HONG KONG 5 DAYS ITINERARY

Day 1. Arrival – test

Guests will arrive at Hong Kong International Airport in the afternoon or evening to be greeted and presented with a Welcome Pack, including maps and guide books, by our staff. The party will then transfer to the hotel in a limousine / MPV-7 seaters or deluxe coaches. A separate truck and baggage master will be provided for group luggage handling.

In the evening, party will be taken from the hotel to the funicular Peak Tram in Central District and ascend to Victoria Peak. There will be a Welcome Dinner at Café Deco at The Peak. This a large, very popular, open-kitchen, combination Eastern-Western restaurant with ceiling to floor windows showing much of the famous Peak view which will establish a thorough sense of being in Hong Kong in the first hours.

Guests will return to the hotel down the hill and through the town in an open-top bus.

Day 2. Hong Kong Island

Breakfast will be taken at the hotel

On Hong Kong Island glass wall buildings and high-tech commerce fuse with terraced shops, sacks of rice and abacuses. You will be introduced to some of the oldest Chinese commercial neighbourhoods where pre war shop houses specialize in dried Chinese food, spices and medicines. We will take you window shopping – or more – along the high quality oriental antique shops of Hollywood Road.

Just below it is the old oriental flea-market, Cat Street, (cat catch rat / customer catch bargain), with its compelling collection of historical memorabilia, and bric-a–brac. Across the street is the Man Mo Temple to the gods of mandarins and warriors where people pray for justice and protection.

You will rise to the ‘Mid-Levels’ on the world’s longest escalator up through the mix of restaurants, stores, galleries and pharmacies and catch, between the tinted high rises, the past busily working in the present.

Lunch will be ‘dim sum’ in a city Chinese restaurant. Small, savoury delicacies shared from plates or wicker steaming baskets are ordered one by one from a list or off trollies pushed round the room by waitresses.

In the afternoon, we cross the island to the South Side and a contrast. Aberdeen Fishing Village and its typhoon shelter is a packed home for ocean-going fishermen who live with their families on their boats, many spending their whole lives on the water a traditional way of living hard to find on the edge of a major city.

You can have a brief but vivid experience of the lifestyle of Hong Kong ‘boat people’ by riding in a sampan. As you move on around the south side of the Island, past the wealthy enclave of Repulse Bay, you drive alongside a gleaming strip of sand, the most visited beach in town and a joyful sea side escape for working people.

The afternoon comes to a cheerful end at Stanley Market, a place of great fun and surprises for inquisitive shoppers where you can find a wide variety of souvenirs such as silk, garments, sportswear, Chinese art work and accessories. Stanley Market is very popular among Western residents of Hong Kong because there you can easily find ‘off the peg’ clothes for the ‘fuller figure’.

After time at leisure, guests will leave the hotel for a sunset cocktail cruise on board a Chinese junk through the Harbour. The destination is a fishing village on Lamma Island where the party will enjoy a fresh seafood dinner by the water’s edge.
After dinner, the junk returns to Hong Kong Island.

Day 3. Lantau Island and Dine Around

Breakfast will be taken at the hotel

Guests will travel by road, through Kowloon, across Hong Kong’s spectacular suspension bridge and along the north of Lantau, Hong Kong’s largest outlying island, to the new town of Tung Chung near Chek Lap Kok International Airport.

From there, the party will ascend to the Po Lin Buddhist Monastery by the Nong Ping Sky Rail cable car. The 17 persons car will begin its 25 minutes ascent by gliding across the bay, giving an amazing view of the airport and the skyline of Tung Chung. The Sky Rail rises over the natural serenity of the North Lantau Country Park. The rolling grasslands, the forested mountains and the natural streams and waterfalls all make it easy to understand why this island is called ‘the green lung’ of Hong Kong.

At the mountain top terminus is the Po Lin Monastery, an important Buddhist centre for Hong Kong and the most popular place for local people to visit on Lantau. It is the home of the 26 metre high Giant Buddha, the biggest sitting, bronze Buddha in the world, atop a summit, overlooking a breathtaking landscape with the near 1,000 metre Lantau Peak as a backdrop.

A vegetarian lunch will be served at the monastery and there will be free time to look around.

Afternoon visit the three hundred year old fishing village of Tai O. Part of the population still lives in the closely packed wooden dwellings on stilts along the Tai O stream. The sights and smells of the market street where dried fish, shrimp paste and other food exotica are sold leave visitors with a strong and fragrant memory.

They will return to Hong Kong Island by boat through one of the world’s busiest harbours and most famous skylines.

Dinner will be a ‘Dine-Around’ in Lan Kwai Fong and Soho areas of Hong Kong Island. These two compact network of streets above the Central business district have become the hot nightlife centres of Hong Kong island and a particular collecting place for some very fine restaurants covering Chinese, Asian and European cuisines. Individual party members will be given an allowance so that they may go off and dine in a restaurant of their choice. After dinner, there will be the opportunity to have a drink in the nightspots.

Guests will be asked to make their own way back to the hotel.

Day 4. Shenzhen Shopping Tour or Macau Heritage Tour

Breakfast will be taken at the hotel

The Shenzhen Shopping Tour is scheduled to take up the whole day.

Guests will take a 45 minutes train ride to city of Shenzhen on the Mainland side of the Hong Kong SAR boundary. En route, guests will see much of the Hong Kong countryside and new towns that have been built to improve the accommodation of city dwellers.

After the immigration formalities, they will visit to an unusual village – The Dafen Oil Painting Village – a large-scale centre of artistic activity. There are over a dozen blocks of painting stores with studios upstairs. There are hundreds of painters based on the Village producing original works and artful copies of masterworks, all for sale.

From art, guests will be move on to retail to the Lo Wu City Shopping Mall in Shenzhen. Rising to six floors, this mall has shops selling everything from housewares to jewellery, from electronics to designer clothes and all at extraordinary good prices.

For those tired out from their shopping, we can make arrangements for a foot massage from an experienced masseur for under 10 USD.

Alternatively:

The Macau Heritage Tour can be scheduled for the whole day

In 2005, UNESCO listed the Historic Centre of Macau as being of World Heritage status. Guests will tour the heart of the city which dates back to the beginning of Macau as a Portuguese possession in the 15th century.

By the famous of St Paul’s is the Na Tcha temple, a distinguished and dignified Buddhist temple, standing next to a Christian ruin typifying Macau’s multi-cultural society. The temple is a single, simple chamber in a classical temple style with ceramic animals on its roof ridge acting as guardians. Next to the temple is a surviving segment of the Old City Wall dating from 1569 and typical of the defence structures the Portuguese placed round their port settlements.

Located in the nearby Mount Fortress is the Museum of Macau which was begun in 1995 and follows the line of the old barracks buildings. Its exhibits include items of archeology, trade, war and domestic life, with an emphasis on the inter action of Eastern and Western culture.

The Mount Fortress itself, built in conjunction with the Jesuits and completed in 1626 is a trapezoid in shape. It was armed with canon and could survive a 2 years siege. Interestingly it only has battlements facing the sea – and other colonial attackers – and not mainland China.

The Temple of A Ma is older than Macau itself, dating probably from 1488 with additions and renovations up to 1828. It is a well ordered complex with shrines to many deities covering Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism and folk religions and is an exemplary representation of the spread of Chinese culture.

The last stop, the Macau Tower measures 338 m in height. An observation deck with panoramic views, restaurants, theaters, shopping malls and the Skywalk X, a thrilling walking tour around the outer rim, are found at the tower’s 233-metre level. It offers a great view of Macau and in more recent years has been used for bungee jumping.

Guests will be taken from the hotel to a Farewell Dinner. The options for this are:

1. Dinner at The China Club, Hong Kong. This is a private members club created out of the upper floors of the Bank of China Building in Central, previously the headquarters of the Chinese state bank in Hong Kong.

The Club is decorated in a lush 1920s retro style with many interesting Chinese artefacts from the period. There is a restaurant, a bar and sitting rooms and a rooftop terrace overlooking the business district and the harbour.

The food, served by waiters in white livery and brass buttons is Chinese with particular features from Shanghai cuisine such as dumplings, renown throughout Hong Kong.

OR

2. Colonial Ball at the Verandah Restaurant in Repulse Bay. The Verandah Restaurant, a low white stucco colonial building facing the waters of Repulse Bay, has a long history.

It has been specially preserved from the old Repulse Bay Hotel, a high class resort from the early twentieth century which made way for development in 1989. The Verandah is noted for its high quality European food in sea side location.

The hotel and restaurant were the venue for many of the great society balls of the colonial years. With fine food and wines, live music and dancing, we will recreate a last Night Ball, an evening for them to remember.

Day 5. Departure

Transfer will be arranged from the hotel to the aiport by limousine/MPV7-seater or deluxe coach. A separate truck and bagagge master assistant will be provided for group luggage handling.