Day 3 - Continued & Ocean Park!

Ocean Park!

After returning to the Tung Chung end of the cable car. We quickly headed to the train station near by, we were able to find free WiFi and easily worked out how to get to Hong Kong Island and on to Ocean Park. After a very quick train ride and change over to a bus at Hong Kong Central Station, we were soon walking through the massive gates to the adventure park! The total journey taking about an hour.
Hot Tip -  Once arrived, we were able to use the parks free WiFi to book tickets online and managed to get a meal
included for the price of a standard admission! Always book tickets for this sort of attraction online to avoid huge waiting times in queues, to score a bargain and save some coin. We hurried into the park and having become hungry from the adventures of the first half of the day, quickly found a vendor to redeem our voucher. Feeling refreshed and renewed we energetically ventured out into the park. First order of business was the Panda's,  inside the Amazing Asian Animals exhibit! We hurried in and were welcomed with no queue just a member of staff holding a sign instructing us to keep the noise to a minimum and not to use flash photography.

 The first exhibit we came to was the smaller cousin of the Giant Panda, The Red Panda. At first this curious creature was hidden inside its leafy and ladder filled enclosure. Though it wasn't long before we caught a glimpse of red fur through the branches. Not knowing much about this little panda we later discovered they are native to the eastern Himalayas and south-eastern China. It has also been classified as endangered because its wild population has slipped below 10,000 mature individuals. The second exhibit had the resident Giant Panda, Le Le, who was sound asleep with his back turned to the small audience around his enclosure. It was great to see the amount of space he had and the different aspects of environmental enrichment he had within his enclosure. There was also Ocean Park staff on stand by making sure people were not disturbing the animals. It was really sad to find out that there is less than a thousand Giant Panda's alive in the wild, we feel lucky to have seen Le Le's backside.

Alongside the Panda's, Ocean Park has quite a few other interesting species native to China including Otters, Giant Salamanders, Alligators, Koi Fish and Gold Fish, all of which were fascinating to see and learn about.

Next stop - the aquarium! We could
of easily spent half a day inside the aquarium (after we got through the queue) admiring the huge spectrum of different aquatic species & learning about the Chinese efforts for preserving the ocean and its inhabitants. From crustaceans to Manta Rays, this aquarium had it all & is definitely something we recommend doing for anyone who visits Hong Kong. After the aquarium we walked around through the rest of the theme park looking at all the various attractions, mostly food, music and children's rides, thinking we had seen it all. Once we checked the map & realised we hadn't even seen half of the park, yet and on the other side of the mountain was an even bigger section with all the roller coasters.

We quickly caught the train across to the other side of the park, by this time it was 6pm and we were running out of daylight & time. We only managed to explore a small bit which included the seals exhibit, 3 harbour seals playing in their pool & a VR roller coaster that got the heart pumping.
After realising how big the park actually is, we would recommend a whole day to explore every exhibit and go on the rides & avoid weekends and Chinese holidays if you can!

Day 3 was a massive day of walking & with our feet obviously feeling the effects of 20km's, we headed home and straight to bed.

- Tom