Sometimes you fly halfway across the globe to visit a new destination and the travel gods are totally not on your side. It might be bad weather, a string of bad luck, or bad news from home that ends up ruining a trip that could have otherwise been awesome. This is exactly what happened to my mom and I during our mother-daughter trip to Hong Kong, but instead of letting it spoil our time there, we made the most out of it and ended up making some fantastic memories!
Hong Kong has generally decent weather year round, and we were expecting temps of high 60s/low 70s which was much welcomed after enduring colder temperatures in Japan and mainland China. Instead, the 3 days we spent there were ridden with rain, heavy fog, and uncharacteristically cold temperatures. Hong Kong's biggest draw to me was the kickass skyline and view of the city from Victoria's Peak, all of which were rendered impossible because of the crazy fog. You couldn't even see a couple hundred feet in front of you. We actually payed to take the tram up to Victoria's Peak to see if it'd clear up even a little, but we were met with a wall of clouds obstructing any sort of view of the city! It sucked.
But, determined to leave HK with some fun memories, we took a beeline for Madame Tussauds Wax Museum which is located inside the Victoria's Peak complex. If you live under a rock and for some reason haven't heard of Madame Tussauds, it's a notoriously tacky place filled with half-decent wax figures of celebrities, athletes, and other people of interest. And it's a hell of a good time. Two (overpriced) tickets please.
We walked around room after room taking funny photos with pretty much every single wax figure in the whole place. They had a good combination of Asian and Western celebs and we got a kick out of taking hilarious poses with all of them. After a trip full of meticulously planned tourist sights and check lists of stuff we had to see, it was refreshing to just mess around and be silly for a day with my mom. After a couple hours of fooling around we treated ourselves to a fancy lunch and lots of wine. It ended up being one of my favorite memories from our whole two-week trip together.
The next day we headed for Hong Kong Disneyland and had yet another day of fun. Given the crappy weather, there was virtually nobody in the park with us and the longest wait time for a ride was 10 minutes - unheard of at Disney! We were able to ride nearly every single ride in the park, which is a hell of an accomplishment since long wait times usually constrict you to only a few rides per visit. It didn't even end up raining for the entire day but was just super cloudy, which deterred enough other visitors that we were able to enjoy basically an empty park.
I guess the moral of this story is to make lemonade when life throws lemons at you. We missed most of the major sights of Hong Kong but left with a lasting connection to the place through our awesome memories. Travel is by no means always a perfect time and often you might feel like the travel gods are against you. Sometimes they are. But my advice is to just roll with the punches and enjoy it all, the good and the bad!
:D
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