Hong Kong 2025 Day 7: Half Day in HK & Flying Home (半日香港.返新)
- Rick
- Aug 11
- 6 min read
11th August 2025, Monday | 🌤
Last day of the Hong Kong trip and our return flight to Singapore was scheduled at 3:40pm. We planned to head straight to the airport after checking-out from the hotel at 11:30pm. But first, we needed breakfast / brunch. We intended to settle it at any of the tea cafes (茶餐厅) located near the hotel.
We left The Cityview Hotel at around 9am, walked passed Nathan Cafe (LY彌敦冰室) less than 5 minutes away, took a brief glimpse of the menus pasted on their glass panels and went in. Only breakfast menus were available before 11am. We ordered two breakfast sets: a Satay Beef with Instant Noodle Soup + Ham & Cheese Croissant + Hong Kong-style coffee (招牌沙爹牛肉公仔面 + 芝士火腿牛角酥 + 香浓咖啡, HK$38) and a Ham & Egg Sandwich + Silky Milk Tea (火腿炒蛋三文治 + 丝袜奶茶, HK$35). The milky coffee and tea were served in metal cups.
The cafe’s signature Satay Beef was smooth, very tender and with rich satay flavours — tastier than the satay beef that I had the night before. The satay sauce also added its flavours to the curly, springy instant noodle — for info., "公仔面" was a longstanding brand of instant noodles in Hong Kong that started in the late 1960s, it was not the name of a particular dish.
I kept forgetting that coffee served in Hong Kong tea cafes were milk-rich coffee and tasted very much like coffee-flavoured milk rather than milk-flavoured coffee. To be fair, Nathan Cafe’s coffee was unsweetened and had rich milky flavours like their silky milk tea.
After breakfast, we returned to the hotel to get ready for check-out — and submitted our SG Arrival Cards (nearly forgotten about it). I changed to a long track pants, without any metallic parts nor belt, for the flight later — it was cold on the SIA flight to Hong Kong, so we were preparing for the coldness, just in case.
11:30am, we checked out of the hotel. It was drizzling very lightly and there was no need for umbrellas. We came to Kadorar et Levain Bakery (加多娜天然酵母手作面包店) again for one of its signature pastries that was rolled out at 11:30am — the Pistachio Sticky Rice Pancake (开心果烧饼, HK$20). We bought a Matcha Sticky Rice Pancake with Red Bean (抹茶豆沙烧饼, HK$8) and a Chocolate & Walnut Soft Cookie (核桃朱古力软奇曲, HK$15) too. We would eat them at the airport while waiting for our flight.
We missed a CityFlyer Service (城巴机场快线) A21 to the airport, while walking towards "Pitt Street" bus stop with our luggage in tow, but it was not long before the next one came along slightly before 12pm. The one-way fare was again HKD34.60. We put our luggage on the racks provided and sat in the lower deck, keeping an eye on our luggage at the same time.
One problem with tourists taking airport buses was big luggage. Some with small luggage put them on lower racks, forcing those with bigger luggage to stack them on top of others on the upper racks, and they happily disappeared onto the upper deck of the bus. And sure enough, a big luggage slipped off the upper rack, when the bus made a sharp turn, with a loud thud on the floor and some liquid spilled out from the luggage. Fortunately, no one was hurt. A couple of passengers in the lower deck helped the bus driver to rearranged the luggage, thus, wasting a bit of time. The owner of the dropped baggage was oblivious to what happened and would be surprised to find his belongings wet, or things broken, at the airport or after reaching their next destination.
When flying from Hong Kong (Chek Lap Kok) International Airport (香港国际机场, HKIA), it would be advisable to be at the airport around 3 hours before departure time. All check-ins to flights were usually done at Terminal 1, but some flights could be taking off from Terminal 2 and would require additional time to get to Terminal 2 for boarding — I did not know about this in 2008, arrived at the airport 2 hours prior, spent some time queuing to check-in, and nearly missed my flight that was flying from Terminal 2.
We reached HKIA Terminal 1 at 12:48pm, taking about 50 minutes from Yau Ma Tei. On entering the Departure Hall of Terminal 1, what caught our attention was a life-size mock-up of the world's first aircraft, by the Wright brothers, hanging from the ceiling.
A weighing station indicated that my luggage had added around 2.5Kg, bringing its total weight to 11Kg. After a quick registration at the self-service kiosk for SIA Flight SQ893, we dropped our check-in luggage. We were to board the flight at Gate 5 of Terminal 1 — good, no need to transit to Terminal 2.
We found some empty seats near the check-in counters and ate the pastries that we bought from Kadorar et Levain. The Pistachio Sticky Rice Pancake was delicious indeed, with rich pistachio flavours from crunchy minced nut and sweet pistachio paste enclosed in baked glutinous rice mochi skin. The Chocolate & Walnut Soft Cookie has sweet chocolate with cuts of crunchy walnut in soft cookie. The Matcha Sticky Rice Pancake with Red Bean gave off a light hint of matcha flavour in the skin and the richer flavour of red bean paste soon dominates the pastry. Although they were supposedly sweet pastries, their sweetness levels were just-right, or lower, and nice!
When munching on the snacks, several groups of young girls ran through the airport, some tripped and fell, some dropped their belongings. They were probably chasing after some celebrities who were flying off / returning to Hong Kong. Such star-chasing (追星) scenes were still pretty common in Hong Kong.
1:40pm, we entered the restricted area for Departures via automated gantries that used facial recognition to grant access. Next was the centralised bag checking area for departing tourists. Many of them were caught by surprises (probably first-time flying) and had to drink up or dump their bottled water or any fluid exceeding or not in 100ml containers and in 1-litre transparent plastic bags. Many were told to remove their belts. Lastly, immigration clearance was done by scanning our passports at another set of automated gantries and clearance by facial recognition again. We were through in less than 15 minutes.
Before continuing to Gate 5, where we would be boarding our flight, we had more than an hour to spare and I still had some Hong Kong Dollars left on my YouTrip card — I decided to spend it. The pastries that we ate were quite filling, although not to the extend of being full, but we decided to skip lunch and looked forward to the inflight meal later.
We checked out Kee Wah Bakery (奇华饼家) and bought 2 boxes of Winter Melon Wife Cakes (冬蓉老婆饼, 5 pieces/box at HK$62), with 10% discount for 2 boxes, and a pack of Coffee Cookies with Cashew (腰果咖啡曲奇, HK$44) — I found out later that Kee Wah Bakery had opened two outlets in Singapore, but buying the wife cakes (to be specific) in Hong Kong was cheaper.
At Gate 5, we waited for just 20 minutes and boarding commenced at 3:10pm. SIA Flight SQ893 took off at around 4pm after a slight delay. The Boeing jet was not as chilly as the Airbus jet that flew us to Hong Kong — the captain had also announced that he tuned down the air-conditioning for take-off and had maintained a cool temperature throughout the flight.
Inflight meal was served at 5:20pm and we had fish fillet with potato cubes, shrimp salad, Häagen-Dazs ice-cream, a small bun with butter and drinking water (as usual). This would be my dinner.
The jet touched down at Changi International Airport at 7:15pm. For Singaporeans, immigration clearance was passport-less via iris scanning and took less than a minute. But the wait for luggage collection took nearly half an hour as an earlier flight was still offloading its last batch of luggage. 8:20pm, we were on our way home.
2 days after returning from Hong Kong, Typhoon Podul wreaked havoc in Taiwan and missed Hong Kong by some 400Km resulting in a Typhoon Signal 1. We were fortunate to have missed the typhoons — barring the slight delay when flying off on Day 1.
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