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Published: April 8th 2006
First meal in Hong Kong
Greasy, with beef and crispy noodles. A bit of a change from Thailand.Yet another country! My flight from Bangkok was full of Indians as it had previously come from Mumbai (I didn’t want to cause offence and was careful to use the new name but was told to call it “Bombay” - now I’m confused!)
Anyway, it’s very exciting to be in Hong Kong SAR! It’s like a bonus prize to be here as it was not on my original shortlist of destinations for the trip.
I’m staying in a tiny room in an apartment in the massive Mirador Mansions apartment block in Tsim Sha Tsui in Kowloon. I awoke the next morning to no sunlight as my room overlooks a square 3x3m. I’m on the 12th floor of 18.
On my first morning, I took the famous Star Ferry over to Hong Kong Island. These ferries are frequent, fast and cheap. They have two bows so the boat doesn’t even have to turn round.
I spent the morning looking round the buildings in “Central”: Jardine House, HSBC Building, Bank of China Building, and Standard Chartered Building. Then I had a look round Hong Kong Park with its fascinating memorial to medical workers killed by SARS in 2003 in
Jardine House
One of HK's first skyscrapers. Affectionately known as "The Building of a Thousand Arseholes". With Henry Moore statue in front. the equally fascinating Tai Chi garden.
In the afternoon, I took the tram out to North Point. The trams are slow and narrow, but cheap and fun. At North Point, I saw loads of residential tower blocks with tiny flats and scarcely any other westerners. Many shops and cafés had no English signage at all and I feel totally lost among Chinese writing.
That evening, I watched the light show that happens every evening. From Kowloon, you can see lights and lasers on the buildings on the island. It was OK, but I didn’t feel very impressed. Apparently, it’s the world’s longest running light show and in the Guinness Book of Records, but I haven’t checked.
I needed to buy a new notebook for my diary. This proved surprisingly difficult. The “Ocean Terminal” shopping mall in Kowloon is massive, yet only one of a great many malls in HK. It seems full of designer clothes shops. I found only one bookshop where I could by a fancy (and expensive “Moleskine” notebook). It surprises me that they don’t have a
WH Smith-type stationers here, but maybe that tells me something about Hong Kong.
Something else they don’t have
The only rickshaw left in Hong Kong
These guys don't actually take you anywhere, just charge for photos. here is Internet Cafés. The only place I can get online is
Pacific Coffee, where they allow free access to a couple of terminals if you buy something. I ended up buying a lot of coffees!
I can’t decide whether Hong Kong is rich or poor. I think the simple answer is that it’s both and that the two are right next to each other. People generally live in tiny apartments in giant blocks of flats. You can get clothes made very cheaply which suggests that many people work for low wages, yet everything except public transport is very expensive and there are so many boutiques and so much wealth being flaunted. No where else on my trip has had such a contrast.
Macau
The next morning, I got up at 6am to catch the first ferry of the day across the Pearl River estuary to Macao. This was a Portugese colony for 4½ centuries (300 years more than Britain had Hong Kong) and was returned to China only in 1999. It is now a Special Administrative Region (SAR) of China with a similar status to Hong Kong.
While waiting for the ferry, I got chatting to Eddie,
Christmas is over!
Hong Kong gets back to the business of making money. a Brazillian who now lives in Birmingham, Alabama. We ended up spending the day together.
As the ferry approached Macao, I saw what appeared to be Dutch houses (like on a canal in Amsterdam). Then, there was what looked like a Venetian Palace. Yes, this is Macao, where gambling is legal (unlike in Hong Kong or the mainland) and this was one of many themed casinos on recently reclaimed land.
We passed immigration and I got yet another stamp on my passport (country No 10 on this trip!). The whole of my time in Hong Kong and Macao was cold: 9C and apparently unusually cold in HK, but Macao was even colder as it’s windy. We needed breakfast. I tried some Macanese “Portuguese-style fried rice” (with sliced sausage and olives).
Macao has a historic centre which is now World Heritage listed. I realised after getting lost in its streets how used to grid patterns I’d become: this place is like a European town. Eddie and I visited various churches and historic buildings. The place definitely has a unique culture: Portuguese and Chinese together.
The Chinese are spending a huge amount of money in Macao. Anyone who
Legislative Council Building
With HSBC Building in background. came here ten years ago would not recognise the place. There is so much building work going on and land being reclaimed. Apparently, they want to make it the entertainment hub of the greater Pearl River area. This stretches from Guangzhou (Canton) down each side of the estuary and is one of the fastest growing areas in the World.
Eddie and I were just about the only foreign tourists we saw on the day we visited. However, there were loads of Chinese tourists. I imagine this place must seem really exotic to them.
We got a taxi down to the
Macao Tower. This is interesting for lots of reasons. It looks exactly like (and built by the same people as) the
Auckland Sky Tower. However, it is (of course!) that little bit bigger and serves no useful purpose. It’s not used for radio transmissions or anything like that. As the clone of Auckland’s Skytower, it has an identical (but slightly higher) Sky Jump and this is run by NZ firm AJ Hackett. It seems very Chinese. Like the new F1 track in Shanghai, or the Beijing Olympic City the Chinese have seen something in another part of the world, thought “we
want something like that”, then hired the best foreign experts to build something a little bit bigger or better. They want to leapfrog development to become a first-class nation and don’t mind how much it costs. The Chinese government is difficult to understand, but presumably very clever. The Macao tower is now the 10th tallest structure in the World.
Eddie toyed with the idea of doing the Sky Jump for a while, then chickened out (I was way too yella!).
At the first level of the tower were some glass floors which give the illusion you’re stepping into the void. I’ve seen loads of these but it was fascinating to watch the handful of Chinese tourists (in this almost empty building) react to it. We had a laugh together over it and they all wanted to have their picture taken with me. They came from the Chinese mainland and I then realised that there was a real possibility I was the first white person they had seen, or maybe the first they had had a laugh with. It was quite thought provoking.
Eddie and I were getting hungry again. We got a taxi to a restaurant. It
was really interesting to see that Eddie could find hardly anyone who could speak Portuguese. Our taxi driver could not even speak much English, something you don’t find in Hong Kong. We had a very nice meal in a Portuguese restaurant run by an ex-Portuguese naval technician. Eddie had finally managed to find someone to chat to in his native language and seemed pleased when I found I could follow bits of the conversation and join in, in Spanish.
The restaurant owner told me that most business these days comes from the Mainland, not Hong Kong. Apartments in the same building as his restaurant (reclaimed since 1989) go for millions of HKD and Hong Kong people can’t afford them. The World is indeed changing!
Back to Hong Kong
I’d had a tiring day in Macao and took it relatively easy for the next couple of days in Hong Kong. I spent the morning watching TV. You can get a real feel for a place by watching its TV. I watched “China Central Television” (CCTV) news; then a technology show; and lastly a learning Chinese programme. It’s an awesome thought to think that the mighty country of China is
SARS Memorial
In the Tai Chi Garden is a memorial to medical staff who died during the 2003 SARS outbreak. right next door. I’d visit if I had more time.
Late morning, I crossed to Central and took the tram up “The Peak”. This gives a great view over Hong Kong, though is actually some way from the summit. I was a bit disappointed with the place: it’s a building site but should hopefully be finished when you get there.
In Thailand, I had drunk virtually nothing with caffeine in. Since I have to drink coffee to go online here, I find that my body now craves it. It’s an interesting experiment...
I returned to Hong Kong Park and visited the walk-through aviary. It’s fantastic!
The afternoon was spent reading the South China Morning Press, then I headed back home on the ferry. I notice that former Hong Kong Governor Chris Patten has recently published a book and it’s no surprise to see it displayed prominently here.
I bought a special supplement on globalisation, published by “
Der Spiegel”. It was a very interesting read: doubly so for me as I’m right by China now and just about to go to India. Globalisation is a scary thing which many people are worried about and rightly so. But
Chinese and Indians both see the growing wealth and influence of their nations as “righting historical wrongs”. One interesting point is that if, after the 1940s China had not gone Communist nor India isolationist, they would now be wealthier anyway. It’s just that 2-3 Billion people have just been launched on the World economy and that’s going to cause a shock. And it was very interesting to hear a German perspective: that country’s lavish social benefits and expenses are facing a harsh reality of competition from ultra-cheap workers who live in Dickensian conditions.
The following day, I went to the
Hong Kong Museum of History. There are some impressive sections on Natural History and on the lives of Chinese residents in Hong Kong, past and present.
The upstairs section deals with the Opium Wars and the British “Occupation” (briefly interrupted by the Japanese “Occupation”). In the later sections, it was interesting to see a very oblique reference to the Tiananmen Square Massacres (the “June 4th Incident”) but no explanation, mentioned in the context of Hong Kong people having an affinity to mainland Chinese and doing other things like sending assistance to flood victims.
Tsim Sha Tsui, where I am staying, is
a bit touristy. You get accosted on every street corner by people trying to sell you fake watches. Funnily enough, none of them are Chinese: they’re all Indian!
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