Saturday, 2 November, 2013

Well, we are off to another Duck Crawl in Hong Kong. This is the third one of these that we have done, all organised by Roy and Selena Moorfield. For those of you that do not know Roy, he is a long time wine consultant and expert that I first met in the 70s at Expovin and the Victorian Winemakers events. He has been the Wine Consultant for Cathay Pacific for well over 20 years and so knows just about everyone and everything about Hong Kong, as well as France and other wine areas. We have been on three wine tours with Roy in France which were pretty special too. Maybe I will do a posthumous Blog on these one day.

So, early on Saturday morning we head out to the airport. Gary Benbow has very kindly offered to drive us out there in our car so we don’t incur Taxi charges. Early in the day, everything runs quite smoothly – well it is air travel we are talking about – not much traffic on the road, smooth check-in, relatively quick through security and the immigration, Duty Free for pick up, for when we arrive back, fine and into the lounge. The plane is to depart (mostly) on time. We are flying Cathay Pacific for a change and for a real difference we have signed up for Premium Economy instead of business class. Comments on PE: in a separate cabin with seats that have more leg room that standard back of bus. The seats do not lay back to a full bed which I understood in advance. There are space problems when the person in front inclines his seat fully but the front row is not full so I move up there.

The menu is OK with a breakfast and late lunch with a couple of reasonable choices; one white and one French red. Good choice of new release movies on the entertainment system. One significant complaint – the Stewards serving us are the same as the ones serving the entire Economy section which was full. As a result, it was difficult to get served for long periods – I think I had the call button on for over 30 minutes at one stage before service finally arrived. I think that I had two glasses of wine which for a 9 hours flight is not very much. The food was OK while not being brilliant.

I managed to get a lot of work done on the flight, which helped the time pass by well. I watched a movie towards the end – White House Down, which was a variation of a Die Hard scene. OK.

When we land in Hong Kong, there is the usual long queue to get through immigration but it moved very quickly, unlike the first time I landed in Hong Kong 5 years ago. The bags come our relatively quickly and after collecting some HK Dollars from an ATM we catch a cab to the Hotel. There is a fair bit of traffic as we get near our Hotel which is the Renaissance Harbour View in Wan Chai. After a bit of a queue at check-in we go t our room. We were advised that there was lots of construction going on, which is five floors directly below us. However, the room is very nice – a corner room which was bigger than the standard rooms. All in all I have had much worse flights and travel experiences.

Roy and Selena have got an upgrade package which allows access to a special lounge for Happy Hour between 5:30 and 7:30. They invite us to join them as guests which we do. There is a smorgasboard of hot and cold snacks, two red wines (Australian and French), white wine, champagne, beer and spirits. Nice and relaxing and about the right amount of food since we had had lunch on the plane only a few hours before. Off to the room at the end of HH albeit Julie goes walkabout for a few hours.

Not any photos today – I am clearly out of practice. I will do much better for the rest of the week.

Actually, overnight I decided that I could not have a post without photos so decided to put in a few from an event in Melbourne a little before the Hong Kong trip. We had gone to a wine tasting at Collins Place for the award winners from the Royal Melbourne Wine Show. There were some quite good wines that we tried, including the Jimmy
Watson Trophy winner which was a Pinot Noir, the Yabby Lake Block 1, 2012 Pinot Noir, for the first time ever. My comment was about the same as everyone else’s “not bad for a Pinot”. Afterwards, we went to Bamboo House which was a short walk away.