While sitting on the runway at Heathrow, waiting for our adventure to begin, we watched fireworks exploding all over West London. From the air it looked like a multi-coloured war-zone and was surrealy beautiful - I recommend everyone to try flying somewhere around bonfire night.

After a fairly gruelling but uneventful 12.5 hour flight we arrived at Chek Lap Kok (no giggling please) Hong Kong's new airport and made our first mistake - leaving a small bag on the plane under a seat - this was down to total lack of sleep rather than the fact that we're amateur travellers. Fortunately the plane was still on the ground being cleaned when we realised and we managed to run back through the arrivals lounge to retrieve it.

The airport is pretty spectacular, built on reclaimed land which was made by demolishing two nearby, mountainous islands and dumping the rock into the sea. This has been done all over the place here as so much of the terrain around HK is too steep to build on.

We were met by Jen's second-cousin Jo and driven back to their apartment in the New Territories (the mainland part of HK). Because land is at such a premium (the population is not far behind London's but is squeezed into an area 15% of the size) there are very few houses and almost everybody lives in huge sky-rise blocks of flats. We met the rest of Jo's family - husband Adrian and daughters Kaela (5) and Jorja (3) - then went out for a Chinese.

Chinese food here is quite different from the UK - most of the flavours are the same but they don't bother to hide the details of what you're eating - we were served roast pigeon whole (head and all) and all meat is presented with bones, fat and skin still attached. The Chinese tend to stuff everything into their mouths, chew it around and then spit out the bits that aren't so good, farting, burping and picking their noses at the same time. There is no such thing as table manners here and except for a bit of chopstick malcoordination, we fit in perfectly.

After going to bed pretty late and hugely tired, our jet-lagged bodies woke us up at 5am. We both felt rubbish, utterly exhausted but wide awake and as it was British dinner time, craving proper food. Determined not to just sit on the sofa and watch cable while we recovered from the jet-lag we got the bus over to HK island.

This is a great city to wander around. There's either something weird and wonderful going on at ground level or an awesome, gleaming, skyscraper towering up above you. The contrasts are enormous, with grimy, local poverty sandwiched between the massive monuments to international commerce.

In the afternoon we got the Star Ferry over to Kowloon (the peninsula of the mainland) this costs about 15p and gives you a great view of the harbour. We were so weary that we almost walked into a McDonald's but realised how awful that would be and opted for the place next door - Cafe Coral (we've since seen these everywhere and so assume they're the Chinese equivalent).

The next morning we woke at 6 (a marginal improvement) and headed over to Lantau island to see 'Big Buddha'. This statue is supposedly the biggest of him in the world at 34m high and is very impressive. He sits at the top of 260 steps in the Po Lin monastery and was built to house a rare Buddhist relic - Buddha's tooth (allegedly!). Here we decided to enjoy the tranquillity, drink some green tea and read a book on Buddhism that had been given to us by the monks. Unfortunately, our plan was foiled by an extremely obnoxious goose that waddled over and started honking loudly at us and refused to go away.

Later that day we bought ourselves a new digital camera (saving about £70 on the UK price) and had dinner looking over to the city which at night looks absolutely incredible. Not even New York can rival the skyline that you get here.

The weather's been scorching for the last couple of days and we've spent most of our time, going to the beach, eating barbecues and playing with the kids but last night we took the tram up to the Peak. This funicular is pretty scary and we reckon it's almost going up at 45 sometimes. The view of the city from up there is even better than from Kowloon and we were lucky enough to get a window seat in Cafe Deco - which must be one of the coolest places to eat in the world (posh but not too expensive, live jazz and HK laid out below you) - where we had a lovely meal and even better cocktails.

We've had an amazing time in HK and tomorrow we fly on to Bangkok - this is backwards in time which should help a bit with the jet-lag that we still haven't got over. We've been lucky enough to be able to start our trip staying with family in an air-conditioned, broadband-connected, comfortable apartment but the next couple of months are going to be considerably rougher. The real travelling begins now.