Four hours would be enough to come and have a look at Victoria harbour and ride across the Star Ferry, but not much more than that if you want it to be relaxing.

One advantage of coming through HKG is that you get to do more long-haul on CX rather than QF or AA. Have you considered routing through SFO or LAX from HKG instead on NRT (which doesn't have much to recommend it as a transit point).

Or alternatively, route SYD-HKG-YVR and then go overland (or on a separate ticket) to YYC before picking up the OWE again there - I guess this would be the quickest way to get there.

A CX-CX transit at HKG with a few hours to do it is very safe as far as your bags are concerned. As you say, you would need to reclaim at the US gateway anyway.

Note my recent thread on Explorer rule changes - you may need to ticket before April 15 to get all the segments you want.

[This message has been edited by christep (edited 03-17-2003).]