Hong Kong!

So at the very end of June, we stopped over in Hong Kong on the way to the Philippines. Hong Kong is an amazing city! It's like New York squished down into half the space. Just a few blocks from our city hotel, the mountains surrounding the city (aka Victoria Peak and such) gave us a challenging hour long hike, with waterfalls along the way. There is a tram up to the top of the peak, but we decided to hike it in the rain for fun. This meant lots of water, near vertical concrete slopes, and tons of mosquitoes! An hour later and drenched from head to toe, we reached the top of the peak only to find it contained a small mall and was totally fogged in. I could only say, "All this way for a mall! Are you kidding me?!? But after an hour, the fog cleared out, giving us an incredible view of the city.

This is the view of Hong Kong at night from our hotel. Jon, did you know they filmed the Dark Knight here? Yeeeaaaahh....

The city is so tightly packed that roads seem to come out of nowhere and snake all over each other. Also, our hotel was up the hill a bit, close to the commuter escalator. The escalator system is a train of about ten (or more... we rode on at least ten... Merrill thinks it might be more like twenty) or so free escalators that take you down (in the morning) or up (in the evening) the hill. We've never seen anything like it.

Our last afternoon in HK, we made the hour-long train and walking trip to the LDS Temple. The Temple is tiny and totally vertical. The small structure you see is both the temple and the mission office. Tiny!! But every inch of it was exquisite. We expected to see mostly foreigners in the temple, British ex pats, etc. but to our delight and surprise, we were the only westerners there that day, except for a couple serving a mission. The temple in Hong Kong is an incredible place. There's a really busy road just out front of it (It took us forever to get a pic of it without cars in the way), but you cannot hear any of the traffic of the city from within it. We felt very lucky to be there!

This gross pic is of me eating noodles in a fast food place in the train station. Yeah... I've got some work to do on learning chop sticks. Thank goodness they use spoons and forks in the Philippines!

We're in the Philippines and having a great time! We love it here, and don't want to leave it any time soon. But we will in just three days. We'll write and post about it after we arrive in Europe.

Let us know how you are doing!

Kaycie and Merrill

P.S. Merrill loves this picture below. The coasts at Coromandel in New Zealand were all covered in a thick foam at both high and low tide. I called it "Sea Barf." Enjoy!