Arrived in Hong Kong to a series of gorgeous days. What an amazing city.
We went between two hotels… one a total budget place run by the Sally Ann in the Kwonloon side of the city, and then splurged on two nights (Xmas eve and Xmas night) in a plush Marriot on the Hong Kong Island side. If we hadn’t gone for the budget hotel I’m not sure we would have spent as much time on the Kwonloon side and I’m so glad we did…. (Ayiee… slightly distracted here as I’m writing this in Vancouver airport and the nightmare screaming kid is sitting across the aisle… two young parents literally on their friggin knees begging and desperately negotiating with the totally confused little boy to persuade him to drink a warm milk from Starbucks… nothing like watching the modern dysfunctional family playing out its games right in front of you)
Anyway… Kwonloon is total beautiful madness and also a poorer part of the city (the higher you go, the more breeze, the less pollution, the richer the houses…)
We wandered the streets, visited the night market, ate fried oysters and green onions on the street, visited the fisherman’s temple with its hanging coils of incense, walked down towards the port and then suddenly and completely ran out of energy, overstimulated, confused and exhausted (kind of like the little boy across from me) in the huge lobby of the Hong Kong scouting association, bizarrely enough sitting under an immense picture of Baden-Powell…
The pollution is kind of terrifying – We got the ferry across the next day and the lovely blue mist obscuring most of the city is actually throat biting smog. Both of us had a scary coughs by the third day there. I don’t know if its heavy industry, or the cars, or the immense harbour or what… but it’s a huge physical aspect to the city… like the rain in Vancouver, or the cold in the Yukon… it feels like something you really have to learn to cope with. Though, everyone else seemed oblivious… so maybe you just learn to ignore it… maybe that would be the healthier option mentally… otherwise it would just scare the hell out of you…
I didn’t expect to feel so comfortable here. But maybe its simply leaving Japan and arriving in such a mixed up, multi-racial, changing city. Although Japan never ceased to amaze me, and the almost every single interaction I had with the Japanese left me delighted, still, I left with the feeling that it was a very alien culture: the streets full of drunken salary-men at 10pm, the red light districts squeezed in between the historic neighbourhoods, the lack of many nationalities (saw about 5 black people in 6 weeks there). Hong Kong, like NYC, has everyone in it and every language on the streets. And, also a bit like NYC, everyone there seems plainly dedicated to making money. So perhaps it all made a little more sense to me. And, ultimately, any city that builds 80 story buildings with Bamboo (bamboo!!!) scaffolding is mad enough for me….
On the 2nd day in Hong Kong we realized that there is really not much to ‘do’ in the city, but an incredible amount to see. So, I had the excellent idea of changing our tour schedule to focus not on sights and historic monuments, but on really great great great restaurants…. for the next three days we were guided by a couple of food guides to the city, and by our own noses, to series of amazing food temples…. Schezuan, Cantonese, Dim Sum, Congee, Noodles, Dumplings, Street Food, Classy Food, Fast Food… I think our best meal came in a tiny 3 table restaurant where there was zero English and my ordering technique consisted of a great deal of smiling and pointing at amazing looking things being delivered to tables around us…. Luckily that seemed to result in both amusing the waitress immensely, and having piles of food arrive from the tiny kitchen…
It was a great trip, the view from our last hotel was spectacular
and on one of the final nights we wandered around looking for some where to have a drink and stumbled into an Australian Bar (dedicated to the criminal Ned Kelly) and caught the last set of the South China Coast Jazzmen… looking mostly Indonesian, these guys were headed by the 80 year old trumpeter (and in this video dancer/percussionist/singer/rubber chicken player and all around party animal) Silverio Yaneza, who is dancing up a storm in the back row. They were pretty loose (but hey, it was the last set of the night and they’ve been playing there for 20 years) but still he rocked and gave us a great send off to an amazing trip…
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