Hong Kong Round One: 19/June - 27/June
Our first night in Hong Kong was mostly one of grogginess and shock. Grogginess after the extended plane ride, shock at the unaccustomed heat and humidity, the lights, the city, the people, and, for me, the return. Having so recently left Hong Kong, it was unreal for me to be back in the city, as though somehow the fact of having returned could erase the time I had been away. I could feel the torn edges of my memory try to mash together, attempting and failing to make the city a linear reality, like trying to blend two songs together unsuccessfully. The effect was discordant and jarring; combined with the physical reality of the city, I felt I was drowning, and very, very happy.
Hong Kong is a city of light and affluence, pockmarked by a variety of dingier and more interesting realities. One of these, and certainly the most notorious, is Chungking Mansions. This complex - and few other institutions so deserve the term - sits in the heart of ritzy Tsim Sha Tsui. Barely 5 blocks away is the groomed and polished Walk of Stars, a tourist trap of the first order complete with photo opportunities and overpriced, over air-conditioned eateries snuggled up between scenic Victoria Harbour and the first class Art Museum and Cultural Centre. A main artery of the vibrant metropolis, Nathan Road, cuts a swath of neon away from the harbour all the way to the gentrified heart of Kowloon Tong; it's awash in chilly, sterile shopping malls and two-storey luxury stores. Farther away from the harbour these eventually peter out and become Internet cafes, hair salons, kung fu academies, and clothing wholesale stores, all stacked one on top of the other in a genius of space utility incomprehensible to someone raised in space-consuming North America. But it’s right in the middle of the shopping malls and Gucci stores that Chungking Mansions unapologetically holds court.
Chungking functions as a locus for something like 80% of all the hostels in the city, at least 70% of the Arabic and Indian hawkers, and, if rumours are true, a significant portion of Hong Kong’s illegal business. Its dilapidated and dirty frame is divided - ‘organised’ being too generous a term - into 6 towers, each served by two tiny and painfully slow elevators, one each for odd and even floors. To get to your hostel you must first survive the first floor, a cell-block labyrinth of food stalls, tiny Internet cafes, and random shops. The dingy linoleum floor is stained with the footsteps and detritus of the hundreds of people who pass through everyday, most of whom seem to be as much a fixture of the place as the inconsistent fluorescent lighting. At night it is a bustling, humming, aggressive obstacle course for the jet-lagged backpacker, thronged with vendors, hawkers, and a hundred other desperate strangers in a part of the city foreign even to the locals.
We got there at peak business time, around 9:30 at night. We first made sure of the tower and floor number of our hostel, dodging restaurant and hostel room vendors to make our way to the appropriate elevator tower, and got in the line for the appropriate elevator (remember, even and odd). From there, it was a simple matter of bullying ourselves and our baggage into the warm steel box, trundling upwards, and falling out at the correct floor. Signage was a bit dodgy, but a brief search revealed a check-in counter. It was here that we received directions to our room, which was, of course, on a different floor in another tower.
The room, once found, proved to be down a narrow hallway that had pretensions of elegance, with dark faux wood panelling and a disconcerting mirror at the end with cleaning supplies and garbage bags stowed in front of it. The door to our room was right next to it, and the room that was revealed upon opening it was brightly lit by fluorescents only activated when a card was inserted into a small receptacle (as was the noisy but utterly ineffectual air conditioner). It was tiny, warm, humid, and clean. It also had a TV, a window opening onto a garbage-littered construction scaffolding, and a private attached bathroom, accessible through a poorly designed glass door and a foot-high step, complete with the Hong Kong standard bathroom of toilet, sink, mirror, and shower stall all rolled into the same tiled space. In short, it was perfect, and far, far better than what either of us had expected.
A note should be made here about Hong Kong hostels. Unlike the rest of the world, hostels in Hong Kong, or at least hostels in Chungking mansions, are geared not towards the ‘traveller’, student or otherwise, but towards the economy-class business man (or men). As such, there are few of the dorm rooms common at other hostels, where you’d rent a bed in the room and share a bathroom with the rest of the floor (though these do exist, they fill up quickly due to their low price and are not always co-ed), and it’s more common to find private rooms that could conceivably serve as a make-shift apartment for a month or two (such as ours), or, even more common, multiple-bed rooms that are meant to be rented out entirely by a single party. We stayed at the Oriental Pearl Hostel, which no longer seems to exist, in a private double-bed room, for something like 20-odd dollars Canadian a night, that being fairly cheap and in a poorly-rated hostel.
That night very little was done except photography by PB. I wandered around with him for a little while after clearing up my confusion about meeting with my friend later, snacked at Hui Lau Shan, and then went back to the hostel to sleep, leaving PB to explore on his own (Hong Kong is stupendously safe).
The next day was mostly taken up at the Chinese Visa office, primarily in the finding of it, and then waiting in line. We spent the rest of the afternoon at The Peak, the highest mountain on Hong Kong Island and an excellent viewpoint from which to capture scenic photos of the city below - for a price. We, of course, cheaped out, and opted for taking advantage of the free-to-access balcony on the lower level of the structure, having decided we’d paid enough to come up by Tram in the first place. The weather had cleared up by then, and despite the wind and my determined incompetency at picture-taking, PB managed to get in a good few photos before we descended. That night we met my friend and her parents for dinner on Ap Lei Chau, one of the outlying islands, though we were a bit late coming due to my poor time management skills and inability to follow simple directional instructions (this was to prove a recurring theme throughout the trip). [Editor’s Note: -and my life]
The next day, the Tuesday, was spent in the finding and exploration of the cemetery for Commonwealth soldiers in the WWII Japanese invasion of the city, called the Sai Wan War Cemetery. PB’s maternal grandfather had lost a friend in the action; we went to find his grave. The cemetery was on a forested hill overlooking the area where the Japanese had broken through the Island’s defences in December, 1941, leading to the surrender of the Commonwealth forces on Christmas Day. It’s a beautiful area, tucked away on the eastern edge of Hong Kong Island. The day was appropriately overcast, but mercifully didn’t rain until we’d climbed the hill and made it to the shelter of the memorial arch at the entrance to the graveyard. It was in one of the booklets considerately kept in a compartment of one of the arch’s pillars that we discovered that, among several hundred others, the remains of PB’s grandfather’s friend had been either un-found or unidentifiable; his death was commemorated by one of the many white granite tombstones marked with a maple leaf and the simple words ‘Known Unto God’.
After descending from the cemetery once more into the city, we decided we still had enough time to take the bus across the island to Stanley, a pretty and upscale seaside-area on the seaward and less commercial side of Hong Kong Island. It’s a pretty and on-purpose-quiet tourist area; anyone who’s ever been to Qualicum Beach on Vancouver Island will understand. Possibly the most entertaining part, though, is the double-decker bus ride there, particularly if you manage to get a seat right at the front on the second floor. The drivers on those roads have to be some of the best in the industry, as the roads are narrow and winding, with a forested mountainside on one side and a steep drop on the other, with a moderately busy two-lane highway in between. The daytime views of beaches and mountains on the way in are very pretty and picturesque, but to my mind are outdone by the spectacle of the lit up city on the way back after dark.
The evening was spent in window shopping by some of the furniture stores we’d passed on the bus to and from Stanley, and taking advantage of the city’s relaxed liquor laws to buy TsingTao beer and ice cream at a 7-11 (alcohol and ice-cream would become another definite theme for this trip), and drinking in a rest area outside an apartment building. I think we may have gone to the Temple Street Night Market this night, but I’m not entirely sure.
The next day we breakfasted at one of my old haunts on Temple Street, and were planning to pack up out of the hostel and go camp at one of Hong Kong’s 40 free campgrounds; however, as there was a Typhoon warning (common in late summer) we put those plans on hold until more clement weather and spent most of the day in the Hong Kong Art Gallery, which is as good a place as any to spend a rainy afternoon. In the evening we headed back across the harbour to Hong Kong Island to have dinner with friends, and visit Happy Valley, Hong Kong island’s famous horse-race track. That was Wednesday, June 22nd.
We picked up our passports Thursday afternoon, with double-entry Chinese visa’s inside, after having Dim Sum at my old university and checking out Festival Walk, a shopping mall in Kowloon Tong with an ice rink inside. It seems to me we also made it out to the clothing and bird markets by Prince Edward Station, and made a stop at the Jade Market in Yau Ma Tei, where PB picked up a green Dragon Ball. However, this is mostly because I know that those events transpired and can’t think of any other time that they could have taken place, rather than any definite memory of a linear ordering of events. That evening we headed down to Lan Kwai Fong, Hong Kong’s nightclub district. At PB’s urging we went into a Lebanese bar with the happiest serving staff I’ve ever seen, and I tried Shisha for the first time. Double apple, double the fun. That was the 24th, still Thursday.
On Friday we left the hustle and bustle of the city to seek refuge in a beachside campground(1) on Lantau Island. Not only was it free, as are all Hong Kong's campgrounds, it was entirely deserted, and we effectively had our very own private tropical beach... with the exception of some little brown cows with a great deal of interest in our groceries and very little fear of humans. Cows are seemingly everywhere in Hong Kong that lacks pavement, and to this day I have no idea who owns them, how they get herded together, or how on earth they manage to avoid both snakes and traffic, but they've always seemed in relentless good health, so I suppose they must manage somehow.
The campground was clean and well maintained, with soft sand tent pads, firepits, picnic tables, and basic pit toilets. The white sand beach and beautiful tropical sea water were an incredibly welcome break from the unrelenting heat of a Hong Kong summer. Even better, at night phosphorescent phytoplankton would light up the water like a starry sky when disturbed by the motion of human limbs through the water. To this day, though, most people I meet who have visited Hong Kong have no idea of the incredible outdoor opportunities offered by the city. It's a shame, because 25% of the metropolitan area is reserved as park land, and between the lush jungle, picturesque mountains, and sparkling soft beaches, the wilderness aspect of 'Asia's World City' is truly worth spending a day or two to check out.
The next day was a busy one of social commitments for me. I was to go to my former place of employment in Hung Hom at lunch for a visit, and then hop back across Victoria Harbour to Central to meet a friend. Both went well, and PB joined me for the visit at Central. That evening we went back across to Kowloon, all the way up to Shatin to have dinner with my ex-co-workers from the English school I used to teach at, before making the trek back once more to our home on the beach on Lantau Island. The day after that, Sunday, June 26th, I spent having brunch with the family of a former tutoring student and then getting my hair strategically dyed dark brown, in anticipation of the upcoming journey through the land of the photo-happy and tourist-targeting.
On Monday the 27th we boarded the train at Hung Hom and left Hong Kong for Beijing.
(1) Yes, you can camp in Hong Kong! Here's the official site.
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