Mood: A little flat
Music: My Chemical Romance - The Black Parade
Today started late again, I wasn't being picked up until after midday and as such I spent some of the morning in bed reading and a little while wondering around looking for somewhere to buy some drinks and munchies for the rest of the day.
The first stop, after the 90 minute drive back to Guilin, was the Reed Flute cave. The was so named due to the mass of reeds outside the entrance when the cave was discovered. As the area is awash with limestone hills, the existence of impressive limestone caves is hardly surprising.
The cave is filled with deposits of stalagmites and stalactites that stretch from the floor to the ceiling some 10-15m above in places. It is all lit up in deep blues and purples, these lights changing over time and increasing when people are in a given area. The first thing I really noted was the number of black smears on the rocks along the walkway. These are caused by the acid on the hands of the people walking past rubbing the rocks. It is very tempting to do but will obviously make the whole thing much less appealing for those generations to come. It seems distinctly a Chinese things to do at the moment, tourism is merely about getting bodies through the door today, it has yet to migrate to the conservation stage that most tourist attractions in the UK have as one of their primary concerns.
After this I was delivered to the airport in plenty of time for the last short haul flight of my trip, to Hong Kong. It seemed to take the guy at customs quite a while to stamp me out of China but I was one of the first through so I didn't overly care.
On landing I gathered my baggage from the belt (it was waiting after the long queue to get past HK immegration) and set out for the train to Kowloon. My instructions from Audley said I was staying in the Kowloon Metropark Hotel on Waterloo Road. As such I got off the airport train in Kowloon and hopped in a taxi to my hotel.
To my slight surprise, the hotel had no idea of my reservation and they checked the other Mertopark on Kowloon (Meng Kok) and I wasn't booked in there. This forced me to call Audley in the UK and find out what was going on.
A few minutes later I got a call back from them saying that they had made a mistake in my documentation as they had booked me into the Metropark on Hong Kong island, not on Kowloon. They told me to take a taxi and keep the receipt and they'd give me a refund. I therefore went back downstairs and asked for a taxi to the Hong Kong Metropark, and this was relayed to the taxi driver in Cantonese as I got in. Obviously when we arrived in Meng Kok I told him that I was trying to get to the Hong Kong Metropark and showed him a map of where it was... Eventually I got in, checked in and ordered room service so that I could get some food without having to go wondering the local streets with little in the way of local currency and no idea where to go!
Enough for now.
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