Next day – Monday morning, Veronika and I embarked on our first adventure in Hong Kong alone, without Maggie or Jean. We decided to go to the amusement park called Ocean Park. Well it’s not exactly amusement park (alone) it’s a mixture of rides and a zoo. The idea is that they attract people with attractions and with the money they can take better care of the animals there.

After a bit of searching we took a bus to the park. The park is enormous it’s almost like 2 parks combined into one, and the location is quite good. Half of the park is situated near a sea level the other half is on a hill and you can take a lift or an underground tunnel ride to get to the top.

Well what is the first animal you think of when you say China? Panda!! Yea the first animal we saw were pandas. It looked almost unreal, they look so cuddly and nice. I later learned I had an honour of seeing the oldest panda in the world – around 43 years old.

Alongside “normal” pandas they also had red panda, which looks even cuter. I can definitely see myself having one as a pet. Would look so cool walking it around like a dog here in Slovenia :D.

The park was really nicely decorated and landscaped, sometimes you even got a feeling you are in the middle of the jungle. After pandas we went to see a sea lion show. After it we took underground ride to get to the upper plateau, where more of the amusement rides were located.

When you think of Hong Kong, you think of hot tropical weather, so what we saw next was a really surprise to us – Penguins. We entered one of the largest aquariums in the world, spanning multiple storeys, containing hundreds of aquariums with thousands of fishes – from sharks to small tropical fishes and of course some big sea mammals like seals, sea cows etc. It was also quite cold at least in the area of the penguins where they actually had snow / ice on the ground. You could actually borrow a jacket, but we as true Europeans used to cold didn’t bother.  😉

It was fun watching penguins as they were playing around jumping on the ice and swimming in water. The floor were made from glass so you could see them swimming beneath. We soon left the penguins to see some artic foxes and then shivering with cold left the building.

After that we went to see a show with dolphins in an arena nearby. As Europeans we really stood out in the crowd in the city and especially here. We quickly got used to people looking at us but here it actually paid off to be different. They chose us to be part of the show with the seals, we got a special seats in the front row and then when seals came we “made” them do some tricks and took photos with them. After the seals they did some tricks with dolphins. I think this was the first time I saw dolphins, they were quite big and jumped what must have been 3-4m high out of the water.

Later in the afternoon we spent more time on the rides, it was quite fun a lot of rides and because they were high on the plateau, they used the height to enhance the rides, which then took you few hundred meters above sea and over the cliffs.

All in all the park was really great and worth the time and money. We returned home to the island late in the evening where we had lunch in a local restaurant on the island and where I yet again ordered something extremely spicy that I couldn’t eat at all.