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Burning incense coils outside a temple
A man came out and asked us to stop taking photos. Not too sure why - it was very a beautiful looking little temple.Hi - this is the new improved updated version of this blog, all about the last three (or is it four?) days we've spent in Hong Kong. God knows we love this city. We should have came here months ago. It's an absolutely amazing place; vibrant, jumpin, hectic, bright, incredibly busy, hot, humid, sweaty, westernised, beautiful, friendly, funky, in your face, and so so so SO much more than all these things - but if we keep writing like this then it'll be a pretty boring blog.
In our last installment we told you about arriving here late on the Friday night of last week. Before we go any further, we have to tell you what we saw immediately upon disembarking from the plane. "Royal Bank of Scotland Welcomes you to Hong Kong' in like size 500 font. What the frig?!?!?!?! Anyway, never mind - at least it made us laugh to think of you all at work while we are on holiday. Sorry about that. Well anyway, we got to bed about 2am that night once we unwound from the 9.5 hour flight, but even though we stayed up so late, this didn't stop us bouncing to life at
Staunton Street, Soho
Soho is excellent - and when we come back to HK after we've been to Beijing and Shanghai we are going to try and stay near here. There are so many cool bars, clubs and restaurants. about 6am on Saturday morning, DESPERATE to get out and about and begin our experience of Honkers. It was the taxi ride in from the airport the night before that filled us with inspiration. Bear in mind that we've been in sedate New Zealand for 3 months prior to this, therefore seeing the heaps and heaps of big flashy high rises with pumping multicoloured lights on the way into Kowloon, its hardly suprising that we were in such appreciation of the potential for excitement and action our time here might bring.
As you may have guessed by the opening lines of this update, we have NOT been disappointed.
We are staying in a hotel called 'Nathan Hotel' which is situated on Nathan Road - the main drag in Kowloon, a super touristatsic area on the main landmass of HK. It's a good hotel, costing about 40 quids a night for our room which has lovely aircon, a nice wee view onto the busy thoroughfare below, and internet access for our laptop costing 3 quids for 24 hours. We think this is a good bargain as HK is generally not falling over itself with the old cheap prices for
This is a hairdressers near Nathan Road called 'Hair Peace'
Their advertising logo is this massive wooden painted mual of John Lennon & Yoko Ono. Somehow they have managed to paint the mural with Yoko looking even uglier than in real life. Quite an achievement. accommodation. It's also got great facilities, with the gym being located right across from our room. Naturally we have been in there every morning for two hours slogging our lardy guts away on the step machines, working out with the hand weights and stretching like there's no tomorrow. Aye RIGHT!!! No danger. Are ya kidding us???? One thing we will say though - is that we haven't been to the bar in here either - and that's deffo saying something as we got 'money off' vouchers for cocktails. Maybe tonight's the night though...............
Along Nathan Road are a Zillion Squillion Brazillion Marillion, Frptchillion (?) shops and stalls and shopping centres and cafes and oh, everything! It's very exciting. You could shop here in Kowloon for ten years and still probably not set foot in every retail outlet available. On our first morning we walked the length of the road right down to the waterfront called Victoria harbour - this is where you catch one of the most famous views of Hong Kong - y'know the one where you see the ferries gliding across the water to the central bit with all the magnifient big rich office block buildings with
the sparkling lights and tinted glass? Yeah, of course you know what we mean. See photos below of you are still not sure. So, anyway, on the way down to Vic Harbour, near the bottom bit of Nathan Rd is a stretch of street about 500 metres long which we have now affectionately nicknamed the 'Gauntlet'. The real name for the gauntlet zone is Tsim Sha Tsui but Alan can't pronounce that. It's called the gauntlet for good reason. Your journey along this stretch of tarmac will bring you many calls of 'Hey Sir, Hey Lady' (at least they are polite) 'Wanna buy copy watch? Copy watch? What about copy handbag? Copy Rolex? Make you a suit Sir... very good quality, you come with me???' We've learned really fast that the best thing to do is put your head in the opposite direction and pretend you don't hear or see these dudes because of you give even a slight inclination of responding with a polite shake of your head then they are all over you like a rash. Saying you have no money doesn't work as they pretend not to understand or even worse they tell you right away that
Care the lovely plants
There are some brilliant signs here in Honkers. The translataions are often slightly wrong and sometimes just plain weird. This is one of our favourites so far though. Every time we see something cute we go 'aww, care the lovely plants'. they'll give you the watch/handbag/cheap suit at half price so 'won't cost lot of money'. In fairness they are not lying either - we have seen some of these copy watches and handbags and they are CHEAP AS CHIPS. The quality does vary though and some feel like the same weight as milk bottle tops or look like they have come out of a Kinder Suprise egg, however some are really very good. Shaz has snapped up a copy D&G bag already for 3 pound. Real leather and good stitching too. Fargain Bargain! If however you are in for the big ticket shopping (ie spending piles of money on the genuine articles) then you'll also be catered for in the extreme. There are just tons of big posh brands here - they're all in for the running: Gucci, Fendi, D&G, Rolex, Zara(?), Gaultier, Lacroix sweetie, Lacroix! Names, names, names etc etc etc!!!!! We can't afford any of that real stuff though as we are just dole scum, however we have familiarised ourselves with how the real brand logos look in preparation for our next stop (Shanghai) so that we can ascertain levels of authenticity when we visit all the markets
there. Bingo! And oh my gawd , the SHOES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Shaz is in shoe shopping HEAVEN. Alan keeps asking why so many shoes might be required. He knows N.O.T.H.I.N.G. about women. And the biggest problem is that she's oly one pair in - a lovely painted cork wedge soled delicious pair with a single flowery band upper strap & black ribbon tie around ankle straps. Ahhh - care the lovely plants!
Bartering: We've got the bartering thing sussed aswell - and you don't even need to do anything really. What you do if you like something is get your calculator out and start tapping away, then go into your 'pre-arranged nearly empty' purse and frown & look completely disappointed and turn to walk away. Immediately the shop keeper is onto you and just starts offering you the goods at less and less prices until you turn your face from frowning to the much more acceptable enthusiastic nodding/smiling thingy. It's great. Outwith the mainstream stores things are really very well priced anyway so even if you still feel uncomfortable bartering (albeit passively) then it's no great shakes - you'll still get a decent deal. Last night at the Temple Street Night
Scotland The Brave.
On Saturday morning we made our way down to Victoria Harbour and found the Boys Brigade of Hong Kong doing a wee rendition of Scotland The Brave. It was topper. Alan was singing some alternative lyrisc, a'la: 'Hail hail the pipes are calling, must have been the beans I ate this morning'. Shaz knows a version about a Highland Granny, but we'll not go there. Market (which is two streets away from our hotel, parallel with Nathan Road) we saw three brand name half decent copy watches for a tenner - and that's before any discounts. Not bad really.
One of the first things we did on Saturday was to apply for our visas for our China visit. Hong Kong is still not fully integrated into China therefore you need to apply for a visa to visit. For Honkers, we are automatically allowed to stay for 180 days as we have British residency, and no payment is required for this luxury. However for China we are only allowed 3 months from the date of entry on a single entry pass, and we had to pay 500 HK dollars each. This is about 33 British pounds. So we got that sorted out by taking a trip into a travel agents just off Nathan Road in the 'Gauntlet' zone. It really couldn't have been more straightforward, the guy who served us spoke brilliant English and was incredibly efficient. We were in and out in about 5 minutes and that included him taking our photos and developing them there and then. You have to leave your passport,
Hong Kong
This is a promenade down at Victoria Harbour called Avenue of the Stars and there are paving stones with the names of the most famous film stars in the Hong Kong film industry. Some of them have the handprints of the famous people, but not all of them. This is probably because some of them have passed away. but you get an official receipt and they give you a photocopy of your passport if you don't already have one (we have about 5 copies of each of our important documents with us incase of any emergencies so we were OK with this one). While we were in there we got Mr Highly Effective Person 2006 to book our train tickets to Shanghai aswell. Not a problem. NOT A PROBLEM. Mr HEP 2006 organised this for us with a swish of his computer keypad and promptly produced two Deluxe Class Cabin one way tickets to Shankers, leaving at 3pm tomorrow (17th May). We are expecting to have a double berth private room with nice soft beds - we'll see what happens. Believing is seeing and all that. There is also a restaurant car which will be fairly vital as the journey takes 26 hours or so. We chose the train over a flight because it was A) cheaper by about 40 pounds each, and also we thought it would be nice to see some of the countryside along the way. The only thing is that this flippin Hurricane, sorry, Tycoon, sorry Typhoooooooon(!!!) is on its way to HK for
Come on Jackie Chan oh oh oh oh oh....
Where are 'Ash' when one needs them? Jackie Chan hs got quite big hands y'know. Maybe that's why he's so good at kung fu. 8am tomorrow morning. We went into the travel agents today to ask if there was a chance that the train would be cancelled or delayed and they said 'no way - trains run even if the typhoon is force 8' (which is about 20 times as big as the twister that transported Dorothy to Oz, but with added water) so we guess we are going whatever happens! Fingers crossed it's all going to work out OK - the rain has started this afternoon so maybe by tomorrow it will be belting from the heavens. Our newly purchased 15 dollar (one pound) postage stamp sized tartan brolly will be no use if this is the case. Shit.
A great day was had on Sunday when we headed over to Hong Kong island. We sped across the water on the Star Ferry for much cheapness - 2 HK dollars each - and the journey was over in a jiffy. It takes about 10 mins or something, and the views are great, but the most entertaining part is when the boat is docking up at the other side. The drivers have no concept of smooth landings. We were bashing about big
Bruce Lee.
Wanna fight? Fight me! Woocha! time, and rocking away in a 'crash bang wollop wotapicture' sort of way. Point of warning: Stay away from the side that the boat is landing on, and stay in your seat grasping the railings tightly, or adopt the brace position as demonstrated on aeroplane safety cards. HK island is the place to visit to go up to the Victoria Peak lookout, the financial district with all the amazing and completely individual Banking buildings, Soho, and and do some fabbo shopping if you haven't spent al your cashola by now. We took a trip up on the funicular to the top of Victoria Peak which is one of the best places in the city to look out over HK. We took quite a lot of photos over here and we've posted these on this update, so we won't go on too muich about our day out here, other than to say that when we come back here in about 2 weeks time we are probably going to try and book somewhere to stay over there for a change of scene. There are such a lot of places to go see, and you can catch all the same ferries etc and
trains to the outer lying islands, so it doesn't matter too much if we are not on the main land mass. Soho is very funky and we can;t wait to have some nights out there.
FOODS & DRINKYS: We have had amazing food and drink since we've been here. Downstairs from our hotel is a Starbucks (which we don't normally offer our patronage to) however we are SOLD on a new favourite breakfast drink called Valencian Mocha which has a hint of orange about it. You can get it hot or cold and comes with whipped cream on top. The diet is not going well as you can imagine. You can get anything to eat here. I think we do mean ANYTHING incidentally. Last night we had goose necks with rice with accompanying chicken 'bits'. We're not quite sure what the 'bits' were but they tasted magic - very soft and flavoursome. There is a cafe along the road from our hotel which serves up wonderful Malaysian chicken curry costing about 2 pounds for a massive helping, including potatoes and rice. On Sunday we had fantastic roti bread, crudites and feta / hummus dips with Lychee Martinis down near
The Star Ferry
Yesterday we caught the ferry over to Hong Kong island. We were on the 'Morning Star'. It only costs 2 HK dollars each (there are 15 dollars to the pound) and takes about 8 minutes to reach the other side. All the ferries have names like Morning Star, Night Star, Bright Star etc. the Gauntlet Zone, and yesterday we had an absolutely tremendous Chinese meal for lunch which I've written about in one of the photos below from a place called something like Zhing Nong Noodle and Dumpling Shop. It was devine - extra spicy chicken with cashew nuts and double chilli, and fabulous lamb with spring onion. Decor not much to write home about, but very professional and friendly service and prompt with it. We can use chopsticks now - hurrah! And Macdonalds do a very very weird burger thing here called a 'Fantastic' which is a choice of chicken or beef stir fry burgers between two rice cakes. We haven't had one yet but will prob get one in either Shanghai or when we come back here.
By accident we ended up in a brothel last night. It was a pub called the Red Lion and seemed entirely normal until we'd been in for about ten minutes and noticed about three scantilly clad women appear from nowhere and start feeling this guy up - then led him away to do something to him that we overheard was going to cost him one thousand HK dollars!!!!! Well what could we do?
We'll tell you, we were straight out with the calculator working out how much this was in pounds (its about 66 quid). We didn't hear what he was getting though, so after that we were all ears every time a new punter came in, but the Ladies Of The Night got wind of our efforts and were a bit more discreet after that. We loved it in there, it was highly entertaining so we stayed for three drinks. And we got offered hash on Saturday in a backstreet near the bottom of Nathan Road. 'Hey Sir (there's that polite thing again) want Hashish? I got Hashish for you, good price'. Our reporters pleasantly declined and left, making their excuses as they went.
Right that's it - we need to go and find some snacks.... Wish us luck with the Typhoon tea tomorrow............... We'll see you in Shankers in a couple of days!
shaz & alan. xxx
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Vik
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WOW
WOWOWOWOWOWOWOWOW! Canny wait to get there... Looks amazing. Make sure you take lots more photos and hints and tips for us : )