We’ve just spent our first night at Eaton Hotel, after arriving in Hong Kong yesterday at about 4pm. It’s about 7am right now, and for some reason this time I feel relatively free of jet-lag and ready to go out and explore the local surroundings.

Unlike our last trip here (was it only 18 months ago?), this time we’re staying in Kowloon on the mainland, rather than Hong Kong Island itself. We haven’t really been out much yet, but just by looking out the window it already seems to be much busier than before. The weather looks pretty unpleasant, but that shouldn’t put too much on a crimp on our near term plans, which for the next few days involves… shopping.

The flight over was actually superb. Bearing in mind how much I normally complain about “how much I hate flying” and “how I’d rather have my wisdoms removed than sit in cattle class for 12 hours”, I have to admit that the service provided by British Airways was pretty good. We had a very personable steward attending our part of the plane, and a very good selection of movies to keep my mind off about how cramped and uncomfortable I was. We had some very good seats this time, which I think made all the difference*.

We arrived at the hotel by means of a highly efficient bus service an hour after we touched down, and after correcting our usual mistake of booking a twin-room rather than a double (bagging ourselves a much nicer one in the process), we settled in for the evening.

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* One thing I would recommend to any traveller flying cattle class long-haul is to do you research and check out seatguru.com before they fly - even in the lower ranks, some seats are much better than others and we managed to get some very good ones near the back of the plane that gave us twice as much space for storing all our carry on junk.