tad bit of everything: Hong Kong Getaway Part 5, Home bound Fin'lly

28 April 2015

HK-Manila

This pretty much concludes our Hong Kong Birthday getaway. We had breakfast around 6:30AM at the hotel since all our luggage bags are ready. After breakfast, we made sure we won't leave anything at our hotel room and as soon as we're good to go we checked out at around 7:30AM to wait for our shuttle bus to the airport. Our flight to Manila is at 10:40AM (HK and Manila is under the same time zone so no time difference) but our shuttle bus to the airport arrived 15 minutes late because they're supposed to pick us up at exactly 8:00AM.

We thought, we still have enough time to run some errands like go to the MTR station to get a refund for our Octopus cards etc. The Cebu Pacific check in counter moved in a very slow pace so it took us almost half an hour to check in our luggage. We spent so much time looking for the MTR customer service counter where we could get our refund. We were already bickering and all until I saw the airport express counter. I told my sister that a customer service counter may not be too far away. We finally found the one and got our refunds. I got 113HKD refund whilst about the same roughly for my sister. We also returned our Octopus cards afterwards.

Tsuen Wan area - photo courtesy of
m00nchildr0cks

We started looking for our boarding gate which was #46 around 10AM already (we should be at the gate at this point) but we have to buy some bottled water to replenish ourselves because we were already both dehydrated due to excessive walking.

The HK airport is vast I'm telling you, so, you should be ready to walk. We passed initial security first then Immigration, then the X-ray machines and the last part is to find your boarding gate. The IO officer who assisted me was kinda cute, he didn't look too chinese lol.

Anyways, we got ourselves some bottled water so we rushed to find boarding gate 46. It was the longest walk of our lives man! The clock is ticking and by the time we reached our gate the message board is already blinking in red that reads 'final call'! Oh my, we literally hurled ourselves to squish ourselves in the que. We promised that we will never be late again because we almost missed our flight geez! God is good. This highlighted our HK trip pretty much lol.

this time my seat is beside the
window!

2PM past – Manila, NAIA T3. Our plane landed safe and sound finally. The weather was really sunny and all. As soon as we picked up our luggage from the carousel we dropped by at this airport money changer to exchange our HK dollars to Peso then later on towards one of the BPI atm machines to the left at the arrival hall (which we should've done before we boarded our plane bound to HK) to get some more funds for expectedly overcharged cabbie fare later on.

My 119HKD became 1k+ php by the way which only means that a Hong Kong dollar's value is quite high once converted to peso. Had late lunch at Burger King, then picked up a fixed rate cabbie for a hefty rate of 780php from the airport to again Tune Hotel. The traffic was quite terrible as expected.

3PM past - Reached Tune Hotel, since we arrived later than the regular check in time which is 2PM they adjusted our check out from 11AM to 12NN instead, not bad. We asked if they have tea pot rentals which they don't so we were advised that if in any case we need hot water they could get one from their headquarters so we did not bother anymore.

Stayed overnight at Tune Hotel so we won't be too tired for out trip to the north the next day because it would be another 7 hour trip from the Victory-Pasay terminal. Again, the heat is quite unbearable when you already got used to the cold up north for years.

29 April 2015

North Bound

At the bus my sister and I started talking about our next trip, the nearest hotel from the airport yadda yadda. I told my sister that the next time we travel we should be back to driving again and must bring our own car instead of commuting like avail a park and fly hotel package perhaps to save us from montrous cabbie fares etc. We haven't decided if we're gonna travel again next year but who knows right? We might be back driving again or whatever. But what's not gonna change is that our love for travel will never wane out.

10PM - Back to homey! Oh man I miss the cold.

Please check out the video I made about our trip! This pretty much sums up our adventure :)