Hong Kong-konnen

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Back when I was a kid I couldn’t wait to grow up and know everything about everything, just like Mum and Dad.

If only I’d realised back then that life could be so disappointing. I’ve now been grown up longer than I was ever a kid, and know I’ll never know everything about anything, let alone acquire universal knowledge.

So many things still completely elude me.

The concept of infinity. The rationale behind fashion, or for that matter religion. The inner workings of washing machines, of women’s minds. Just how to put a Fruit Pastille in your mouth without chewing it. These, and a thousand other conundrums will go forever unanswered.

At least I can set the video, but I suspect that’s a generational thing.

Besides, who the hell still uses a video?

It’s just the way things are meant to be. After a while you come to accept it.

Other things in life, though, really do seem like they should be simpler. Among them are flight tickets.

Really, all we want to do is get from A to B without touching the ground or getting our feet wet. The Wright brothers worked out all the really difficult bits a long time ago. All Orville had to do to get a flight was ask Wilbur if he could have the next go.

To go airborne from A to B these days you have to go on the internet and fill forms asking for all manner of personal details, only for the damn thing to crash before revealing if you’ve successfully gained your seats. Admittedly any crash Orville might have encountered would probably have been significantly more painful, but other than that things seem to have got more difficult over the intervening century, if anything.

It all really starts to get complex when you don’t want to go to B at all. Should you want to go to all the way to Q, stopping at G on the way, and J or K on the way back (and who wouldn’t?) you’re really up the spout. It would be easier to obtain a degree in aeronautical engineering and source an endless supply of balsa-wood than achieve that result on the internet. All just a scam to keep the travel agents in business, in my book.

Trouble is, travel agents, at least those in Cairns, don’t seem to have a degree either.

Delhi-London-Bangkok-Cairns... -oohh, never heard of that one before! Not sure how to do that, not even sure you can!

Had I asked to go to Neptune via Venus, stopping off at Io and Titan on the return leg, I could have sympathised with their plight. Could take a while to arrange, I would imagine. Might cost a bit. Two weeks on the moon’s popular this time of year, and you can stop off at the space station on the way back to get your Duty Frees, but Io,... tricky! You’d have to at least overnight on Jupiter, and if the Red Spot flares up you’ll not be covered on the insurance.

One agent wanted us to go all the way to Z, and then cross the International Alphabet Line to complete the loop home. I wasn’t keen as I’d tried this once before, and have never been the same at Scrabble since. Admittedly you to get to land at Fiji right after, but there’s no triple word score so it hardly seems worth the effort really.

After a range of wildly different recommendations and quotes, it was, as usual, Trailfinders who came up trumps, but there were two complications. The first was that their Cairns office was closing that very day due to the global downturn, so it all had to be booked before 5 o’clock. This sounded like the kind of scam I hadn’t expected until I actually touched down in Delhi, but the abundance of packing boxes and polystyrene foam, together with half the staff out the back having some kind of farewell party persuaded us it was the real deal.

Secondly, the cheapest ticket was not with Qantas, Thai, Air India or BA, as you might imagine, but with Finn Air, of all people, which might explain why all the other agents had completely overlooked it.

Finland is one more subject I profess to know very little about. I seem to remember the men like to drink too much vodka, and drive cars at insane speeds through forests, even when it’s snowing. Other than that it’s a bit of a blank. The women, presumably, spend most of their time complaining about the men, so maybe it’s not so different after-all.

Anyway, we’d find out soon enough, as one of the vagaries of the cheap-as-chips ticket was that we’d have to go to Helsinki. Not straight away, fortunately, as it would be a bit nippy in early Feb, I’d imagine. No, first, before Delhi, London and Helsinki, and for reasons which still completely baffle me, we had to go to Hong Kong.

Last time I was in Hong Kong was back in 1996, when there was a certain nervous tension in the air as the whole place was about to be handed back to the Chinese, the Brits having rather carelessly let their lease expire (should’ve gone to Radio Rentals). As we descended from 30000ft, I wondered what changes I’d find in the meantime.

The first was that we didn’t land at Hong Kong at all, but at the swanky new airport out of town. In the old days you used to fly right between the skyscrapers in the middle of town, but even before 9/11 this was deemed way too risky, and a much blander alternative had been constructed, connected to the city by the anonymous but efficient MTR.

Friendship (with a capital F) is right up there with Noodles in the Chinese Communist Party dictionary, but doesn’t always translate into the kind of friendship we know, being more akin to, say, a friendly visit from the police. In Hong Kong, though, it seems to have been taken to heart, and despite being initially bewildered by our surroundings and the lateness of our arrival we were assisted by one and all and swiftly found ourselves whisked to our swanky hotel in double quick time, still waiting for the catch which never came. God bless those Finns!

With only 2 days in Hong Kong, we were up early and eager to get out and explore. Our hotel was in the slightly more traditional part of Hong Kong, which merely means the high-rises aren’t quite as new and the signs are in Cantonese only. It’s also the area where every shop specialises in selling nothing but dry dead things. Some of the dry things have been dead so long you can’t imagine what they might have been when alive. And whether animal, vegetable, or previously undiscovered species they all smell identical: dry, dead and ever so slightly salty, with just a hint of sardines.

Indeed, on closer inspection, sea creatures form the vast bulk of these displays. Squid are present in unbelievable numbers, which is just as well as when you dry a squid there’s not much left, the remnants resembling yellowing previously-burst bubble wrap. Looks about as tasty too.

A smattering of weird looking fungi make up most of the rest of the displays, but pride of place is always left to piles of dried sharks’ fin. These are present in such quantities and in so many shops that it’s not hard to see why sharks have become endangered worldwide, as they never learnt the starfishes’ trick of casually growing a replacement limb. Most fins are pretty tiddly these days, but there are still one or two which must surely have belonged to Jaws, put on display like trophies behind glass. I do hope after all that carnage that the soup tastes better than salty sardines.

Enjoy it while you can, boys and girls!

After a mile or two the scenery abruptly morphs, the buildings themselves resembling sardines as great scales of silver climb endless walls into the sky. I can see now why they moved the airport, as the pilots would either be blinded or too busy studying their own reflections to land the planes.

Central is as close as anywhere on the planet to a futuristic metropolis, full of endless malls of designer tat, and appears to be yuppie Ground Zero. Fortunately yuppies seem to prefer Starbucks to shark-fin soup so there may be hope for our cartilaginous cousins after all, provided Louis Vuitton doesn’t discover how to turn them into handbags. Quite what Chairman Mao would have made of it all I can’t imagine, but it seems the Chinese are as happy to pander to the excesses of big business as the Brits were before them. Bunch of Corporate Bankers!

We grabbed a bite in a local fast-food joint with decor by Easyjet, wall-to-wall formica in flamboyant orange, though there was no sign of a Stelios-burger, and the food came on time, so maybe it was just one of those unhappy coincidences.

Then it was time to separate from the corporate high-flyers and demonstrate our bona-fide tourist status by riding the cable-train to Victoria Peak for a view of the Hong Kong skyline. No need to take a camera, as they obligingly take a snap of you standing in front of a cardboard cut-out of the scene while you’re still in the queue to buy your ticket.

I was loving it already.

On arrival you can see why, as the train deposits you in the centre of yet another impenetrable mall, from which there seems no escape unless you want to pay extra for the ‘Skyview’, which basically means standing on the roof. Afterwards you can pig out at the Bubba-Gump Shrimp Company’s restaurant, though quite why this is in Hong-Kong and not Alabama I’ve no idea. All goes to show that life is indeed like a box of chocolates... you never know what you’re gonna get.

We decided to ‘Run Forrest, Run!’ instead, finally stumbling upon an exit from the torture and spilling out into a plaza where you could enjoy the views with a Haagen-Daas. As the views were entirely of the surrounding malls we chose not to, eventually locating the circuit-track around the peak itself which was happily almost entirely deserted, possibly due to a complete absence of shops.

And I’m pleased to report that once you’ve escaped commercial confines the views are very fine indeed, Hong Kong harbour sparkling up at you with the green hills as a backdrop beyond. We toddled back to the hotel merrily and slept a heavy sleep.

Having exhausted our legs the first day, the second was a bit more low-key, just a stroll closer to home, a much more charming area in any case, and a rickety tram-ride back. On the way we stumbled upon Man-Mo temple, which seems to be the only properly old building left in Hong Kong, though even it, I later discovered, despite its ancient appearance, dates back to only 1847. (The Aussies among you are now thinking ‘wow, that really is old!’ while the Europeans have lawnmowers which pre-date that stuck somewhere at the back of the garden shed.)

Whatever, it looks like it might have been constructed by the Buddha himself, an incongruous grey-stone edifice dwarfed by the surrounding steel-reinforced concrete. One also imagines on first sight that its days may be done, as smoke billows in great clouds from the roof. The Fire Brigade never arrive, however, and bravely entering without breathing apparatus you find not the stuffy interior of a church, but a great fire-breathing religious extravaganza. Inside it’s chock-full of pilgrims burning incense and praying to whichever of the bewildering display of icons that first takes their fancy, with no obvious rules or head-honcho running the show. Your senses are assaulted on all sides by a blur of colour, noise and scent. Slap on your iPod and you could be in the middle of a particularly trippy rave. I could have stayed forever, or at least until the lung-cancer did me in.

Alas there was time for only one more random cafe meal near home (menus you can’t read adding an unpredictable element to eating out) before collapsing in bed and blearily jetting off in the morning for pastures New Delhi.

A whirlwind trip but I’d had fun. Debbie, on her first acquaintance, had absolutely loved the place.

Helsinki had much to live up to.

I only hoped she’d take to India with the same verve and gusto. Soon enough, we’d be finding out.

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Photos

Man-Mo temple
They're not Lampshades, They're Incense.