Ray outside the entrance to Craig's Apartment in Macau

 
First Stop Hong Kong

We left a miserable wet Auckland day for some eleven hours in an Air N.Z. 747-400, which had better specs than the Lufthansa on the next leg. With an aisle seat up against a bulk head we were able to move out of our seat relatively easily and Ray could see various stages of the same movie on a number of screens. Individual LCD screens on the back of each seat in Pacific class was good for the passenger to play around with different movie styles and music genre. You could even make your own playlist from all the offerings of classical, pop, jazz and whatever.
The noise reducing headphones I had purchased from Katthmandu worked after a fashion, replacing one tone with another, hopefully less tiring but difficult for a qualitative assessment.
With a night time flight we did get some sleep and it was interesting in the morning to see the tracking of the flight on the screens, showing time left, height, speed and temperature outside.
It helped my geography to have the flight path illustrated like so. When I had looked at the Atlas before I didn't think we would be flying over the Phillipines - Ah lessons in life.

When we arrived in Hong Kong we were impressed with the systems and high speed subway type train that transported us from arrivals to customs and the buses. We had a 'bit of a character' who was putting on a performance for us people in his care to get to the correct buses. We were instructed to wear our 'stick on' name labels with the relevant bus company and sit and wait in one area until called to move to the next phase.

It was fascinating looking at the various styles of accomodation on our way into Kowloon and the amazing bridge structures. Craig later told us they even have space inside the boxed sections that can keep limited traffic flowing during typhoons that stop traffic traveling on the open, exposed, carriage ways.

Our Hotel Ramada seemed to be in cross over area, partly run down on one side and at the front entrance, somewhat more stylish. Looking out our Hotel room window, we could see older, run down buildings and signs of rust.

We were pleased to be allowed in so early in the day, some time before 9am so we could fit in a short sleep. From that we gathered out energies to head to the Ferry Terminal, where we found a Star Bucks to sip a coffee and contemplate the information we needed to get over to Macau. We gave cousin Craig a call to his Hong Kong number, which was diverted to his Macau number.

Following Craig's instructions we caught the free Venetian Buses to the Venetian Casino and tried to contact Craig but being in Macau (even getting special Vodafone texts welcoming us to the new calling area) we couldn't get through. Then ensued a drawn out saga of trying to get help from Casino staff who spoke English and point us in the direction of a phone we could use so we could make a toll call back to Hong Kong, hopefully to get through to Craig. Some punters told us the area code for Hong Kong but didn't include the double zero in front. Finally after getting the necessary Macau dollars from the cashiers for the casino we headed back to the phones and finally got through to Craig, who worked across the road (somewhere) from this Venetian Casino and told us to head to the Star Bucks inside and he'd be there in 15 minutes. Those phone problems took a couple of hours to resolve.

Using a taxi we headed to Craig's place to drop our bags and we headed out to walk various sites including the old Portugese area. We got to the old Portugese Fort at 7pm, it's closing time. Interesting just wandering all those little alley ways and the facade of the old Portugese Church. Heading down hill again we weaved our way through narrow streets to one of Craig's favourite Restaurants and luckily they were able to fit us in. A cabbage dish with Portugese salami, a prawn dish and a chicken option filled the requirements and we headed back to Craig's Macau Apartment to crash after a tiring day.