The map came in extremely handy... while the MTR was the easiest and most convenient means of transport, it's like problem solving when planning for the route each morning. The challenge here was to minimise the number of transits, and hopefully, also to reduce the amount of walking and climbing (oh yes! for some stations, it was not easy to find the escalators, which was called 电梯 which, in Singapore, we call 电动扶梯. We also attempted to look out for lifts, which in HK was called 升降机. This was in anticipation that we might need to lug our luggage from station to station.
Our base station is University 大学 (the light blue line, heading to Lo-Wu). It's less than 5 minutes walk from the hotel lift to the station.
Indeed, Kowloon Tung 九龙塘 was our most visited interchange.
Well, with the Octopus card, it's definitely very easy to check in/out the stations.
Bought the card from Changi Recommends (instead of Klook). Reason being the card could be collected in Singapore. That saved us the time from searching for the shop/ station counter to redeem the card with the digital voucher. It came with a base of HKD50, which over the few days, we topped up with another HKD200. Now, still have balance of more than HKD50 for the next trip :)
Something I found quite amazing about the MTR was the way it used the digital displays:
One was kept in touch with the news, the weather forecast, which I thought it's a very good use of on-the-move technology! In addition, apart from some TV commercials, there were also short clips that guide passengers how to do simple exercises while standing (e.g. the “缩肚功”). There definitely not a single minute of boredom.
Of course, to quantify the above, I have the advantage of being able to understand and use the language - Cantonese!
On the first night, we took the tram from the Admiralty MTR station to Pedder Street 毕打街 . From there, we took the ferry from the Victoria Habour to Tsim Sha Tsui.
Well, the same harbour served ferries to the outlying islands, too.
The octopus card could be used for the airport express, though would not have any discount.
Indeed, for airport express, as long as there were 2 or more travellers together, one could purchase the discount package, that can only be bought on the day of use.
The airport express was comfortable, and was similar to the bullet trains in Japan (though not as spacious). There's a luggage area near the exit for one to park the bigger pieces of luggage. It toook us approximately 30 minutes to travel from the Kowloon Station to the Airport.
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