Hong Kong - 29th October 2011

We were due to fly out tonight, and had to head out to the airport in the afternoon. We had a slow morning, before checking out. We left our bags at the hotel while we made one last stop at the markets to buy the last minute things. By this stage we were pretty much done, but it wasn't time to head to the airport yet, so we found a little bar in an alley way, where we had a few drinks and Wade watched the Formula One. I got bored with that pretty quickly so I headed off to do a bit more shopping before we left for the airport. I got back and that is when things turned bad!! While I was gone, Wade had gotten a message that there was a Qantas strike and that we should get to the airport ASAP. So we raced back to the hotel, trying to find out some more information along the way, but in the end decided to catch a cab to the airport and work it out when we got there. When we arrived it was chaos. We spent hours in the line, and when we finally got to the front they told us there were no flights leaving and there were no hotels left in Hong Kong to be able to put us up in (the same thing they had been telling the hundreds of people in the line in front of us). They told us to come back in an hour for another update, at which point we did, for them to tell us that they were putting us up on the floor of the airport hotel conference centre (men in one room, females in another). Clearly that wasn't going to happen for us!! At this point, we were over it, so we headed over to the airport hotel, found some decent internet connection, booked flights on Cathay Pacific for the next day and went to the airport lounge where we pushed some chairs together and attempted to sleep for the rest of the night! We got breakfast here in the morning, had showers and headed back to the terminal to wait for our flight home (which was also delayed a couple of hours as well - but we made it home safely)!! While it was a crappy end to a holiday, we still had a great time in Hong Kong together (and me in China) and it definitely didn't ruin it. Although the fun continued when we got home trying to deal with Qantas to get a refund of the costs we incurred to get home (months later we finally got our money back - better late than never I guess)!!