12 May 2013 - Hong Kong Day 1: Touch Down and Disneyland

The day that we all were looking forward to has finally arrived.  We are going on a 7 days 6 nights Hong Kong trip starting today.  As our flight departs at 7:35am, we all woke up very early so that we could reach the airport at around 6:30am.  Initially, I thought I would have a hard time waking the little ones up but that's not the case.  I simply shouted:"We are going Disneyland now!" and they both woke up immediately.  Think they were really very excited about going to Disneyland.

We touched down at Hong Kong airport at around 11:15am.  The first thing we did were to buy a pre-paid SIM card for internet access.  It's really difficult to live without internet nowadays.  It was very cheap, costing about HK$88 for seven days unlimited access.  There was also some values in the card for making IDD calls.  After we were done with that, we proceeded to take a taxi to Disney Hollywood Hotel, where we are going to stay for 2 nights.  As it's still early for check in, we left our luggage at the concierge and took the shuttle bus from the hotel to Disneyland!

As we had purchased 2 days passes over the internet before we came, we need to redeem the tickets at some self service kiosks.  However the machines wasn't working so the staff led us to one of the ticket counters to collect our passes (ie. we jumped queue).  The moment we entered Disneyland, first thing that came into our mind.....why was it SO CROWDED!  It was really packed with people.  Then we remembered, today is Mother's Day!  So a lot of families brought their mother there to celebrate.  The queue for most of the rides were terrible.  We wanted to find a place to have our lunch but all the restaurant and food outlets were full.  In the end, we had to buy some snacks from food cart and ate along the pavement.

After we had our snacks, we saw that the queue for "Mickey's PhilhaMagic", which is a 4D show, was not too bad.  So we quickly went into that queue and my little angels loved the show.  After the show, Jerlene kept asking me to sing her the song from Aladdin "A Whole New World".  When we were out from the show, it started to drizzle.  We quickly put on the disposable raincoat, that we had brought along, for Jerlene and Javier.  We continue to move on to Adventureland where we wanted to try to Jungle River Cruise.  Once again, we gave up after seeing the queue.  There was a Tim Sum restaurant across the road and since it had long passed the lunch time, there wasn't much queue so we decided to go in for our lunch.

Next we went over to the Tarzan's Treehouse which is only accessible by taking the rafts.  Jerlene and Javier were full of energies and they went up two rounds.

From there we went back to the Jungle River Cruise as we saw the queue was getting shorter.  It's quite a fun ride with a little bit of excitement.  After the ride, we went to an area called Grizzly Gulch, which I do not recall seeing it the last time we came many years back.  Jerlene and Javier were fascinated by the Geyser that constantly "spitting" out water.

This area is a great destination for some water play escapades.  Kids were busy stepping on water that squirts out from the ground.

We spent quite sometimes around this area because the temperature seemed cooler than the other parts of Disneyland.  We left this place at around 7pm when Javier started showing signs of sleepiness.  Jerlene on the other hand was still keen to play on.  We slowly walked back to Fantasyland and decided to take the Winnie the Pooh ride.

The kids enjoyed the ride as the surrounding was pretty colourful.  However, once out of the ride, Javier started asking me to carry him.  Guess he's really tired since we all woke up very early in the morning and did not sleep much during the flight.  Actually we wanted to wait for the fireworks at 9pm but I did not think Javier can take it till then,  So we took the Disney train back to the entrance and caught the shuttle bus back to our hotel.  Jerlene was pretty sad but I promised her that we will definitely stayed till the fireworks end tomorrow.

It was a 10 mins bus ride to our hotel as it went to Disneyland Hotel before Hollywood Hotel.

We took our luggage from the concierge and proceeded to check in to our room.  From this point onward, we have a codeword "5723", which means our room.  Javier was the one who started it off.

After settling down with our stuffs in the room, we decided to go for our dinner at a little cafe called "Hollywood and Dine".  Jerlene and Javier loved the noodles.  When we were back in our room, Javier's tiredness seemed to have disappeared.  They then spent more than 30mins in the bathtub before taking their shower.  After their shower, they started to "own" the TV because there were so many channels showing Disney cartoons.  That's day 1 of our week long trip.