Days 208-214: Rest Week

After a morning train to Shenzen we walked across the border to Hong Kong and took the metro train south to Kowloon. Our guide had only ever spent a day or two in Hong Kong at a time, usually doing the exact same things, so I was appointed the unofficial reference person since I'd done quite a bit in Hong Kong earlier. We visited the harbor for the light show, which is one of the things I missed my first visit, then I took some of the group around to the night market.

We all split up over the next few days as people drifted off and started heading home After leaving the tour hotel I switched to a really terrible hostel in Kowloon which I stayed in for a single night before switching to my old hostel on Hong Kong Island for the rest of my stay. A few of the people stayed in Hong Kong longer, so I took a few around to the electronics and goldfish market, and later revisited the Ten Thousand Buddha Monastery and did the Dragon's Back hike again with people from my group. Since it was mostly just doing things I'd already done once, I didn't really take any pictures through this stretch. Parallel to this I had also gotten quite sick - the sickest I've been my entire trip. Most of the time I wasn't feeling too horrible, but I was getting fairly frequent stomach cramps and had ongoing diarrhea which made going too far from my hostel a bit of a hassle. Mostly I just tried to rest and keep meals to fairly simple things in an effort to get better before India, which I figured would give me even more problems.

Towards the end of the week I went back to Lantau Island with a few of the people from my hostel dorm, this time taking the cable car up the mountain to the Giant Buddha. By the end of my break week I was feeling quite a bit better, although I still wasn't totally healthy yet. I had to get up early on my last morning to take the first airport shuttle bus at 5:30am in order to get to the airport in time for my 8:30 flight, but everything went smoothly and I flew out without incident.