Thus spake The Leader of the Opposition as we walked through Hong Kong on our first day, proving that you can't be brilliant all the time. She claims its a profound philosophical comment. Our 9 hr flight from Melbourne was a breeze thanks to Cathay Pacific's great in-flight entertainment. This system of choosing your own things from a choice of easily 50 films as well as TV shows, documentaries and 800 albums really is a travel revolution. Flights of 9 hours just whizz by.
Unusually for us we are staying in a hotel here. All accomodation is expensive here and when we looked for a place we found that the difference in price between the cheapest (a ratty guesthouse) and a budget hotel was only $US 15 a night. The reports we read of guesthouses were all the same, with reports of indifferent cleanliness, dodgy streets, cockroaches in kitchens, etc so we decided to use the hotel option. Good choice too, we have a spotlessly clean room on the 16th floor with our own bathroom. The hotel is in a great location as well, in Kowloon with all the action on our doorstep and the metro station a few minutes walk away.
The food has been great. One of our favourites is Dim Sum, we go to a great one in Montreal when we are there. You sit at your table and the ladies wheel trolleys around the room. You flag them down and they you show you what they have on their trolley. When you take something they mark it on your sheet and so it goes on. All great fun, very noisy and full of action. We had dim sum pretty much every day, though here they don't have the trolleys which is an essential part of the meal. We were directed to one restaurant that used the troleys but as soon as we saw the enormous glittering chandeliers we knew that it was not a budget cheapskate backpackers place and we went elsewhere. We'll see the trolleys when we are back in Montreal. Our favourite place for dinner (not dim sum) was in the market just around the corner from here. The food was cheap, excellent and we were the only whites for miles. Just how it should be. We went out for a night in the party area Central Hong Kong itself and we were surrounded by westerners. We had a good night out but it was the same as being at home really. Its much better to be surrounded by locals.
Hong KOng is quite an interesting place. Seven million people live in a tiny area, they can't build outwards so they build upwards. The whole place is a forest of high rise buildings, both flats and offices. The business area of Hong Kong itself is moder nand full of glittering glass but a lot of the rest are grubby looking blocks of flats, some of them 30 floors high. You'd think that it would be a social catastrophe but they are all used to it. These seven million live in small flats in huge blocks and the result is a clean, tidy and peaceful city. If clean, tidy and peaceful gives the impression of calm then correct that impression now. Hong Kong is not calm. It is seethingly busy but in an ordered way. Its every bit as busy as La Paz but nowhere near as tiring or aggressive. Main streets like Nathan Road are never ending streams of buses cars and taxis with never ending streams of people on each side. Drivers don't use therir horns every two seconds which helps. The best indicator we saw of this placidity was getting off of the ferry going from Kowloon to Hong Kong. The boat had docked and the gangplank was down. There was a barrier preventing people from getting off the boat until the boss said it was safe and everyone was waiting patiently behind this barrier, no pushing or going under it. And do you know what that barrier was? A yellow ribbon. Cool huh, you can keep a hundred busy HK-ers calmly waiting behind a yellow ribbon.
Hong Kong really comes into its own at night though. I have never seen so many neon lights, the streets are ablaze with them. At the moment we are just a week from Chinese New Year so the streets are extra busy with shoppers. Some streets are pedestrian-only and they are jam packed.
We had a day away from the frenzy, we got the ferry over to Cheung Chau which is a small island about 45 minutes boat ride from Central. The main town is a small village with narrow backstreets and lots of people on bikes. We walked about 3 hours there, an oasis of calm with no cars and no high rise buildings.
The only real disappointment was the weather which has been grey and hazy all the time. For walking about its fine as its not too hot and humid but for pictures it is impossible to have worse. Luckily HK is at its best at night so I was able to get some shooting done in the evenings.
Now we head to India. We felt that our time in Australia and NZ lacked the cultural aspect, we now get to redress the balance.
Bye Berthier