The Travel Diaries: Cheung Chau and Chloé Afternoon Tea at the Mandarin Oriental, Hong Kong

With our Vietnamese adventures behind us, Joss got ready to show me more of Hong Kong. Our first stop was the Mandarin Oriental's Clipper Lounge for their Chloé afternoon tea, so we dusted off our heels and set out to gobble up lots of cakes and catch up with a mutual friend.

I have to say, we were very excited about the afternoon tea. We were expecting the Chloé theme to come across strongly, maybe in the form of handbag shaped cakes or sandwiches fashioned into little dresses. Sadly, we were rather disappointed. The only hint of Chloé seemed to come from a chocolate bow atop one cake and a little chocolate plaque stating the brand name adorning another. It just wasn't the fashionista experience we were expecting!

Having said that, the afternoon tea was still rather enjoyable and reasonably priced, especially when compared to English afternoon teas. Our teapots were routinely refreshed and the scones were particularly delicious, as were the savoury tartlets. We had a lovely time nattering over cake, just not quite the time we were expecting. However we did manage to do a little celebrity spotting since the Hong Kong pop star William So and his entourage ended up sitting at the table behind us!

Our next excursion took us out to the little island of Cheung Chau, an old fishing island. Here, we sampled delicacies such as deep fried ice cream and balls of crushed ice, flavoured with a rainbow of different sauces.

After stuffing oursleves full of yummy snacks, we walked up along the steep seafront to the secret cave of Cheung Po Tsai, the notorious Hong Kong pirate.

 The cave opening was a tiny gap in the rocks which took a little climbing to get down to. Once we had scraped our way down, clutching our phone torches tightly we proceeded to wiggle and squeeze our way through the narrow cave opening and then climbed down an old, rusting ladder, before bravely creeping down the dark, narrow cave passage. We could see how a wanted pirate could hide down there and evade capture since the cave was so well hidden! It was also rather scary however, so we dashed through it quickly, eager to return to the sunny outdoors!

After our little caving adventure, we decided to spend the rest of our afternoon along the sea front, where Jossi had a chance to get more familiar with a bicycle. Recently, I was a little shocked to discover  that Joss had never learnt to ride a bike and so with this in mind, we hired one and I set about attempting to teach her. We must have been creating quite a spectacle however, since one friendly fisherman abandoned his work to come help, while restaurant staff cheered us on from their restaurants!

Cheung Chau is a wonderful little place for a day trip- there's plenty to do, despite the island being tiny and we had a great time! Although later that evening, the pair of us crawled into bed tired and just a bit bruised from the day's excursion!