Hong Kong

I'm in the Central Library in Hong Kong right now. Above me there are containers containing books moving on tracks in the ceiling. When I entered the building a machine dried my umbrella for me. This is indeed a modern city. I love it!

Even though the weather is dreary, Hong Kong is a great place to be. People are still in good spirits. And everything works. There's a typhoon just off the coast heading our way. We're at Level 3 warning right now, which really isn't anything. Hong Kong has long been protected from the worst typhoon damage thanks to its geography (the city is sheltered from the brunt of the sea's fury by a ridge of mountains on Hong Kong Island).

The flight over on China Airlines was decent enough. 12.5 hours, the entirety of it in darkness. Taipei Airport was dead when I arrived at 4:30 am. I wanted some tea or coffee but all the cafes and restaurants were closed. However, the Duty Free shops were all open, and they had free samples of pineapple cake and beef jerky. The second flight was only 1 hour 20 minutes. My seat partner was a young woman my age from Taiwan on her way to Beijing to attend an Intel conference. She sells laptops for a living. There are no direct flights between Taiwan and China; so Hong Kong is a popular transfer point.

Hong Kong airport, built on a manmade island and opened in 1998, is one of the world's great airports. Although I was hastily ushered through the arrivals wing I was still able to get a glimpse of its grandeur. The Airport Express train whisks people donwtown in just 20 minutes, but it's expensive (almost $20 US) so I took the bus instead ($4 US). Hong Kong is made up of hundreds of verdant islands and we traversed many of them on the way into town from the airport. There is very little flat land in Hong Kong. Gleaming skyscrapers and residential towers hug the steep, lush green slopes. It's amazing that they've managed to fit 8 million people into this territory.

On the way into town we drove right next to America's trade deficit - the ports where containers are loaded onto ships bound for Oakland and Long Beach.

I'm staying in Mirador Mansions, the lesser known companion to the more famous Chungking Mansions. Mansions is a misnomer, as these are among the least luxurious digs in the city. And the cheapest. Mirador is a 20-floor building arranged around a central courtyard, and each floor hosts a different guest house or short term housing for migrant workers. For $8 US a night I got a bed in a 4-person dorm room with a/c, bath, shower, hot water, fridge, and free local calls. The best part is that the location is in the heart of Kowloon and right next to the metro station.

Kowloon lies across the harbor from Hong Kong proper. They are connected by ferries and the metro. Greater Hong Kong (formerly the British crown colony and now the Special Administrative Zone as administered by China) actually consists of far more than just the city of Hong Kong. It includes suburbs and several smaller cities, as well as mountains, parks, wilderness, farmland, and beaches.

My roommate Ben is a 25-year old Australian on his way home from 2+ years abroad in Canada, South America, and Europe. Together we set out for a full day's explorations. Just a couple blocks away from the hostel is the harbor, with its famous view of the Hong Kong skyline. We caught a ferry across the harbor and began exploring the streets. The city is full of covered walkways, pedestrian overpasses and underpasses, and even covered escalators. All this results in a high degree of separation between pedestrian and street vehicles, which, from the standpoint of both pedestrian and automobilist, is great. In most cities in Asia it seems like pedestrians and drivers are pitted in a life-or-death battle. But here, cars are well-behaved. They don't honk their horns. They stop and let people cross the street. There isn't even that much traffic. Most of the traffic is buses and taxis.

Hong Kong boasts one of the world's finest assemblages of skyscrapers. They are also among the world's most beautiful skyscrapers. No mere glass-and-steel boxes, these monuments to capitalism each have a character of their own, bearing the mark of both architect and artist.

It doesn't take long walking through Hong Kong before you start climbing the steep green hills. You can pay to take a tram to the top but Ben and I opted to hike it instead. Near the base of the mountain is a lovely park with several attractions which would surely cost money anywhere else but were free here. We strolled through both arboretum and aviary and climbed a tower for a stellar view. We meandered our way up the mountain on staircases, paths, and streets, passing schools, hotels, apartment buildings, and some of the most expensive real estate in the world. This was the first real walking (let alone hiking) I had done since breaking my foot, and it was a good workout. About 400 meters of altitude later we reached the top of the ridge where someone thought it convenient to place a mall called "The Peak".

Later, down at the bottom again, we found a street lined with bars filled with locals and Western expats alike. After a pint we went to a hole-in-the-wall Chinese restaurant and I had tofu. I'm easing into the cuisine slowly. No pig's feet or snake blood for me. Hong Kong is mostly a Chinese city, but there are sizable minorities of Indians and Westerners. Simply glancing at the faces on the street, the bodies they are attached to, and the clothes shrouding those bodies, Hong Kong doesn't look much different than parts of San Francisco, Vancouver, or New York. Everyone wears Western clothing. That's a huge difference from India where 99% of women and many men appeared to wear traditional clothing. Whether it is business attire or t-shirts, people here style themselves exactly as any Westerner would.

There are few outward signs of poverty here. There are gritty streets and aging buildings, but I feel that most American cities are far grittier. There is so much that is so new, clean, sparkling, and oozing with wealth and class. There is virtually no traditional Chinese architecture. Everything looks to have been built in the last few decades, and much of it within the last few years. I saw a photograph of the city from the 60s and there wasn't a single skyscraper. Now it's hard to find a building that's not a skyscraper. It's not just the corporate towers. Residential towers, too, reach for the sky. They shimmer in shades of green, pink, and gold. I'd seen something like this in Vancouver, which was built mostly by Hong Kong capital, but nothing had prepared me for the glory that is Hong Kong urbanism. The level of density is phenomenal. The buildings are so tall and so close together they're like a forest of erector sets.

As night fell, we crossed back to Kowloon and gazed across the harbor at the Hong Kong skyline, which was now lit up brilliantly. The names of corporate giants glow emblazoned atop the towers. There's Sony, Panasonic, Epson, Bank of China, Bank of America. Each building has a different lighting scheme resulting in a panoply of colors and designs that can only truly be appreciated in visual form (check my flickr photo site).

This morning we had a new roommate, Tim from New York, who is embarking on quite an adventure. He is going to Tibet and then to Pakistan via the Karakoram Highway. Today is Wednesday and all the museums are free. Ben and I went to the Hong Kong Museum of History, full of well-executed replicas of fishing villages, ports, turn of the century street scenes, and extensive multimedia displays and exhibits. Although the museum's chronology of Hong Kong went back to dawn of civilization, I was primarily interested in the 1700s through present, the era in which Hong Kong's fate was inextricably tied to Europe and the West by trade. I still find it amusing (if not a bit disturbing) that Britain won Hong Kong as a concession in a war which Britain fought over the right to smuggle narcotics into China. A group of several hundred Chinese schoolchildren all in identical matching outfits joined us in the museum and behaved just as a similarly-sized group of American schoolchildren would, running around, shouting, pointing, and not really looking at anything in depth.

The library I'm in right now is simply amazing. Twelve floors of books, maps, periodicals, CDs, and DVDs in English, Cantonese, and Mandarin. Newspapers from all around the world. And probably the largest collection of popular periodicals I've ever seen outside of Harvard's libraries. Not only do they have every magazine you'd find in a well-stocked newsstand in the US, but they also have versions of most of them translated into Chinese, and then of course they have hundreds of Chinese magazines, and then from the rest of the world.

......

It's been another two days since I first started this entry on Hong Kong. I've been to Disneyland (see my Disneyland entry) and seen a lot more of the city, which is bigger than I had at first realized. I've been to parks in the morning where Chinese men and women, mostly of middle age or older, practice T'ai Chi. All over China, people gather in parks for this slow-moving form of dance and exercise. They do it on their way to work. Some of them are in business suits. They follow a leader in choreographed moves, or they do it on their own.

On Hong Kong island there is a set of escalators called the mid-level escalators. It is a series of several dozen covered, inclined, moving walkways, escalators, and overpasses which scale several hundred feet of the mountain, all amidst the dense urban neighborhood called Soho, which is where some of Hong Kong's trendiest restaurants and bars are located. The escalators run downhill in the morning and uphill the rest of the day, facilitating escalator "commuter" traffic.

Hong Kong features a substantial nightlife scene. Restaurants, bars, nightclubs, tea houses, cafes, coffeeshops galore. Neon lights everywhere. It seems like nearly anywhere you go at night, you are assailed by wall-to-wall neon lights.  They aren't just on main thoroughfares. Side streets, too, are plastered in neon lights and activity. They call Hong Kong the "city that never sleeps" and it's easy to see why. At midnight, everything is still open. People are out shopping, the malls are open, and the streets are brightly-lit and crowded. It seems like there's a mall every single block in this city. And they're elegant malls, too, loaded with floor after floor of the top designers.

Perhaps what is most unusual about this city is that amidst all the wealth it is still possible to find things very cheaply. Dining, shopping, and sleeping can be a 5-star affair if you like, but it's possible to do everything on a 1-star budget and still have a great time. On average, most food and consumer goods are cheaper than they would be at home. Maybe not much cheaper, but cheaper. 25 cents to ride the ferry, 75 cents for a bottle of water, 2 dollars for a bowl of noodle soup, 5 dollars for a decent dinner, 50 cents for a metro ride, 7 dollars for a movie ticket. And so many things are free....the museums, the zoo, the views...

The cafe culture has thoroughly permeated this city. Starbucks and Starbucks-ish chains like "Pacific Coffee Company" are around every corner. The McDonalds here have their own version of Starbucks called "McCafe" which offers essentially the same menu as Starbucks but at half the cost.

In my wanderings I discovered the "Hong Kong Infrastructure Experience" which is sort of a public outreach project sponsored by the municipal planning department. It is there to promote and inform of the many development and redevelopment projects underway in Hong Kong and features  state-of-the-art models, multimedia, and even interactive games.

Hong Kong is a public transportation aficionado's dream. You can choose from: metro, ferry, double-decker bus, double-decker tram, commuter train, light rail, funicular, and aerial cable car. Probably the most fun is the double-decker tram, a hundred-plus year vestige of England's role in the colony. In an odd juxtaposition, the aging yet dignified old trams ply the main streets of Hong Kong using centuries-old technology amidst monuments to the biggest names in high technology today. The views from the upper floor of the trams as they make their way slowly through traffic are among the best in the city.

Every time I walk down Nathan Street (the main street in Kowloon) hawkers try to sell me things. In other countries, hawkers are usually peddling drugs, sex, taxis, and tours. Here, however, they peddle suits and "Rolexes"! Another interesting thing to happen on Nathan Street: an Englishman attempted to scam me. He approached me with a sob story about how he lost his passport and the British Embassy was closed, yada yada yada. For a minute I thought he might be telling the truth. But when I said I couldn't help him and walked off, he called me a "bloody bastard". I met my father's friend and professional travel writer Roger yesterday and we took a bus to Stanley on the other side of Hong Kong island. In Stanley we went to the new Maritime Museum. On the bus ride back we met a family of Americans living in Hong Kong for a year. The dad works at a venture capitalist firm and the kids go to High School at the international school. They love it here and think all Americans would benefit from spending time here. I agree. Roger gave me a new contact - a Harvard grad and former Lets Go writer just like me, who now writes for Fodors Hong Kong and Fodors Italy. We met over a drink at the Intercontinental Hotel, perhaps the swankiest and nicest view in the city, right on the harbor. His girlfriend was Indian, born in Hong Kong, and went to college in San Francisco. Later at night I met my new friend Karen, whom I had met on the plane from Taipei, for dessert.

A few last minute observations made in Hong Kong:

An ad billboard for "Harvard Add-Hair", a hair growth remedy bearing my alma mater. Somehow I don't think Harvard's licensing department would approve.

McDonalds has a "Crayfish Mango" sandwich.

Ben and I tried out the "massage path" in the park, which is an indented path that is supposed to massage your barefoot feet when you walk across. I just found it painful.

One final strange adventure in Hong Kong. On my final night I was strolling through the nightlife district. I had a strong yearning to urinate but my quest to find a public toilet was proving unsuccessful. A couple times I wandered into a cafe to try to use their toilet only to find it locked. After 20 minutes or so of circling around looking for an opportunity, I found myself apprehended by a plainclothes policeman. At first I suspected he was just pretending to be a policeman and I told him so. But then he gave me a closer look at his badge...and his gun. He wanted to see my passport and know what I was doing. He said the police had been watching me because my behavior was very suspicious! He said I might be a terrorist, or an illegal immigrant! I explained that I was just looking for a toilet, and it took several minutes to fully convince him of this.