Wax on, Wax off

If there’s a must do in Hong Kong, then of course it’s on every tourists itinerary to hit ‘The Peak’. Basically ‘The Peak’ overlooks the entire city, so of course my mates and I assumed that it would have been more ideal to overlook the city of Hong Kong at night time. It was most definitely a beautiful experience to view Hong Kong from high above and there were no surprises as to how cold it was. It was well worth freezing our asses off, however regardless the view was absolutely spectacular! It felt rather surreal considering it was like just looking over a neon concrete jungle.

On our trip to The Peak we also made the time to pay a visit to the Madame Tassauds Wax Museum, where you could find a collection of various wax works of celebrities. We definitely had the time of our lives considering how overly luvo my mates and I were when it came to photos. This museum was practically made for us… for the very luvo of course haha. The amount of poses we had to come up with each celebrity made it all worthwhile. We wouldn’t have thought we’d ever run out of pose ideas but however eventually it did feel like it. There were just too many celebrity wax figures to have your fun with!

After a long night spent at Madame Tassauds and basking in beautiful city scenery at The Peak we thought we might as well check off another typical activity that we just simply had to do while we’re Hong Kong… Karaoke! While my mates and I caught the first taxi to one of Hong Kong’s ‘popular’ karaoke joint, Le-way Karaoke - by memory I think that’s what it’s called? So it was time to get our singing on! However on our journey from The Peak to Karaoke certain events did not fall as smooth as we’d expect it to.

So the story is, that my mates and I found ourselves all tucked into a small vehicle with a suspicious taxi driver. We’ve always been warned about kidnappers and fake/deceiving taxi drivers. So for that very moment all six of us were squished up tightly into his a tiny single taxi. So the first of our suspicions we all noticed that he did not bother running the taxi fare by a pre-set meter like most or possibly even all taxis that we’ve encountered during our stay in Hong Kong would. Second of all, haggling was not ever seen evident in Hong Kong as to Thailand or Malaysia where it was most common. The taxi driver was happy to ‘haggle’ a negotiable fare price to our destination. He seemed rather desperate to take us to start with ,which was also another scary part. So basically to top off our high suspicions further whilst seated within his vehicle, our taxi driver wasn’t even sure where the popular Karaoke joint was and began to make several random phone calls where a few times we heard him mentioned the name of our destination. Things were feeling rather uneasy at this point and highly suspicious to us when we noticed several dodgy hand written stickers stuck all across the inside of his vehicle instead of the more noticeably professional government stickers that were seen in other taxis. However the most scariest moment was that we realised our taxi driver did not even have his license displayed like all taxi drivers would legally have to do so. We were all beginning to feel extremely vulnerable and beyond afraid for all our safety. Other events such as speeding past major roads as well as speeding past the toll collection points escalated the experience even further. At one stage we were all thinking we were possibly being kidnapped haha. However looking back at our over analytical paranoia it's funny to remember back at some of the strategic plans we came up with while we were in that taxi. We spent the time writing up final notes on mobile phones ‘in the event’ that we were going to end up kidnapped or found dead or something on the lines haha. So basically we were trying to leave trails of evidence of our ‘killer taxi driver’ for people to find haha. We used our digital cameras to film a final message and attempted to capture a clear shot of the taxi driver and labelling him as the ‘potential taxi driver killer’ if we were to end up in a nasty situation LOL! It's all too hilarious looking back at it now at our paranoia.and especially to think at how overly influneced we are by Horror/Thriller movies. Re-running the videos and recordings we conducted at the time puts me into stitches. It’s of course funny now, however during that very moment of course I don’t think I’ve really ever been a situation where my fear has ever heightened to such an extent. Nevertheless a fairly hilarious scenario that will forever be mentioned for future laughs between my travel buddies. It was most definitely an odd experience… got to love holidays!