Finally, after almost 24h of travel I arrived at Hong Kong International Airport. The weather was rainy but warm, around 30°C. From the plane to the immigration area was quite a long walk, I even had to use a train. For busy people who don’t want to walk that far, some airport taxis offer to take them directly to Immigration for 50 HK$. After sitting in a plane for that long, I preferred to walk.
Immigration went through smooth, I expected the procedure to take longer but they organize the waiting queues quiet efficiently so everything went fast. I am now in possession of a ninety day visa for Hong Kong. After going through immigration and picking up my luggage (which was already waiting for me after I went through Immigrations), I was picked up by a driver of my travel agency and taken to the Harbor View International hotel. My room there is quite small, but clean, I have a nice view onto the harbor. Unfortunately internet access is quite costly (40 HK$ for one hour, 60 HK$ for four hours), so I will only go online once every two days at maximum.
After sleeping for some hours I decided to take a small walk around the nearby harbor area and visit the Convention Center. In the meantime night had fallen in and now I finally saw a very beautiful Hong Kong.
During my taxi transfer to the hotel, my first impression of the city was “grey” with bad air quality. Now, after sun-set, the city really became beautiful. I have direct view to the skyline of Kowloon here from my hotel room and the Convention and Exhibition Center is only a few walking minutes away. The look at the huge skyline in the darkness is really breath-taking. It is by far better than any skyline I have seen before (granted, I have not seen that many skylines before). I walked around for about four hours and experimented with my camera which I still don’t really master for good night-shots.
A small note about security: while walking around I always felt safe. There are plenty of people around and the main roads and walking-paths are illuminated very well. At the moment I feel safe, I don’t know how it will be once I move away further than I did today.