Madame Tussaud Hong Kong

Ep.14

“Exploration is really the essence of the human spirit.” – Frank Borman

Skyscrapers vs. us

A little bit flash back. During my first 4 days in HK, I manage to find an explorer girl out of my classmates, Riani, and we agreed to visit one of the most favorite places in Hong Kong, Victoria’s Peak and Madame Tussaud. On 30^th of July 2011, Riani and I start our day trip at 10 or 11 am. As we’re living in Tuen Mun, New Territories, we will take the 962 bus to the Jardine House Station in Central (or you can take any MTR and get off at Central Station), which costs us HKD18.80 per trip per each person.  We met Val and Doni near the bus station and it seems that they also had the same plan for today, so we decided to collided as a group to take the trip together.

Me and Riani in 962 bus.

It took us around 1 hour to get to Jardine House Station. We go of the bus and here it is. We forgot to search for the direction. I had a map on my hand, but we had no idea which way is which way. Val can speak in Cantonese, on the other hand, the other of us were just as hopeless as a donkey. Val try to get his phone online and browse the google maps (two thumbs up for google founder *smooch*). We finally know where to walk and on a normal rate, it will only takes like 15-20 minutes walk from the bus station to the tram station (we planned to take the tram up to the peak), but due to our narcissism, it took us more than an hour to get from Jardine House to the Tram Station (just for information, you will have to cross the street and walk towards the US embassy, sorry, my bad, I never remember the name of the street, I always use a building or places as my stakes). 

Walk to the tram

Central is the place where Hong Kong skyscrapers stood still. HSBC Tower, Bank of China, AIA Tower are those among others that form the famous landscape of Hong Kong. Well if you notice, they were the towers that always represents Hong Kong in any movies, such as Independence Day, 2012, The Day After Tomorrow, and many others.

The queuing is massive. But we played it smarter, we found a person holding a standing banner stated “package ticket available: Madame Tussaud, Tram Ride and Sky Terrace for HKD 268” (awesome! Calculation: tram ticket round trip is HKD 116, Madame Tussaud admission is HKD 150, Sky Terrace is *forget*, either way, we saved a lot!). 

We bought our ticket there and queue for the tram. Tick tock tick tock! It took us around another hour to queue. And after a long time chatting, a cup of ice blended coffee of Val, we finally managed to squeezed into the tram. I remember Kay said “whenever you ride the tram, try to sit on the right hand side, because the view is awesome on the right, on the other hand, left hand side view is just jungle.” It was totally true! Actually, we were standing in the middle (in fact, we didn’t manage to get any seat), so we can still look both side view from the tram.

Adopted children of Brangelina.

We went directly to Madame Tussaud entrance. I supposed it was around 1 or 2 pm by the time me we start taking picture of all the wax statue of world stars. Madame Tussaud Hong Kong is where, Andy Lau, Jacky Chan, and Bruce Lee’s statues displayed along with many other important people either in China, Asia and worldwide. We took like hundreds? NAH! We took almost thousand pictures within few hours. Sometimes we even took the picture first than read about who that statue is and what’s so special about him/her. There are few rooms: International actors and actresses, Movie, Sports, Asian actors and actresses, Cartoon, Royalty, Presidents and Important people, and Music. Let me list some of them: Lady Gaga was there as well as Madonna, Beckham, The Beatles, Twins, Jay Chow, Robert Pattison, Amita Bachan, Lady Diana, Queen Elizabet, Mozart, Shakespeare, Obama, Astro Boy, Spiderman and many many others.We managed to finished the photo session (read: madame tussaud tour) by 7.30 pm. It was merely due to our nature call (read: Hunger). We bought some souvenirs at the exit of Madame Tussaud and headed directly to Burger King.

View from the Sky Terrace

After we filled our fuel, we went to the Sky Terrace, where you can see the overview of Hong Kong. There were actually two places where you can see the landscape of Hong Kong, Tsim Sha Tsui or Victoria Peak. It depends on your preference, from the same eye level or from the above. It was damn crowded up there, as we had to squeeze to take a good spot to take a picture. Took us around an hour to be amazed by the night view of Hong Kong skyscrapers. The lamps view blew me away, but the crowd kept my feet in HK, it still in HK if it is crowded. We printed bought our picture downstairs and we head home. We’re still full of energy that we still shared some stories along the way. We arrived back to our apartment by 10 pm. and bid farewell to each other. It was such a nice one-day trip on our (wait a minute..how many days have we been in HK?) fourth day in Hong Kong (we really can’t hold our ass down). 

Val put his sunglasses on Einstein. Cool!

 “The outcome of a trip would be different when you spend it with companions that have the same interest as you.” – Me.