Along the wild section of the Great Wall near Simatai, China

Mount Everest's North Face in Tibet

One of the many pandas in the Panda Conversation Centre outside of Chengdu, China

Hong Kong (April 14 - April 22)

Life in the Big City
Hong Kong is an amazing city perched on the edge of China. It offered all the modern conveniences that our travel weary souls could hope for: a nearly bilingual population (English and Cantonese)a good haircut (for me anyway...Chris's barber took a little too much off over the ears), a good cup of coffee, adequate Mexican food (let's just face it, there's nothin' quite as good as So. Cal Mexican comida), and free accommodation, laundry, and internet access (thanks, Clark!). We went from the street bars of Hanoi sitting on plastic stools and drinking 5 cent beer to a new posh bar drinking California wine overlooking Hong Kong harbor in just a couple of days. The difference was quite stark and one we were ready to have after 2 1/2 months in Southeast Asia.

This post will be quite short as we did not do too much in HK besides relax and plan the China-Mongolia-Central Europe part of our trip. It was a great little break in our big adventure...Clark took great care of us (our first night there he treated us to dinner and foot massages complete with a celebrity sighting and paparazzi)! Chris got to show off his basketball skills, and we got to experience a little home away from home for a little while before heading off to China.

Our first order of business was to head to the U.S. Consulate to get pages added to our passports. Yes folks, we actually ran out of pages. How cool is that? We are now the proud owners of big, fat passports.

We did do a few touristy things. We took a tour of the harbor on a junk boat (a traditional Chinese fishing boat), rode the cable car to the top of Victoria peak where we enjoyed a magnificent view of the city and its harbor, wandered through Hong Kong Park and its aviary, and saw the nightly light show where all the skyscrapers and office buildings are dressed in colorful blinking lights.

Before we knew it, our week was up and we were on a plane to Shanghai.

As I finish this post I am sitting in an internet cafe in Rome, Italy. Since Hong Kong we've visited China, Mongolia, Berlin and Krakow. We really want to tell you all about our adventures in those places...but in the interest of not getting too far behind, I think we'll pick up in Germany and add China and Mongolia sometime soon after our return. We get so caught up in our adventure that we find it difficult to keep this thing up-to-date!! We will post pictures to Snapfish very soon.