U.S. dollars. Rather dejected, we went back to the hotel to regroup. I polished off the cider and the Scotch and felt mighty fine.  

We dined at 6:00 p.m. at a marvelous little Sapporo ramen restaurant a couple of doors down from the hotel. For just a couple hundred HK dollars we had dumplings, beef tongue, tonkatsu curry with rice (Miss H), and a big heaping bowl of Hokkaido ramen with pork (me). Great guns—I'd heard Hokkaido ramen and its light brown miso-laden broth was the shiz, but but the reality blew me away. Best ramen these lips have been privileged to taste. Can't wait to get back to Sapporo and have the real deal.  

Not my photo.

To keep the Japanese theme going, Miss H and I boarded the streetcar and rode to Burrows Street to visit the Hokkaido Dairy Farm "Milk Restaurant." Not sure what their gimmick was—I guess all their dairy products came from Hokkaido, and all their food was cooked with it. I'd read that Hokkaido ice cream was a delicacy in Hong Kong, and unlike most "delicacies" which interest me, this was something Miss H could sample too. We had a vanilla sundae with chocolate and adzuki bean sauce—superb. 

For kicks, we stepped across the road and into the Wellcome supermarket to get a look at what Hong Kongers mow down on. There was a staggering array of western foods, including Cadbury's chocolate—nearly impossible to find in other Asian countries and nonexistent in Korea, much to all my English friends' chagrin. I bought one of the Cadbury's bars, a Double Decker bar ('cause I'd never tried one), and a bottle of Laoshan, Tsingtao's upscale brand.

Then we rode the tramway home, dumped everything in our room (and I drank my Gambler's Gold), and went back out and around the corner to a gaming arcade we'd spotted on the second floor of a high-rise. We played at racing games and basketball tosses and a couple of rail shooters, burning through HK$35 in an hour. Then we came home, showered, and collapsed into bed. A fantastic thunderstorm hit just as we turned out the lights, and we laid there, tangled up with each other, watching the flashes and counting the seconds, until we drifted off to sleep.