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We came to Hong Kong for Lara. I was never really fussed but luckily agreed to go and really enjoyed it too. Having been away for about 130 days now Lara is really missing people and life at home.
Hong Kong is the perfect medicine for people home sick for London. There is so much to see and do here. The first thing that struck us both is the intensity of the consumerist, "bigger is better" feel of the place. It is impossible to walk from one building to another without going through enormous shopping arcades. Of course Lara was excited to point of wetting herself when she clapped eyes on the shoe shops. Number one on the agenda was to treat ourselves to a big Western meal. All the way through SE Asia we have denied ourselves anything but the local fare (noodles, rice, pale coloured meat, etc.) mainly because Western options, where available, are disappointing to say the least. Although we have put on brave (if thinning) faces and convinced ourselves that noddle soup for breakfast, lunch and dinner is satisfying enough, sometimes there is just no substitue for a big, juicy burger. Dan Ryan's Chicago Grill delivered
the goods in spades. Have you ever seen me unable to clear a plate? With the fullest bellies we've had for months we were ready for the sights of this awesome city.
We made ourselves at home in the Tsim Sha Tsui area of Kowloon (on the mainland). Unfortunately, we accidentally booked beds in Chungking Mansions. Having heard and heeded multiple warnings about this monstrosity of a building we tried to avoid it by researching on t'internet to find a nice place, which also warned potential guests not to stay in the low quality accomodation at the Mansions. After booking and paying a deposit we were emailed the address - those sneaky bastards tricked us! The Mansions are anything but the name suggests. In fact, if it was in Camden I could swear I'd been in here before on work related business, if you know what I mean. Damp, smelly corridors lead to dark stairwells where unsavoury looking characters congregate, giving the impression that one is interrupting the hatching of some dastardly deeds. But it was not bad enough for us to look elsewhere, so we stayed for 5 nights anyway.
The Light Show, veiwed from the Avenue
of Stars, has to be seen to be believed. Every night at 8 the buildings along the North Shore of HK Island perform a display of neon, laser and spot lights, all in time to music. It is mesmerising in much the same way as watching a fruit machine down the pub. HK does not even need elabourate light and sound displays to be impressive. Lara nearly cried when she first saw the sky-line stretching both directions as far the eye can see, and vows that she most definitely will be working there whether they want her or not! One of the key objectives has been to get up as high as possible to see the city from a vantage point. The 28th floor bar of the Peninsula Hotel (the poshest hotel in Kowloon) afforded excellent veiws of the HK from across the water at night and an excuse to get a bit dressed up (in new boots which cost almost as much as the time we spent in Vietnam! - Lara obvioulsy) and drink a $65 beer (that includes Lara - who would believe that this posh scots lass would start liking beers! although as always the tastes are
Dan Ryan's
Finally, some decent food and proper ketchup expnsive..bloody Corona!). The 47th floor observatory of Central Plaza was OK for looking down on the evening rush-hour traffic and roof-top pools of the plush hotels on the water front, and it was FREE! Good but not the one. Ascending the Peak is the only way to get above all the buildings and see the whole of HK Island and most of the mainland too. We have not been lucky with the weather and most of time our views have been obscured by cloud and haze. Not wanting to waste a trip up to the Peak, we kept putting if and putting it off until, on the afternoon of our last day day, the low cloud cleared and the sun poked through for just long enough for us to enjoy the breath-takingly beautiful vistas.
HK needs to be seen twice. By day and by night. Most of our time was spent walking the streets looking at the arcitecture, the people, the traffic, the lights and, most of all, the shops. Every street is different and unique in its own way. From the market on Pottinger street steps to the traditional Chinese stores selling ginseng, birds nest, sharks fins and
flattened duck (what ever that may be) in Kennedy Town, to the fruit stalls on graham street or the hawker stalls in stanley street, HK has it all. Aswell as walking the streets, there are elevated walkways making it easy for pedestrians to move around the city as if in some Sci-fi world where setting foot on the surface of the planet is a thing of the past. We rode the Tram the length of its course on our first day to get some idea of our bearings and could no quite believe the amount of neon we saw. It was all too inviting for Lara who went about hunting out incredible bargans on boots and fake designer handbags. I was also tempted and decided to replace the camera that disappeared on the was to Bangkok. After briefly shopping around I found a camera that did more than I thought was possible for the price and got loads of extas chucked in too. I have been playing with my new toy ever since and am delighted to share with you all the fruits of my labour on this blog.
We had the most eclectic selections of Eastern and Western
meals I've ever known. Dim Sum in a tea house on the Chinese side of town was perhaps the most memorable (and at totally the other end of the scale from Dan Ryan's). We nearly bottled it when we looked in and saw the large round tables crowded with locals and steaming bowls of god-knows-what that they were frantically tucking into. But as soon as we were spotted by someone who worked there (or I presume they worked there, it's very hard to tell) we could not escape. Being the only round-eyes in a room of about 200 diners we were subject to an uncomfortable amount of scrutiny (many an old gent requested Lara to sit with them...purely to gawp we can assume)as we sat down at a large table next to a man eating delicious-looking chicken feet. So we tried our hardest to look like we ate there every day. It all went out the window when I poured tea into the wrong recepticule and the "waiter" had to arrange our selection of small bowls and cups before us. Thank god we had become accustom to chop-sticks in Vietnam or we would have totally lost face.
We also
spent a day seeing some of the other towns of Hong Kong. Aberdeen, a busy fishing port on the South of the Island, was alot more built up than we expected. Here there are enormous floating restaurants - the biggest, aptly titled Jumbo, is a four-floor behemoth. I was pleased to see that even in this huge, Westernised city of skyscrapers and neon signs there is that all so Asian juxtapossition of the traditional fishing 'junks' on which fishermen still live and work.
We have seen just about all there is to see on Hong Kong Island and Kowloon, but did not even touch the other outlying islands. We had to leave something....
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