I’ll never forget my first trip with a friend I’ve just met months before our journey. We arrived at the HK pier around 20:00 from Macau via Turbojet. We still didn’t have a place to stay in as we planned to get our hostel on that same night thinking that Hong Kong is a very tourist-friendly place. We asked for a Hong Kong map at the information counter when we arrived. Little did we know that we’ll encounter a problem — there’s no English map at the information counter!
A lot came to mind — “How will we find a place to stay without a map? Where are we going to sleep? At the pier?” That’s when 3 locals saw us and asked what the problem was. They translated everything we said to Chinese to the person at the information counter and reconfirmed that there was no English map. They asked us where we plan to stay so we gave them a list of hostels we are planning to check. They used their own cellphone to call the numbers and asked if there’s an available room for us for that night, and informed us that the hostels are inexpensive, but the place is not that safe for 2 lassies like us. “We don’t have enough money for a 3 star hotel,” we said and that we can only afford a hostel. They offered us a ride to get there. Yes, we weren’t thinking straight. We didn’t even think for a second that they might abduct us like the movie “Taken.” We thought they were “Angels from Heaven” who saved us that night.
It was year 2006 and I am months away from graduating from college. During that time, I had an online business of selling beauty products imported from Thailand. In 2006, online selling was still on unfamiliar ground to Filipinos. I don’t know how to get clients to see my products. So an idea came to mind – get all email addresses I see on forwarded messages. Yes, I became a spammer. That’s how I got to know my new friend as she got intrigued of my beauty products. We exchanged emails, learned that she graduated from the same school I am graduating from, and that we had the same dream of traveling the world. We agreed to reach this dream together and planned a HK-Macau trip for the first time. We patiently waited for promo fares. We talked about what we wanted to see and planned a DIY itinerary. As you can see, I had never traveled alone before, much more with a complete stranger. At first, my dad did not approve of the idea but later on allowed me as I asked this to be my graduation gift instead. That’s how our Macau-HK trip was conceived. 
Here's a short clip of my 233m Sky Jump Experience at the Macau Tower.
Acrophobia (Fear of Heights) finally conquered.
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