Hong Kong Hangover

Walkway of Stars
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Fast Facts:

• Hong Kong, formerly under British control was handed over to Chinese in 1997
• 95% of the population is Chinese, although half of them are Hong Kong born.
• Hong Kong with 6.8 million people packed into an area of 1,100 sq. kms (half the size of Rhode Island) is one of the most densely populated places on earth.
• No room for sheep.

Princess Claire at Walkway of Stars
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We arrive in Hong Kong around 2:00 in the morning to find immigration’s computer down. After waiting for 30 minutes watching bureaucracy at its best we get processed manually, walk through a very quiet airport and find a cab to take us to hotel. Over-tired and with residual effects from the escape from Tibet, it’s hard to get to sleep

We’ve already agreed that our first day away from Yaksville and (Beijing before) is going to be a western (as in civilization) day. Not a grain of rice will pass our lips. Claire has a craving for a potato. I want a pancake. Breakfast at hotel (Sheraton, natch) accommodates us for breakfast. Never has a pancake (with real imitation maple syrup?) tasted so good, although we learn that dining in Hong Kong is going to be just as financially challenging as Singapore. Energized by our new found health and a real breakfast we set out to explore Hong Kong. We start out on a self guided walking tour which will take us to the harbour. After about two blocks we realize that this isn’t going to be that easy. Feeling faint and dizzy from residual high altitude sickness we make it (just) to the waterfront, where we have to rest. Contemplate next steps as we overlook the Avenue of Stars, a boardwalk that extends for a km or two and is themed around well known Hong Kongian celebrities a la Jackie Chan. Handprints in cement schtick with several movie related statues and picture taking set ups. A little weird for a major waterfront theme but kind of fun as well. We struggle for 20 more minutes and go back to the hotel. We’ve been out exploring for all of 90 minutes and consider calling it a day. We head to a rooftop pool on the 18^th floor to rest. Theory is that if we’re suffering reverse symptoms of high altitude sickness, then we should get a little higher. So 18 floors at around 14 feet each we’ll be coming from 13,000 feet to 252 feet rather than sea level. Flawed theory as it turns out.

Not what you think. Hawking is peddling.
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Claire goes to room to rest again and I go back out determined to at least get some bearings. Some success but I return early to go for an early supper. I’ve spotted a TGIF restaurant next door. Potatoes! We’d normally consider a TGIF dining experience as pretty uninspired, but this was an epicurean delight. Ice cold beer, baked potato and some other western food and we were happy campers. (Only problem is that it cost well over twice what it would back in USA.) Back to hotel to watch an in-room movie just to ensure that all TVs in Asia weren’t hardwired to CNN. Only thing we could agree on was some chickflick thing. Larry King starting to look good again. (Kidding!) To bed. Surely tomorrow we’ll be better.

Hong Kong smogline. I mean skyline.
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Day two: Wrong. We’ll learn that it takes about a week for the effects of high altitude sickness to retreat. Better every day but strength and energy elude us. I won’t mention it again but it tempered our activity levels.

Hong Kong has an extensive public transportation system. Thinking that this will be the day for exploring, I buy the three-day pass with an airport express trip add-on. We make it to the Avenue of Stars area again and over to an adjacent shopping center. Huge. Over 600 shops and loosely organized by product. For example one complete wing contained nothing but children’s stores, another all electronics stores. Displays were bright, prices were quite good. Remarkable contrast from our Chinese retail exposure, just next door.. Brief visit and light lunch and it’s back to the room again for Claire. I stay on a bit longer trying to find a guidebook for our India visit.

Didn't need this confusion. Two days later learn Somewhere Else is a restaurant.
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We’ve seen an Italian restaurant (no rice) beside the shopping center and return there for dinner. Given a table outside overlooking the harbour. Very pleasant. We’re finishing up dinner when the lighting show begins. Many of the high rise office towers and hotels, of which there are many, have a dramatic lights-on scheme wired to their exteriors and synchronized with each other. At 8:00 each night there is a 15 minute show where the dark buildings transition into flashing lights, different colours, patterns and so on. We learn there is a sound track which is broadcast at certain areas along the water front or you can tune it in on an FM radio station. We aren’t able to hear the sound track but quite a dazzling exhibition of lights. Too much excitement. Back to the hotel. We’ve now been in Hong Kong for two full days and we haven’t gotten Claire any further than three blocks away from the hotel.

Boat village
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Day three: Today we’re going to see some sights. Walk to waterfront (again) but this time after forking over 30 cents each, we board the Star Ferry which will us to Hong Kong Island. Progress.

Arriving on Hong Kong Island, we look for the # 15C bus to take us to The Victoria Peak (a highest point in the city perspective.) We’ve gotten $20 each transportation credit with our subway pass. A terminal in the bus reads our pass and deducts the appropriate amount of cash. We catch bus #15 in error which turns out to be stroke of luck. Our destination had been the cable car ride which would take us to the top of The Peak. However the # 15 bus by-passes the cable car and makes its way all the way to the top over a period of a half hour. It’s a two decker bus and we’ve snagged the front two seats with a bird’s eye view as the bus winds higher and higher above the city. Outstanding views! Great thrills! The $1.25 we spent for this 30 minute drive is the best investment we’ve made since we left home. We get to The Peak which is pretty impressive (360 degree view of city / harbour etc.) and go in for a coffee. There we end up sitting beside a couple of Brits and strike up a conversation. Turns out there doing almost exactly the same thing as we are i.e. going around the world except that they’re going easterly and we’re gong westerly. They’ll even end up doing New Zealand with the South Island first and the North Island last, the opposite to what we did. Spend a half hour swapping stories, go find the elusive cable car and take it down. Pretty neat, goes down the entire mountain at about a 45 degree angle and takes turns and everything. But I like the bus ride better.

Walk back down from escalator
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Jump on the (15C this time) bus for a few blocks and get off looking for the Central/Mid Levels escalator, reputed to be the longest escalator in the world. It stretches 2,600 feet and takes 20 minutes to get from one end to the other. Built as a commuter-assist device it goes downhill in the morning and reverses direction in the afternoon, carrying 27,000 people per day. Find it and start. Very interesting as it crosses over streets and neighbourhoods. Tons of cafes, bars and markets to stop and visit if so inclined. About half way along it occurs to us that this is only going in one direction, fairly steeply straight up. We’ll have to walk all the way back down, on our dwindling reserves. Decide to see it through though and when finished takes about 25 minutes to walk back down. On the way we see a line-up of several blocks. Learn that there is a prison that has been decommissioned and is newly opened to the public. Newspaper accounts the next day mention that there were over 3,000 people in line to see it and police were begging the public to stay away. People lining up to get in prison? Police asking people to stay away? These Asians truly are inscrutable.

Prison line up.
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Although we had great plans for more touring we’re losing steam, catch the subway back to the hotel for a quiet evening. This time at dinner (again on the Avenue of Stars!) we see the light show, this time with a sound track. Chinese hip hop is a bit obscure for us and we leave early. To bed.

Day four: We’ve booked a two hour harbour tour this morning and are picked up at (guess where?) the Avenue of Stars at 10:00. Jump on a Chinese junk type vessel and off we go. The tour was evidently quite good. Not being able to understand any more than every third word of our alleged English speaking narrator. Claire maintains she could understand and tried to translate for me. I can usually understand every second word of what she says, so it helped a bit. Facts gleaned from the tour (according to Claire, so could be suspect)

• Gambling is illegal in Hong Kong so several casino cruise boats moor in the harbour, leaving each evening to go to international waters, returning later than night.
• Visit a fishing village where hundreds of small boats are moored together. The residents literally spend their entire life on the boat, leaving only long enough to carry out necessities such as to sell fish or to buy groceries.
• We go to some sort of structure from which a gun is fired at noon each day. As noon approaches, everyone jostles for position to see the structure from which the sound will emerge. Concept escapes me. Under careful scrutiny the gun goes off around noon.

We go for quick lunch, and check out of hotel. Then to Post Office to mail home a package of stuff we’ve accumulated along the way to lighten the load to make room for more useless stuff. We go to visit the Hong Kong History Museum. This could be the best museum I’ve been in, ever. Outstanding displays and presentations chronicling the prehistoric history of the area and the evolution of Hong Kong until the time of its handover in 1997. We only have a couple of hours so we skip the first 400,000 years or so and get to the good stuff. If anyone is ever in the area, go here first, plan on spending a half day and use it as context to understand the rest of your Hong Kong visit. The only strange thing is that there was no mention of Avenue of Stars. Clearly an oversight that will have to be corrected.

Back to hotel to pick up the luggage in preparation for our late evening flight. We’ve decided to catch the express subway to the airport. Save a few dollars and avoid surface rush hour traffic. We have this vision of wrestling luggage amidst hordes of commuters. We learn that an express train shuttle picks up just behind the hotel. Sure enough after a 5 minute wait we’re on our way. Arrive at the subway station to find large immaculate station full of airline check-in desks. We’re able to check our luggage and get boarding passes before even stepping on the express. We do. Then off to the express, a modern, clean spacious string of cars designed with travellers in mind with room to store luggage etc. We get on and find we’re the only passengers on the particular car. The express is partly underground but substantially above ground. We have a pleasant 25 minute ride to the airport, where we walk off luggageless and feeling relaxed. After going through security we select the first café we find and have the best meal we’ve had in days. No light show but well prepared food in an attractive environment and surprisingly reasonably priced. Even try rice again.

Poke around the outstanding retail area to kill another couple of hours. Claire desperately looking to buy something, anything she can wear realizing she’s running out of time and the clothes we brought with us should be burned. While waiting for her I spot a casual sports jacket I’ve been half looking for, fits perfectly, excellent value. In and out in 5 minutes. Claire, very not amused. Next hour or so fairly quiet. Finally board the flight at 10:20 en route to Delhi, planning an arrival at 2:30AM local time. With the 2 ½ hour time difference we’re looking at a 6 ½ hour flight.

View of Hong Kong:

Nice city but…

Cons:

• Very expensive for food and drink. Similar to Singapore.
• Air pollution is very bad. It bothered me a lot and each day the newspaper warned that air quality was “Very Poor”. (There was actually quite a lot of controversy while we there resulting from a just released study identifying air pollution as the biggest threat to health and prosperity in the area and that there had been no serious attempt by authorities to address it.)

Pros:

• Shopping is good. Huge variety and prices were very good.
• Restaurants among the best in the world. (Not basing this on our TGIF experience; I read it somewhere.
• Dynamic, seemingly clean harbour.
• Great transport system utilizing subway, buses and ferries.
• Walkway of Stars.

WHAT I LEARNED TODAY

Hong Kong is actually an island. The tip of the peninsula (in which we’d been staying) is known as Kowloon although generally the entire area is referred to as Hong Kong. Kowloon in turn is adjacent to an area called The New Territories which is up against mainland China. Our hotel, the Hong Kong Sheraton was actually in Kowloon and the “other half of the city” view from the Walkway of Stars was Hong Kong Island. (In our conversation with the Brit gentlemen, he revealed that with the military, many years ago he had lived for two years in Kowloon and had never known that Hong Kong was actually the island across the harbour rather than the area in which he was stationed.)

What I learned today that both Kowloon on the peninsula on one side of the harbour and the Island of Hong Kong make up the city that we usually refer to as Hong Kong.

QUESTION OF THE DAY

We know that Hong Kong had been under British Rule until 1997 when it was “handed over” under Chinese rule. We also know that steps were taken in order to insulate the economy and culture from any cataclysmic impact of a quick integration under a communist socialist regime. But what’s the deal? We think there was a transition period established. How long was it and what is its nature?