We’ve been hearing a lot about the old market culture of Hong Kong and how successive governments since the 1970s would like to see the market culture removed from the street vendor model to an indoor shop-based market to reflect the modernisation of Hong Kong. What this really means is that a lot of the…

Today was all about visiting Macau. These days Macau is known for it’s casinos and a Grand Prix in a couple of weeks time, however it has quite a long history of about 6,000 years. The Portuguese sailors first came to Macau in the early 1500s and established it as a trading port, but it…

Another clear day greeted us this morning as we got up just a little later than yesterday and headed up for breakfast. Then it was back to the metro to meet up with the Hop on / Hop off bus. Today we’d planned to take the ‘Green Route’ which goes to the village of Stanley…

Being in a new city the first things we had to do was to our usual housekeeping things, but not until we’d had breakfast which is served on the 41st floor in the main restaurant. There a breakfast buffet and some set menu options, one of which was Eggs Benedict on Lobster. I’ll try most…

It was a cold start in Seoul this morning, barely reaching double figures. Luckily for us, we only had to get to our car from the hotel lobby, which had very warm heated seats. It’s about 53 kms from central Seoul to Incheon airport, but being Saturday morning we were able to beat most of…

Cold and rainy was the best way to describe Seoul today. Luckily for us we’d really covered off all the things that we wanted to do here, but we did head out to see if we could take in a few of the Art Galleries. That plan didn’t start well when we found we’d got…

We had an early start this morning as we were going on a tour to the DMZ. We met up with our group and started the bus ride from Seoul. It is only about 50 Kilometres from Seoul to the North Korean Border. Our guide was very informative as she took us through a brief…

So having returned to feeling just a little bit human again with the help of some drugs especially purchased from a Korean Pharmacy, I’m retrospectively writing yesterday’s blog. In the spirit of full disclosure I have borrowed a lot of the content from Debbie’s update of yesterday. Our day started with a visit to Gyeongbokgung…

It turned out to be another busy day again today, despite our intentions not to cram too much into it. Following breakfast we once again navigated the metro to Changdeokgung Palace, which was built in 1405. It remains largely in tact, although some elements were destroyed during the Japanese occupation of 1910-45. These are actively…

After a big day yesterday, we slept in a while this morning. Our original plan was to include a trip to the Namsan Seoul Tower today, but the pollution haze had settled in and with no wind to blow it away, we decided that we would leave that until later in the week when some…