Travel log of Eli and Anna Bendersky

Hi All,

For the impatient (you know who you are): We were in Hong Kong. It was fun. Now we’re in Cairns, Australia. It is hot and fun. There are photos below. See you later.

And now to the long story

Our El-Al flight took us to Hong Kong landing on Thursday, at about 15:00 local time. We catched a train to downtown where our hotel was located. The train, on its way from the airport to Hong Kong Island (the main area of Hong Kong) passes through two islands and the mainland, at times running on suspension bridges and at times in tunnels underneath the sea. The route is very beautiful, and takes 24 minutes (according to the super-punctual Hongkongians who count everything up to the minute).

Our hotel was pretty nice. Although the room was on the 13th floor, the most views we had were of the buildings across the street. 13 floors is tiny in Hong Kong terms - even the residential buildings are on average 30+ floors high there. All in all, Hong Kong looks the most advanced place we’ve ever seen - the downtown, in particular, is all scyscrapers, traffic on 3 levels (with a subway below) and even pedestrians move mostly on “sky walks” which are elevated bridges above the roads and enter and exit the buildings. It is also one big shopping mall, the various stores running endlessly in all directions. It is interesting that with all this high technology around, Hong Kong construction teams are using bamboo for the scaffolds.

In the evening we took the “Peak tram” to ascend a high hill in the southern part of the island, from which there are stunning views of Hong Kong at night:

Next day we spent half a day walking around the other side of the harbour - the mainland (Kowloon peninsula) and then came back to the central train station. There, we checked into the flight, got our plane boarding passes (at the train station !) and took a train to the airport.

Our flight to Cairns stopped for an hour in Brisbane, and finally reached Cairns on the 16th at 14:00. Cairns is a tropical leisure town (somewhat similar to Eilat) on the north-eastern tip of Australia. It is located near the upper part of the Great Barrier Reef (the largest coral reef in the world):

The weather here is very hot and humid, just like Haifa in the summer. We live in a backpackers hostel near the city center. The ocean is beautiful, but people don’t swim here - there are no beaches at all ! That is because the water near the beach is filled with venomous jellyfishes and sometimes sharks. When one must go into the water for some reason, he wears a “stinger suit” - a thin metalic net. We have booked a snorkeling tour to the reef tomorrow, so we’ll see

Yesterday we rented a car and went to a short road trip around Cairns. The area here is a real tropical jungle and the roads cut through the forest and the hills offer stunning views. The car was a tiny Daihatsu Charade with manual transmission, which proved to be not too bad. In fact, the left-hand manual transmission is much easier to master than driving on the wrong side of the road.

It was a very nice day, and the highlight was Kuranda - a small village on the banks of the Barron river a little west of Cairns. We trekked for a couple of hours around the village (jungle walk) and visited the Kuranda wildlife zoo, where we fed Kangaroos and Wallabies (basically smaller Kangaroos) and (for an extra fee) we got to hold a Koala bear.

Today we’re going to spend a quiet day at the hostel and rest, and tomorrow we’re going for a full day trip, boarding a catamaran to the reef and nearby islands to snorkel and bask in the sun. On Thursday we have a flight to Adelaide.

That’s it for now - see you later. There are more photos at the photo album.

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