It was a joy to wake to civilisation this morning. Despite the relief, however, Polly was not impressed when I dragged her out of bed to go exploring Hong Kong one last time instead of sleeping in. However I won her over by promising waffles and so we leaped onto the tube and headed for the central city and Hong Kong’s newest mall, the IFC Mall. This is a very spacious three level mall that suffers from being too new to have all the shop space filled out as yet. However it did have a lovely juice bar and a handy supermarket. It is also connected to the tube station so you need not leave the air-conditioned environs to go shopping.
We, however, did venture outside into the heat to investigate the world’s longest escalator (800m). Finding that as exciting as you’d expect we headed over to Kowloon to have a look at the Space Museum. This did turn out to be less than expected and hence we were soon back on Hong Kong Island investigating the mall attached to the Admiralty station. This turned out to be badly laid out and somewhat confusing and so we surrendered and headed back to the hotel for a swim.
Our best laid plains were once again defeated when we discovered the pool temperature was a sticky 28 degrees. Thus after a short swim we retired and began the joy of trying to pack our suitcases for the final time. Our flight to London Heathrow was just after midnight and hence we were picked up at 2020 by the airport shuttle and were able to enjoy racing around Hong Kong picking up other passengers before being dropped at the airport some three hours before our flight.
As I mentioned the new Hong Kong airport is somewhat nicer than the previous incarnation. There are 2 levels of shops including a very nice restaurant at which we dined. However the shops started closing at about 2300 and we eventually boarded just after midnight. We then spent the next 90 minutes overheating in the cabin as we waited for the aircraft to be refuelled (apparently they had a gauge failure). We took off an hour late on what turned out to be a comedy of errors – while the flight attendants were excellent the plane was crowded, full of kids and crammed as full of people as possible. Polly’s “Low Protein’ meal turned up only to find it had a lamb chop in it, luckily they had a spare vegetarian meal. The movie selection was terrible (‘The Day After Tomorrow’ is possibly the worst movie ever made) and they couldn’t turn the cabin lights off. To really polish off the night there were constant queues for loos. It goes without saying that little sleep was to be had, except by an exceptional chap next to us who appeared to sleep for the entire 12 hour flight.
Despite our late departure we nevertheless found ourselves at Heathrow on time and got to enjoy skipping the passport control queue via the British passport queue. The downside was that we still had 3 hours to kill before our next flight and two shops to kill it in. Five minutes later with the purchase of a kilogram of chocolates we found ourselves with 2 hours and 55 minutes to kill and no shops to entertain ourselves within. Luckily the good people at BT had wireless hotspots available. Unfortunately they wanted six quid for 60 minutes. We stuck with our books.
Luckily time is not one to slack in the execution of our duty and hence the time eventually passed. One flight to go, and although half of the flight time seemed to be spent finding a runway at Heathrow we arrive roughly on time in that most cultural of centres (according to Lonely Planet), Glasgow. And so we spent our afternoon indulging in the cultural sophistication – we feed peanuts to squirrels.
