Holiday at Home: Part 3!

The Beach & Piazza

Here is part three of our recent 3-day weekend: the beach & Piazza! Hong Kong has a lot of coastline (733 km), but not many long beaches. A lot of the coastline is rock, or harbour, and often has very little sand. Many of the beaches are small coves, which don't lend themselves to walking along for hours as we Brits are used to. The beach at the Gold Coast was the longest beach I've seen here to date! 

The view from our hotel window

A deserted beach on a sunny Monday morning!

Another thing that made The Gold Coast unique was the piazza just around the corner from the hotel. We discovered it on our first night as we were wandering around the beautiful gardens. Behind the hotel is also the Gold Coast Yacht and Country Club. 

The Gold Coast Piazza

On Sunday night there was an Arts and Crafts market, which lent itself to a lovely atmosphere of stalls and shoppers. With its European-style design it feels like a little slice of the Mediterranean in Hong Kong. 

With the Gold Coast Yacht and Country Club in the background

Arts & Crafts stalls and shoppers

Holiday at Home: Part 2

The Hotel


Recently Nick & I had a 3-day weekend and couldn't decide where to go. We have previously stayed in a luxurious 5-star hotel in Macau and wondered about doing that again. In the end we decided that Hong Kong had both sightseeing and luxury to offer, without the hassle of travel. 

The Gold Coast Hotel

We booked ourselves into the 5-star Gold Coast Hotel for two nights. The Gold Coast is situated beyond Kowloon in the area of Hong Kong which borders China. Despite Hong Kong being relatively small (426 sq miles or 1,104 km²) we calculated that by public transport it would take us about 90 minutes to get there. We therefore  treated ourselves to a taxi from Tsim Sha Tsui MTR station (for those of you living in HK it costs about HK$150 from TST) to cut down on the journey time a little. 

Inside fountain

To our surprise we were greeted by porters and doormen with white gloves on! The main lobby was vast with comfy seating, glass lifts, the main restaurant (where we had our delicious Jazz Buffet - check out Holiday at Home: Part 1 for more details) and beautiful golden fountains. We certainly feel that we've moved up in the world a little since our days of hostels in Germany! The room was fairly standard, but extremely comfortable with a mini bar that wasn't too extortionately expensive. Best of all it offered a view of the nearby beach, but more on that next week...

The beautiful gardens

This hotel is also used as a wedding venue and it doesn't take much calculation to work out why. Along with the decadence inside, there are beautiful gardens at the back of the hotel.