Stepping into a new continent – a week in Hong Kong COMPLETED - Page 24 - PassPorter - A Community of Walt Disney World, Disneyland, Disney Cruise Line, and General Travel Forums
As of January 1, 2019, we have closed our forums. This is a decision we did not come to lightly, but it is necessary. The software our forums run on is just too out-of-date and it poses a significant security risk. The server software itself must be updated, and it cannot be without removing the forums.
So it is with a heavy heart that we say goodbye to our long-running forums. They came online in 2000 and brought together so many wonderful Disney fans. We had friendships form, careers launch, couples marry, children born ... all because of this amazing community.
Thank you to each of you who were a part of this community. You made it possible.
And a very special thank you to our Guides (moderators), past and present, who kept our forums a happy place to be. You are the glue that held everything together, and we are forever grateful to you. Thank you aliceinwdw, Caldercup, MrsM, WillCAD, Fortissimo, GingerJ, HiddenMickey, CRCrazy, Eeyoresmom, disneyknut, disneydani, Cam22, chezp, WDWfan, Luvsun, KMB733, rescuesk, OhToodles!, Colexis Mom, lfredsbo, HiddenMickey, DrDolphin, DopeyGirl, duck addict, Disneybine, PixieMichele, Sandra Bostwick, Eeyore Tattoo, DyanKJ130, Suzy Q'Disney, LilMarcieMouse, AllisonG, Belle*, Chrissi, Brant, DawnDenise, Crystalloubear, Disneymom9092, FanOfMickey, Goofy4Goofy, GoofyMom, Home4us123, iamgrumpy, ilovedisney247, Jennifer2003, Jenny Pooh, KrisLuvsDisney, Ladyt, Laughaholic88, LauraBelle Hime, Lilianna, LizardCop, Loobyoxlip, lukeandbrooksmom, marisag, michnash, MickeyMAC, OffKilter_Lynn, PamelaK, Poor_Eeyore, ripkensnana, RobDVC, SHEANA1226, Shell of the South, snoozin, Statelady01, Tara O'Hara, tigger22, Tink and Co., Tinkerbelz, WDWJAMBA, wdwlovers, Wendyismyname, whoSEZ, WildforWD, and WvuGrrrl. You made the magic.
We want to personally thank Sara Varney, who coordinated our community for many years (among so many other things she did for us), and Cheryl Pendry, our Message Board Manager who helped train our Guides, and Ginger Jabour, who helped us with the PassPorter-specific forums and Live! Guides. Thank you for your time, energy, and enthusiasm. You made it all happen.
There are other changes as well.
Why? Well, the world has changed. And change with it, we must. The lyrics to "We Go On" for IllumiNations say it best:
We go on to the joy and through the tears
We go on to discover new frontiers
Moving on with the current of the years.
We go on
Moving forward now as one
Moving on with a spirit born to run
Ever on with each rising sun.
To a new day, we go on.
It's time to move on and move forward.
PassPorter is a small business, and for many years it supported our family. But the world changed, print books took a backseat to the Internet, and for a long time now it has been unable to make ends meet. We've had to find new ways to support our family, which means new careers and less and less time available to devote to our first baby, PassPorter.
But eventually, we must move on and move forward. It is the right thing to do.
So we are retiring this newsletter, as we simply cannot keep up with it. Many thanks to Mouse Fan Travel who supported it all these years, to All Ears and MousePlanet who helped us with news, to our many article contributors, and -- most importantly -- to Sara Varney who edited our newsletter so wonderfully for years and years.
And we are no longer charging for the Live Guides. If you have a subscription, it's yours to keep for the lifetime of the Live Guides at no additional cost. The Live Guides will stay online, barring server issues and technical problems, for all of 2019.
That said, PassPorter is not going away. Most of the resources will remain online for as long as we can support them, and after that we will find ways to make whatever we can available. PassPorter means a great deal to us, and to many of you, and we will do our best to keep it alive in whatever way we can. Our server costs are high, and they'll need to come out of our pockets, so in the future you can expect some changes so we can bring those costs down.
Thank you, thank you, thank you for your amazing support over the years. Without you, there's no way us little guys could have made something like this happen and given the "big guys" a run for their money. PassPorter was consistently the #3 guidebook after the Unofficial and Official guides, which was really unheard of for such a small company to do. We ROCKED it thanks to you and your support and love!
If you miss us, you can still find some of us online. Sara started a new blog at DisneyParkPrincess.com -- I strongly urge you to visit and get on her mailing list. She IS the Disney park princess and knows Disney backward and forward. And I am blogging as well at JenniferMaker.com, which is a little craft blog I started a couple of years ago to make ends meet. You can see and hear me in my craft show at https://www.youtube.com/c/jennifermaker . Many PassPorter readers and fans are on Facebook, in groups they formed like the PassPorter Trip Reports and PassPorter Crafting Challenge (if you join, just let them know you read about it in the newsletter). And some of our most devoted community members started a forum of their own at Pixie Dust Lane and all are invited over.
So we encourage you to stay in touch with us and your fellow community members wherever works best for you!
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Thursday 21 February – part five: will we ever find food?
When we got off the boat, it’s fair to say that we were a bit cold, so we decided to go back to the hotel to change. Now don’t get me wrong, our hotel was fine, but I think in hindsight a more centrally located hotel would’ve been better for exactly this reason. It took us about 20 minutes to get back to it on the subway and then by the time we had unwound for half an hour or so, it was past 6.00. We knew that we wanted to try the Symphony of Lights again tonight, as the visibility seemed to be better today and I wanted to get my JingJing tonight before we had to pack tomorrow, so we had a lot to do and still needed to eat.
We set off, thinking that we would eat at the other restaurant in our hotel, which serves Malaysian food, but when we got in there, I really struggled to find anything that I liked the look of. It was all very spicy and the fish was just stupidly priced, so we did something that we don’t usually do and we left. We did apologise to the serving staff, who had already brought us a drink (we weren’t sure what it was, it was brown and hot, so maybe it was tea, but it was in a glass?)
I had a list of a couple of restaurants that were near to the hotel, so we tried looking for one and realised we had walked past it. Had we used our eyes a bit more when we were in our room, then we would’ve realised that the restaurant we were looking for was just opposite our room. The next morning that was the first thing I noticed. Typical!
Anyway, the next one shouldn’t be that far down the road… or so I thought! About 10 minutes later, we found it right by the next subway station and went inside. It looked great, so we checked out the menu and all we could find were set menu for 10 or more people. I don’t think so, so we gave up with that one.
By now, I think it’s fair to say that we were both getting hungry and a bit ratty. We took the subway and decided that we would just look for somewhere to eat when we got to Kowloon. Oh my goodness, if we thought that we had seen the subway crowded before, we had seen nothing yet. This was murder! By the time we got to the change to the second line to get to Kowloon, the platforms were packed and they had MTR staff on hand, holding people back from getting on to the trains when they were full. It was madness and not the sort of sight you need when you’re getting hungry and are irritated. We weren’t in the best of moods by the time we got to Kowloon.
When we did get there, we first went looking for my little JingJing. The spot where the shop was meant to be didn’t work out and I was getting very frustrated by now. We kept walking and fortunately found it a couple of minutes later. At first, I thought I would have to buy the whole set, but then I found my favourite on his or her (I’m not sure which one?) own and got one. Much happier now, we set off in search of food.
It didn’t bode well. It was now 7.15 and we had just 45 minutes before the Symphony of Lights. How on earth were we going to get a meal in before that? Well, as anyone knows, sometimes when you are out of time, the answer is fast food and sadly that’s what we decided to go for. McDonald’s was nearby, so I’m almost ashamed to say that we ended up in there. In our defence, we knew that we could get food in time and we couldn’t see any other option and we were also so hungry by then that I don’t think we cared. It did the trick and filled us up and we were out of there in just 20 minutes, leaving plenty of time to get in place for the Symphony of Lights. Result!
We made our way down to the promenade and were there a few minutes early. This time, we were a bit further down, having learnt our lesson from the other night and worked out where the best viewing area was.
We enjoyed it a lot more this time, as the effects from the lights were a lot clearer and easier to see.
We lingered after the show finished, taking photos and by accident, I found a new setting on my camera, which made for some great shots of the skyline.
After we finished playing around with the camera, we decided to call it a night and walked back through a nearby shopping centre, stopping to have a look for chocolates in a department store there. They had some that were definitely Chinese and they were excellent as well – everyone at work was very impressed by them!
I had half thought about going to the Temple Street Night Market, but I was getting really tired by now and so it turned out was Mark. We made our way back to the subway station and, as we did, it was probably the only other time during our stay in Hong Kong, that we felt slightly unsafe. There were lots of groups of men and we couldn’t work out what they were doing. They just seemed to be standing around and it was a little intimidating. It’s surprising that happened, when you consider it’s a city with seven million people with a very vibrant nightlife. We were fine and made it back to the hotel with no problems.
Today we walked 8.71 miles. The weather today was hot and sunny with temperatures in the 70’s. The best thing today was visiting Aberdeen. The worst thing today was how hungry and irritated we got in the evening. Today we tried finding the observation deck at the Bank of China Tower And the result was it’s worth a visit, as there are some amazing views from there. The most magical moment today was the voyage on the Duk Ling.
Don't feel bad giving up and eating at Micky D's, I once saw an interview with Julia Child and she said she always ate at Mcdonald's when she traveled that you got good plain food that was cooked in a clean kitchen, so when I start to feel like I'm just giving in to Micky D I think of her and if it was good enough for Julia it's good enough for me. (but not to often!)
Friday 22 February – part one: what is it with umbrellas today?!
It’s perhaps no surprise that we had another late start today and it wasn’t a good day. The day you leave anywhere is never good and that was the case here as well. Fortunately, it all fitted fine and the case came in underweight, even with all the bits and pieces we had bought.
We headed down to breakfast and when we came back, we dropped off the bags at concierge and off we went. The first mistake we made this morning was our dress. Well, it wasn’t really a mistake, but when we sampled the temperature a little earlier, it hadn’t been that warm, but somehow in the 20 minutes or so since then, it had become very humid all of a sudden. They had forecast rain for today, so I guess that this was probably a sign of it.
Wearing too many layers, off we went and caught the subway into the centre of Hong Kong Island.
Our first stop today was to be Hong Kong Park. This had been recommended to us by a friend of mine at work, who had spent a couple of days in Hong Kong a couple of years ago. It wasn’t something that had been on my list of things to do, but I thought that we should give it a go, based on her recommendations and I’m glad we did take her advice, as the park is a hidden little gem in the middle of literally hundreds of high rise buildings.
There’s a bit of a walk up the hill to get to it, as it’s on the side of a former barracks and that was based on many different levels. We entered about halfway up and made our way up to the reflecting lake, which was just beautiful. We timed this right, as it started to rain quite hard just as we got there, but fortunately, with all the trees around, we were able to find a bench in the shade of those trees and not get too wet.
It had already not been a good day for umbrellas. We had started with two, but it was clear one was broken, as soon as we first put it up, so we binned that and then the second suffered a malfunction problem and also ended up with a large present from a passing bird, so that one bit the dust as well.
We sat there for quite some time, just watching the world go buy and hoping that the rain would ease. It didn’t, so eventually we walked over to the waterfall we could see in the distance. As we passed behind it, it became clear that this was a cunning slope up to one of the higher parts of the park. Very well done and you almost didn’t notice you were going up.
It led up to the Conservatory and it was here that we learnt about the history of the place and the fact that the park had only been created in the early 1990’s. I really thought that it had been here much longer than that. The Conservatory has displays of plants from humid conditions (although it felt quite cold in there), desert conditions and examples of the plants around the park. It was a beautiful area and the smell in here was just stunning, quite overpowering, with the hyacinths in particularly just lovely.
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Pixie Dust
I can understand not bring back Mark and Spencer chocolates 
PassPorter Guide Author
The next morning that was the first thing I noticed. Typical! 
Always a safe choice though 
More please 
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