Rooms with Views

I have been completely offline for the last 10 days, and boy was it a weird feeling.

The last 10 days have been like one exciting travel roller-coaster moving from one place to the next, trying to cram in as many great experiences as possible in a very short time. Now, I need some quiet time to sort through all the photos and all the experiences, and choose what I want to share on my blog. So much happened, I just have to edit it to a few moments!

First off, I know I need to start with the most awesome time we spent in Hong Kong visiting Disneyland. We really wanted to stay at the Disneyland Hotel, but could not get a booking. Instead, we settled for the Kowloon Shangri-la. Or at least, we thought we were settling. When we arrived there on Christmas day noon, we found the hotel buzzing with activity. The rooms were all full up, and nothing was available for us to use.

We were given some coffee and asked to wait in the coffee shop for a room to free up. Two hours later, and we were still sitting. Fed up, we decided not to waste any more time. We left our luggage at the bell desk, did some light freshening up at the lobby restrooms (brushing your teeth in a public restroom is kind of gross!), and left for Disneyland.

Ended up having a great time in Disneyland (fodder for another post), and came back past midnight to find that we had been upgraded to a suite to make up for all the inconvenience, they said (I suspect they did not have any ordinary rooms free), but hey who’s complaining, right ;).

Getting upgraded because of non-availability actually became a kind of theme for us throughout our holidays. What luck!

Situated on the 18th floor facing, with wall-to-wall windows with amazing views of the Hong Kong harbour, we just luxuriated in all this grandeur of our suite.

Thanks to this hotel, I also got a chance to play around with the L’Occitane range of beauty products, which they stocked. Their Verbena shower gel and moisturizer was good, but their shea butter shampoo and conditioner really works to calm down the most frizz-prone hair. We requested the hotel staff for extra samples to take with us for the rest of our trip, and they happily obliged. We ended up really needing it after our salty sea dips in Phuket and Pattaya.

We thought our Hong Kong hotel room view was amazing, however the Mandarin Oriental hotel in Macau managed to top even that!

The Stratosphere tower is a popular bungee jumping spot. It’s a bit too nerve wracking for me though.

Highly recommend both the hotels. The rooms and the service were first class. The Chinese concierge at the Mandarin Oriental was beyond helpful when we were running late for our shuttle. Helped organize everything for us…even calling up folks from his personal cell phone! He was also quite the linguist speaking hindi, chinese, and portuguese! Wow!

What an awesome start to our vacation!