First up was Hong Kong. I've blogged about it before, but I'd been to Hong Kong five years ago and knew my husband would love it. Hong Kong is so unique in that it's a mix of Western and Asian influences with a mind-boggling population density and beautiful jungle-ish mountains.
View from the our 31st floor hotel room.
View from the top of Victoria Peak, with the city in the background.
To get to Hong Kong Island, you either take the subway or the old-timey Star Ferry boats.
For the record, we did not eat at KFC.
For the record, I did not eat any street vendor spicy octopus....
...but I did have some shrimp burger.
If you're ever there, a trip to Sai Kung, a fishing village 20 minutes out of the main city is well worth it. Tons of dockside restaurants keep tanks filled with fresh crab, shrimp, grouper, lobster, and critters I couldn't even identify.
After two days in Hong Kong, we flew to Phuket, Thailand. We arrived at midnight and our boat/kayak tour was picking us up at 5:45 the next morning. Ughughugh travel. Turns out that this boat tour was one of the best things I've done in life.
Two Sea Tours is amazing. My Trip Advisor obsessing paid off big time. They limit the tours to a max of 14 people so that there was plenty of space on the immaculately clean boat. Other tour boats we saw were jam packed and looked to be in nasty condition. They had breakfast waiting for us on the boat along with coffee and tea. One of the breakfast items was a caramelized coconut-and-rice thing wrapped in a banana leaf. Tasty.
We set off for our first destination- kayaking the sea caves. They have it set up so each couple has a guide to paddle. That left us free to take pictures and also not freak out about bad steering.
Inside each sea cave were shallow lagoons with mangrove trees and monkeys.
"Really? We're going in there?"
Sleep deprivation does not become me but the rest of the pic is cool. Hi Dep, our guide
One of the island's beaches had tons of monkeys. We might have seen two of them doing it like they do on the Discovery Channel...
I still can't believe I got to go to the kind of places you only see on Google Images.
After paddling around two islands, we went to James Bond Island, named after the 2 minute scene that featured it in..."Gold something..."
I'm so happy to be there I couldn't even keep my eyes open.
While we toured this island, the cook on the boat prepared us an awesome meal for the ride back to Phuket. We were both super hungry. What! Watching other people paddle my kayak makes me hungry.
The last stop was a secluded beach for some swimming in the Andaman Sea and plates of fresh fruit paddled ashore by our guides. Don't be fooled by my belly- it's half fetus, half watermelon.
The rest of our time in Phuket consisted of snorkeling (wish I would've brought an underwater camera), beaching, pooling, and eating. The snorkeling was super cool- a guide at our hotel drove us to a tiny beach on the southern end of the island. We saw huge pink and blue starfish, puffer fish, those blue-and-black-and-yellow-tail-fish, and many other critters.
We went to the main market in Phuket, which had the Bizarre Foods-type stuff. I can't even blame it on pregnancy, but I really did not have interest in eating street meat or roasted insects or fish chunks.
I wish we also would have taken our camera on our day trip to the beaches on the west side of the island- clear blue-green water and beautiful sand. And one random 16" jellyfish. Eeeeek.
All in all it was a great trip- the travel portion was intense. 14 hours on a plane is no joke. The experiences we had were well worth it though.
Goodbye, Phuket.
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