Stanley and the pram

Once we had finished at Ocean Park we decided to move on to Stanley.   The journey over was our first experience of Hong Kong taxis and couldn't quite believe how cheap they were.   We headed for Stanley because we'd heard there was an interesting market in this expat enclave; Laura had her mind set on beaches, whilst I was quite hungry! I won out, and fortunately we ended up in wonderful colonial building which was the former officers mess from the city centre (now called Murray House).

The building had been removed from the city centre during the 1980s, being taken apart brick by brick to sit in storage for around 20 years, prior to returning to its former glory in Stanley on the south side of the island.  We had expected the pizza restaurant (guide book!) which is odd enough but it was even odder to sit down to Spanish tapas.

An increasingly frequent occurrence, once John had lost interest in food (usually signalled by him standing up in his chair and trying to climb over the back of it) it was time to move on.  I wanted to see the old war cemetery so we crossed the promenade and headed east - arriving at about 1730 - just in time to see what I assume was the CWGC caretaker running for his bus (it's the only logical explanation for a Chinaman telling me 'going for my bus' whilst running out of a graveyard!). Fortunately for us the graveyard remained open - an interesting place with a mixture of tombs, war graves, and internee graves.  We spent about 15 to 20 minutes there, at which point we decided to take a very very long taxi journey back over towards our hotel which ended up costing the grand sum of about 10 quid.

That evening I searched high and low across the Internet, eventually finding a new MacLaren stroller on craigslist.  I had a chat on whatsapp with the vendor, and eventually steeled myself to go out to an unknown station in an unknown town to meet an unknown person to give them one hundred pounds. In the back of my mind was the thought that this was some kind of elaborate honey trap whereby tourist fathers are lured dark passages to be filled in by five Chinamen in order to relieve them of £100.  Fortunately I met J, who was a perfectly nice finance guy from a hotel soap manufacturer - who provided me with an up to date version of the MacLaren pram for a bargain price (for Hong Kong!).