Hong Kong


The fifteen hour-long flight was extended by a late arriving inbound aircraft from Hong Kong and then by a painfully slow departure. All in all, we were on the plane for about 16 1/2 hours. My ipod died too, just for fun, right at the start of the flight. The best thing was the bloke sitting next to me and I didn't speak once to each other at all. I should have got his number to find out when he was flying again. The perfect traveling companion. Mind you, when I was married it was also possible to go 16 hours without speaking to each other too so I guess it's not so unremarkable.


Hong Kong is one of the most efficient airports around, so much so that the only delay was waiting to go through immigration because of the lines - even then, when you got to the desk the had a little tray of gummy candies for you to try while the nice man stamped your passport. I was in my hotel room 1 hour and 20 minutes after landing. Whoever runs JFK should come here and take notes. Scratch that; whoever runs JFK probably can't write so what would be the point?



I dropped my bags off in my room and wandered down to the Star Ferry Terminal before my jet-lag kicked in (I slept about seven hours on the flight, but I've learned not to trust that as a rule of thumb). Sure enough, by the time I was walking on the promenade at Tsim Sha Tsui and staring boggle-eyed across the harbour, I felt very tired. Got back just in time to crash out.



I love Hong Kong. It's one of my happy places (along with New York, LA (sometimes), Berlin, Beijing, Hawaii, Sydney, Beijing & Beijing). Something about the place makes perfect sense even though it's a chaotic cross between New York, San Francisco, London and China all at once. It's truly international. It's a working city too, so the harbour is always busy, and the whole place is a jumble of commerce and industry, from cheap hawkers in the markets to the huge International Finance Tower that dominates the island skyline.


The IFC tower and Victoria Peak from the ferry.






The air in Asia smells different - the air when you land in London smells damp and fresh, in New York it smells dry, metallic and carbonised, in LA it smells warm, like hot blacktop, and sometimes musky; in Asia it smells steamy and ripe, like there's a different kind of tropical pollen in the air, and like there are unfamiliar vegetables cooking somewhere that you can't see. I love it. It's the same in Xi'an and Tokyo and Hong Kong. For some reason since I've arrived I've been noticing smells, whether it be the ripe, steamy air, or the diesel for the ferries, or the green seaweed smell of the seawater by the ferry dock pilings, or the cooking Pork in the restaurants near my hotel, or the cigarette smoke of the old geezers who've walked up the Peak which rises 1200 feet behind my hotel.












This morning I climbed Victoria Peak for my daily exercise. It's a sheer path up the hill and it took me nearly 50 minutes of uphill walking to get there. It's so steep! Sweat beaded on my arms and hands and ran down my face, I was thirsty and sweat-soaked at the same time, kind of like being in a sauna (only I was wearing more than a towel and my speedos). When I got to the top for good measure I ran the 3KM loop around the Peak. It's the best running track in the world with the best views (I'll take my camera tomorrow) but by the time I'd finished I was beat. The sun was getting too hot for me. It was 7:52AM. It took over half an hour to get down. I cheated for the last few metres by using the commuter escalator.













This escalator is 800 metres long and in the morning between 6am-10am it runs downhill to take people to thier offices in Central. After that, it runs uphill until Midnight. Considering that some of the streets are sheer climbs and taxis are permanently gridlocked this was a genius idea. Also, because of the tropical sun, the escalator connects to the covered walkways that inter-connect buildings in the Central area allowing pedestrians to walk over the traffic and in the shade. I've got to think that whoever designed the infrastructure of Central Hong Kong was German or Japanese, as it makes so much sense. The road layout is undoubtedly English (it feels like Central London somehow) but the logic of the connected walkways most definitely isn't English, not in the least.

Below is a street near my hotel, which looks like every other backstreet in Hong Kong. Now imagine the smell of barbequing pork over an industrial-sized kettle full of endless boiling water.....

On Thursday, I've since learned, all the museums are closed, so I took a bus up to the Kowloon Walled City . This is now a park (see photo below) but up until the 1990's it was a lawless labyrinth of drug dens and crime, which, to be honest, is what I went for. Instead of getting boosted for my trainers by some skag-smoking 8 year olds I had a nice walk through the park and said hello to some old grandads, which was probably better for me in the long run. Although, when I asked them to tell me some stories about what it was like when they lived here, back in the day when they were all impoverished and high on British Imported Opium (something you don't learn in History classes in the UK) they got all cantankerous and started caterwauling. I thought old people liked talking about the good old days? Some people, they've got no respect for history.

The strange thing is the buses in Hong Kong are all British Double-Decker buses so I was sitting on a bus that was exactly the same as the #36 to Keresley; the bus that I used to take to school. The view was anything but similar as it meandered through Mong Kok. I was especially pleased to be able to use my Mandarin on the bus driver too, it seems slightly more useful now than it did two years ago. Then, when I was here, people refused to answer me but now I'm hearing a lot of Mandarin spoken. I have to say I didn't have a clue what he said when he answered me though.

And they have trams too; just like Manchester, but without all the thieves, guns, crap fashions, acid-cut drugs and unwarranted sense of self.

Finally, an adolescent moment. How could I not take a photo...?