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When I had the opportunity to use frequent flyer miles for an overseas trip, I decided to use them to go over a different sea than usual for a trip to Asia in November 2002. Here is a report on that trip to Hong Kong, Macau, Vietnam, and Cambodia.
TRIP TO ASIA, NOVEMBER 2002
Amc2004-09-13 14:42:34
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I made it out of areas perceived as risky and this connection went smoothly.
I got through Hong Kong arrival formalities, and once again took the A21 bus to my hotel, in the same area as before. This time I had to stand on the lower level of the bus for most of the ride, and I was ready to get off at my stop. For this night, I was booked at the Holiday Inn Golden Mile on Nathan Rd. I had built up Holiday Inn Priority Club points, mostly from using a credit card; a standard free night is 15,000 points, but in U.S. cities of any interest it generally takes 25,000 points. I found that this HK hotel offered it at 15,000, so I took my free night there. It was fine for my brief stay, and I wonder if it had the same management as my previous HK hotel; there were so many similarities in the setup of the room and the phone numbers were one digit apart.
For this late afternoon and evening in Hong Kong, I went back to the promenade and found that many of the HK Island high-rises now had a side covered with Christmas decorations, and I did some final shopping. In this stay, I saw some of the things people warn about in HK but I hadn’t seen in my previous stay: unfriendly customer service and overcharging. In particular I have a complaint about a camera shop, the Hong Kong City Shop in a Nathan Rd. storefront of the Chungking Mansions, charging HK$164 to develop 36 pictures, while the photo booth at the Star Ferry terminal had charged HK$37.80 to develop 26, both with 1-hour service and the same type and size paper. I had my final dinner in the hotel’s Cantonese restaurant. I checked out around 5.30 a.m. and got the return bus to the airport.
Transpacific flights
In summer 2001 I reached 80,000 miles on Northwest Airlines. None of these were from intercontinental flights; 40,000 were for switches of long-distance phone service. I was also alert to other promotions they offered, such
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See photographs from:
Vietnam Gallery
,
Macau Gallery
,
Hong Kong Gallery
,
Cambodia Gallery
