Good bye Nepal, Hello Hong Kong

After successfully shoving three women and their six body bags (joce's is still monkless) into a trunkless mini-cab smaller than my tercel (with a roof rack though...), we bid a group of laughing Nepalese hotel attendants and tour travel companions goodbye. We zipped through the traffic lawless streets of Katmandu to catch our red eye flight to Hong Kong for 11:30 pm. Apparently the airport in Katmandu takes after their free-for-all street system, so we knew that we would have to pay our way to the front of the line. Luckily we were early enough to be first in line at the check-in counter as it opened. It still did take a good hour to get things sorted out - good thing we went early...

Arriving into Hong Kong was a visual shock to the system. Everything is so large scale that it actually looks miniature. Looking into the port, all of the truck cabs stacked in their neat rows as far as you can see looked like legos. We were ecstatic to check-in early into our beautiful 5 star hotel room overlooking the harbor (Thanks again for the treat Joce). After the most glorious shower of my life, in a very shi shi granite and glass bathroom - and yes, with western toilet, we headed down to the cafe to gorge ourselves on the most fabulous lunch buffet I have ever seen, complete with Sushi, french cheeses, oysters and nice pinot grigio. It was almost as though we had not eaten in three weeks. (wait a minute...)

We then walked around the city, checked out a couple of stores (Vitton, Bulgari, Hermes) that I could not even afford to buy a plastic shopping bag from and settled to spend the remainder of the afternoon in our roof top hot tub - and there were 3 of them making it very private, so the 3 of us had our own private hot tub overlooking the city. Life felt good after three weeks of "roughing it". What a nice treat.

But like all great things, it had to end. We are now sitting in the Vancouver airport waiting for our final flights to Winnipeg and Edmonton. I am looking forward to getting home to my family.

Thanks for following us on this life altering trip - I hope you enjoyed reading our messages. xoxo - Mel, Joce and Mone