Hong Kong!

View of the Temple Street Night Market from our Airbnb.

Greetings from Hong Kong! This is the starting point for our epic trip through China. Bro and I will be here for the next few days getting reacquainted with a place that I have not been to since I was a kid....literally decades ago. Even though I have been here several times, as a child, I don't remember much about Hong Kong so I will essentially be experiencing it for the first time. For a Chinese person like me, who is of Cantonese heritage, Hong Kong is above all, culinary heaven. I have picked out a few special places I want us to eat at and am very excited about that.

Packing List. China 2018.

Photo from Tropenmuseum, part of the National Museum of World Cultures
( Licensed under Creative Commons CC BY-SA 3.0 license)

Hard to believe but I leave for China in just a few short weeks.  I feel I just got back from India not that long ago and in fact, I've not even done all the blog postings for that trip!

Not to mention that I still have some planning tasks to wrap up for the China trip e.g., buying our train tickets from Beijing to Xi'an, handling whatever needs to be done for my two cousins as they go through the processes of getting their China visas from the UK (a nightmare for poor Sook Kwan) and Australia, put together my travel binder, and offline all my Google maps.

The Land of the Tsars Via the Trans Siberian Railway.

Shamans Rock, Olkhon Island, Lake Baikal
(Photo by amanderson2.  Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.)

This year I finally get to fulfill one of my long time travel dreams - to go across Russia via the Trans-Siberian Railway!  I am so excited that every time I think about this truly epic adventure, I literally burst with anticipation of the moment that I board the train.

She's Coming Too!

SK and I in Malacca in 1996...at least I think that was the year.  That was the last time I saw her in person.

When I sent my cousin Yim the itinerary to China, she immediately forwarded it to her sister, SK.  I had originally planned for this trip to be just for Bro and I - our annual trip together but it was beginning to evolve into a family affair.  At first, I wasn't sure I was up for it as my travel style is not everyone else's travel style.  I knew Bro and Yim would be okay but had no clue about SK.