Good morning from Hong Kong! A lazy in-room breakfast was just what the doctor ordered.

There's also the "Building of 1000 A***holes" (on the left) and the "Big Beard Trimmer" (on the right). Ok, I made one of those up, but it's not the one you think.

That's literally just the teas. I'm having something called "Organic Misty Cloud Tea". Wish me luck. Meg's as happy as a Meg in tea.

Flutterbies!

Or where to charge up your expensive electric cars.

After lunch, we stopped in at St John's (Anglican) Cathedral, and lit a candle to pray for a good marriage and to thank God that we survived the weddings more or less intact.

A little further up is the HSBC building, a cathedral to modern finance. The atrium is flanked by two lions, Stephen and Stitt, named after two early managers of the bank.

Also, I haven't been able to quite get away from work. In characteristic style, the Links office is in the same building as Armani, Chloe, Bottega Veneta, etc...

Afterwards, we headed out for an iconic Wednesday night activity in Hong Kong - the Happy Valley Races (when in Rome...)

The vibe was pretty electric - didn't win anything, but had a great time. Live music, burgers, beer in plastic cups, picking horses with romantic names - what more could we want?

We left a little love message at the Peak.

No, actually, go home. With a new Stella McCartney dress, some Fendi shoes and a Balenciaga handbag. Don't worry about the kids, they'll be fine - just stick em in the magical Christmas fairy land for a few hours.

Next up was the duck foie gras (which didn't last long enough for a photo), followed by the aori cuttlefish with tear-drop peas, buttermilk emulsion and other delicious things. Again, I'd normally be wary of cuttlefish, but this was amaaazing - so tender and delicious.

The "main" course was the line-caught kinmedai, from Fukuoka, Japan. This was my favourite dish of the night (perhaps ever). So rich and just perfectly-cooked. Heaven on a plate.

Then dessert - two of them, first the honey-poached celery, peanuts, goats cheese and goats milk ice-cream (the celery treatment makes it taste a bit similar to rhubarb)...

And second, the chocolate and tofu ganache and foam, cacao sorbet, almond praline and crispy cacao sheets.

And (following presentation of the birthday cake) a little selection of Petit fours. The level of detail in each one was incredible.

Overall, this was a night we won't forget for a long time. I think it was my favourite meal ever. Worth every dollar (and there were many, many dollars...)

It was a really beautiful (and surprisingly long) journey taking us across bays and mountains, to eventually reach the Tian Tan Buddha (which you can see in the distance below) and the Po Lin Monastery.

On our arrival at the Monastery, we were treated to a delicious vegetarian lunch.

Afterwards, we ascended to the Buddha itself - the largest outdoor seated Buddha in the world, and visible from the airport as you come in to land in Hong Kong.

The views from all around are quite spectacular.

Afterwards, we cabled back down as the light was fading.

Upon our return to Hong Kong (after the aforementioned "lost in shops" moment), we caught the Star Ferry across the harbour and back to see some spectacular views of the skyline.

Two tired little honeymooners now. Off to Taipei next; I think a good lie down is in order.

On the plus side, I have a new favourite beer.

We spent the afternoon templing through the Wanhua district, which is an older, Japanese-influenced former trading district. Many of the shops and temples are very well preserved, particularly the Qingshan Temple on Guiyang Street (3rd, 4th, 5th and 6th pictures below), which was built in 1856 and is probably one of the largest and most elaborate "old" temples I've seen).

The area reminded me a little of Penang in Malaysia, although for the most part it was a lot cleaner and more organised. That said, of course, we did come across a few oddities that reminded me of Hanoi's old quarter, and reminded Meg of Bangalore, including this novel clothes-drying apparatus about three floors up:

Some kitsch street art and B-movie posters in the restored Qing-era Bo-Pi-Liao Street:

A museum which seemed to be devoted to Taiwanese pop music (or perhaps just one Taiwanese pop star, I couldn't tell because there were no English captions):

One of the guides was most enthusiastic, and showed me a video on his phone of "great Spanish man, Domingo" singing a famous Taiwanese song. Meg chose that moment to urgently be somewhere else, so I felt obliged to listen to the whole thing and nod approvingly.

I'm not sure what this even is, it appears to be a pile of cardboard masquerading as a building.

Around dinner time, we emerged at the Red House in the Ximending district, an octagonal red brick building from the early 1900s that was Taipei's first public market. It now houses some very trendy and chic young creative markets (the kind you see selling artisanal handmade jewellery in little pop-up kiosks in upmarket shopping centres).

We had dinner at a Lonely Planet recommendation, the unassuming (and creatively-named) "Thai Food" in a little courtyard behind the Red House. It was delicious.

As night fell, we had a little walk through Ximending, which is a very modern, very crowded and very commercial district. This is where young Taipei comes out to play.

It's tall (and stands out like a sore thumb in a city that's not particularly full of tall buildings), but also quite bulky (designed to look like a bamboo shoot). As such, it doesn't particularly look world-beatingly tall (certainly the sleek reflectiveness of 1WTC is more breathtaking).

The views from the 91st floor are pretty good though.

As are the sunsets on the open-air deck.

Inside, between about the 87th and 91st floors, is an interesting curiosity - an enormous "tuned mass damper", a super- heavy layered steel ball that prevents the building from swaying around too much in high winds.

The maximum displacement ever recorded was during a typhoon, when the damper swayed by up to 10cm. They're used in a number of super-tall buildings, but this is the only one in the world that's open to the public.

While there are still vast sections of the factory that remain unused, large chunks have been converted into small-batch hobby manufacturing spaces, architecture and design studios, cafes, food trucks, a cute little bookshop and even a music studio.

As you walk through the post-industrial corridors, you can see and hear leatherworkers tapping out monograms on wallets and handbags; making jewellery; drinking matcha lattes as they draft up architectural drawings on their laptops. It's like the Maitland High Street of Nan's era, reimagined by a hyper-savvy Asian generation that is already too cool for Facebook.

At some point, the post-war generations convinced us to abandon this quaint, "human-scale" commerce. They convinced us that having a "proper" economy meant having 300 identical shops selling the same jeans for $800 each with not a sole human sales assistant in sight; an economy where house prices have been driven up to ridiculous levels; and where wage growth is flatlining. Pretty soon, they'll wonder why nobody is buying their $800 jeans.

Of course, a modern economy can't simply be based on people selling each other home-brewed iced teas and artisanal pencil cases. But right here, among the repurposed relics of the past - this feels like the future.

Lonely Planet had warned that the food options around Sun Moon Lake are relatively bland and limited - I went for the vegetarian option to be on the safe side (the other options included strange things like pork knuckles, lamb tripe and beef intestines). All things considered, "boiled lettuce" wasn't so bad.

We took a couple of nice walking trails around one part of the lake. The weather was perfect, and the water was an amazing aqua colour - I had expected the weather in Taiwan at this time of year to be misty and cool, but this was like a warm spring day in Melbourne (notwithstanding the colour of the trees).

Up on a hill, we visited the smallish Longfeng Temple.

The views from the temple are quite spectacular.

After the long journey back to Taipei, we had Indian for dinner at Nataraj, just down the road from our hotel. I had the beef rogan josh washed down with a Taiwan beer; Meg had the okra. It was very good - not a pork knuckle in sight!

After an early start, we were a bit snookered by the train timetabling from Taipei to Hualien - there's a "limited stops" train down the east coast (which is not really a high speed train, but which covers the distance in a couple of hours) and an "express" train (which, it turns out, is neither fast nor modern, and takes three and a half hours). Needless to say, we somehow ended up on the latter.

It was a journey that will be more memorable for its atmospherics than its speed. Meg generously thought that the train was about 30 years old; I thought it may have been built by Moses. (I'm exaggerating, but picture the trains in "Slumdog Millionaire" and you're not far from it). Needless to say, there was no WiFi, and so I got a lot of reading done.

When we finally got to Hualien, we were met by the Silks Place shuttle bus driver, who carried our bags for us and gave us two bottles of mineral water, which were gratefully received. The bus ride from Hualien into Taroko Gorge (ie, through the gorge itself) was incredible - one of the most breathtaking things I think I've ever seen. The sheer scale of the mountains (with the tops disappearing up into the clouds) is incomparable to anything I've seen outside a "Lord of the Rings" movie. As we were bouncing along in the bus with our jaws dropping, I wondered aloud what kind of rock the gorge was made out of - "it can't be limestone, it doesn't have that Jenolan Caves look. Maybe granite?" As it turns out, it's actually marble - but more on the gorge in the next post.

You can see the marble seams quite clearly throughout the gorge, and there are huge marble boulders just lying around all over the river bed.

Later that evening (after enjoying afternoon tea, happy hour and a full buffet dinner) we received ginger tea with our turn-down service. Silks Place was clearly the pick of all the hotels we stayed at.

We also saw a little bit of monkey business on the footpath a bit further up, but luckily we didn't step in it.

We then walked the Baiyang Trail (although part of it was closed due to landslides). It begins with a long, dark tunnel through the mountain, for which you need a torch. The tunnel starts about halfway along that semi-enclosed road, and goes right through the mountain behind.

On the other side, there's a gentle meandering walk through the misty mountains (and a bit more monkey business).

Afterwards, we had a bit more tea and a snack at the hotel, before heading back in to Hualien to get the train back up the coast to our hotel at Linkou.

After some detailed consideration of the Byzantine ticketing and timetabling methodologies of Hualien Station, I have concluded that while trains on the west coast of Taiwan are brilliant, trains on the east coast are antediluvian. They do not work properly. If I had to travel from Hualien to Linkou again and my only choices were to catch the train or to fly in a 40-year old two-seater plane piloted by an alcoholic, I'd say "Pour me a stiff one and scoot over, good buddy."

By the time we arrived In Linkou, it was about 11pm (us having left Taroko Gorge some seven hours earlier). Our hotel was very nice (a Sheraton), but room service had finished at 10. Thankfully, we were able to get nachos, lasagne and a beer from the hotel bar (which continued taking orders until the devilishly irresponsible time of 11.30pm).

It was a disappointing end to what was otherwise a wonderful holiday. No doubt we will laugh about it one day (probably the day on which the Taiwan Railways Administration goes into liquidation).