mamas here
Woohoo! My Mum came to visit! Along with her lovely partner, spent the weekend getting to know him, catching up with her and dragging them both through the city and surrounds in the sweltering heat. Day 1 was a bit of local exploration, temples, street art, a tram ride and yummy vegetarian lunch during the day. Then we headed out to the super flash Mott32 for dinner, we were seated in a smallish room shaped like an arch/stable with paintbrushes completely covering the mirrored walls on both sides. We ate stupidly delicious and expensive dim sum, fish, pork belly and kale stems and drank wine that was pretty standard but we convinced ourselves was amazing. The restaurant is in an old bank vault so down many flights of stairs and an escalator and has a very cool moody vibe, definitely somewhere for a special occasion, we loved it! On the way home we popped our heads in at Iron Fairies to check out the butterflies and caught a street concert along the way, booming in the middle of central, we did not pity the apartment buildings surrounding it. We then finished the night with a rooftop nightcap at Picniq, drinking in the skyline from within.
Sunday morning we got up early to beat the heat and hiked Dragons Back, during which I learnt that I hiked it “wrong” last time, the way we did it this time was much nicer, starting at a road side spot and ending at the beach directly. It was super hot but a really nice clear day and the views were totally worth all the sweat, and cooling off with a dip in the ocean was the perfect finish.
In the afternoon we headed across to Kowloon and explored the flower market, bird market and goldfish market (turns out it really is a whole street, I just had been in the wrong spot last time!). We ate Bafang Dumplings and marvelled at the price difference to the night before for almost equal yumminess, they tried their first bubble tea which was well entertaining and we had the obligatory egg tart. We had a token wander through some markets and then made for the waterfront to enjoy the night time skyline before taking the Star Ferry home.
Yay for public holidays - Monday was spent on Cheung Chau island. It was fun to take them somewhere I hadn’t been, we took the ferry across then had a great seafood lunch on the harbour, I tried Eel for the first time, it was SO good - who knew! Then we hired bikes and attempted to bike around the island, it was really beautiful and such a nice way to get around the car-free island. However realistically we needed mountain bikes at least or even eBikes, as there were a lot of hills and it was the middle of a hot sunny day. After battling for a while we decided to call it and head back to give up the bikes and go for a swim. But then one wrong turn saw us facing either riding back up a huge hill or carrying our bikes down 3 flights of stairs, carrying it was. By that time we had some heat exhaustion settling in, so we chilled on the side of the road, chugged some electrolyte drinks then eventually made our way back to the little town and had a swim. Revived and refreshed we checked out the town and tried fried ice cream and the classic HK milk tea while we waited for the next ferry, we also brought one of the classic Cheung Chau buns. They have a whole festival dedicated to them so we thought they must be pretty good, turns out we were wrong, kinda dry with a weird not sweet not savoury paste like filling, not adding those to the recommended list! I think there is a way to get around the island if you ride the right way and in cooler weather / with the right set of wheels it would be very epic. We also spotted a really nice looking beach (down a steep hill), the Italian beach they call it, which looked worth further investigation!
Our final day together we headed up the Peak early in the morning and got super lucky with the clear skies, one of the clearest I have ever seen it up there. I had to work so we couldn’t get up to too much else apart from a nice lunch together and then one more round of soup dumplings for dinner. Then it was goodbye/see you in 2 months (we are playing stopover host) as they headed off to Europe! Always the best to have peeps from home come visit :)
