Beijing Round One: 28/June - 05/July
After an uneventful train ride from Hong Kong, we disembarked at Beijing’s West Railway Station. Beijing in the spring and fall months is a brisk, dry, dusty city of improbably blue skies and sudden playful breezes. Beijing in July is a 20-million-person slum languishing under a sky the colour and density of a rotting leviathan; the incredible pollution permeates every single drop of the intense humidity, coating buildings, bridges, landmarks, and skin in a gritty layer of toxic residue. Nothing is dry. Nothing is clean. Everything is sweating.
We swam through the damp, ugly masses of pollution and people outside the imposing train station and made our way to the subway system, and from there to Chegongzhuang station. Walking down the road to our hostel, we found ourselves behind 3 westerners walking in the same direction. They all three of them were wearing what appeared from the back to be band t-shirts, with long shorts, sandals, and long, long hair completing the uniform. We decided they were either vikings or American. We were sort of hoping for vikings. They were, of course, American (vikings not being known for inland travel - or sandals) and were also staying at our hostel, which, as we ended up there so often, and loved so much, I will attempt to describe here.
INNer City Hostel is [Editing Note: was, actually. Tragically it no longer exists] a small, student run backpacking hostel tucked away in a working class neighbourhood bordered on the east by historic and touristy central Beijing and on the west by the upscale and ‘westerner-friendly’ financial district, between CheGongzhuang and Ping'Anli metro stations. The hostel itself [was] a converted Siheyuan, a traditional Chinese style of home comprised of different buildings organised around a central courtyard, and is situated on a Hutong, a particular kind of small, crooked alley found in neighbourhoods of Siheyuans.
Anyway, the Americans turned out to be from (surprise!) San Francisco; a father, a son, and the son’s friend. Good people. Cannot remember their names.
That evening we went to Hou Hai, one of Beijing’s pub districts. ‘Hai’ is ‘lake’ in putonghua (mandarin), and the area is really just a long circuit of lake-front bars blaring music and neon out onto the waters of two small man-made lakes in a brassy attempt to lure in the crowds of pedestrians who come to people watch and bar-hop. After some wandering and prevaricating we ensconced ourselves on the outdoor sofa-seating of Bar 31, which proudly advertised the fact that it had shisha (true), cheap drinks (debatable), and ‘Hou Hai’s first Uighur Flamenco band’ (amazing). It was a good night, and after the sun sets the heat lets up and the darkness makes it easy to forget the masses of pollution hanging above and all around you. Pleasantly buzzed, energised by the Flamenco, and mildly oxygen-deprived from the shisha, we headed back to the hostel and ended our first night in the largest communist country on earth.
The next day was the Temple of Heaven, a title pleasantly incorrect in a city where you couldn’t see the sky and a country where religion was generally discouraged. Even cloaked in smog, though, it’s an impressive series of structures, and is, besides, surrounded by an expansive park. It was in the park on the way out that we happened upon on an elderly Chinese man with a red accordion, playing unmistakably 1930’s era Parisian songs while seated on a low stone platform. Sitting across from him was another local, younger and chubbier, nodding his head and frowning in agreement as he listened and occasionally tapped his foot in time with the tune. Seated a little way away from them was a girl about our age, probably a university student, judging by her fashionable clothing and high-quality camera. What ensued was one of only two instances in the trip where I truly wished I had my own camera, as there was a moment where PB was taking a photo of the accordion player and the girl was taking a photo of PB. Ships passing in the night, I guess.
The rest of the afternoon was spent in wandering around Beijing, largely in the wrong direction, again due to my terrible map-using skills. However, we accidentally found a bell tower, a restaurant with a very accommodating but overworked waitress, and some spheres and columns with interesting bas reliefs carved on them, so the afternoon wasn’t entirely lost. No, really.
The next day (June 30th, a Thursday) PB went to the Jinshanling Great Wall [Editing Note: He went alone because I'd been to Beijing twice before, and had trekked over Jinshanling on both occasions. Also, if you want to stay friends with the person you're travelling with, it's often a good idea to schedule a day apart here and there], while I tried to track down train tickets to get us to Mongolia in time for Nadaam and getting picked up by the horseback riding / tour company Stepperiders.
I had ballparked the price of these tickets to be somewhere around 500 yuan each one way, and dutifully set out to stand in line somewhere. This was not as easy as I hoped it would be, as the train station from which the train (the Trans-Siberian) actually left was not actually permitted to sell the tickets. I was instead directed to the International Ticket Office, which I eventually found on the ground floor of a large hotel a block or two away from the main station. Unfortunately, and to my dismay, the tickets from Beijing to Ulanbataar were priced at 1300-odd yuan each - one way! I decided to go do some equipment shopping instead, picking up such essentials as multivitamins, flashlights, and an equipment bag to replace one bag which hadn’t entirely survived the trip from Canada to China.
Later, at the hostel, PB and I asked our gracious hosts about how to get to Mongolia, and we were informed that we could probably take a train to the border town of Er Lian for about 400 yuan each, hire a jeep across, and take a Mongolian train up from there. We agreed this was a far more pleasing solution and spent the rest of the evening making dumplings and talking to the other guests, including a lady and her daughter from the state of Georgia, USA, who were heading to the Great Wall the next day, which was, funnily, both Canada Day and Chinese National Day. Either way, it’d be a good idea to wear red.
The next morning we attempted valiantly to enter and explore the Forbidden City. PB had it on good authority that the best and wisest way to go through was to enter through the north, which most people used as an exit. However, owing to a late start, and, I believe, making the rather foolhardy decision of walking from the front (Tiananmen Square metro stop, replete with out-sized screens broadcasting comforting images of stylized nature and happy cultural minorities) all the way around the city to the back, we didn’t actually end up going into the City that day.
I should note here that the Forbidden City is HUGE; calling it a city is not just hubris. Set aside a good 3 or 4 hours to wind your way through, and it's worth it to just gently meander through and take your time instead of going with a tour. There's interesting alcoves to either side of the 'main drag' that are worth visiting in their own right (I really like the bit with the not-quite-finished building. Dunno why, just found it really pleasant), and when it's sunny there's loads of benches in those areas that are perfect for lounging on. There's also a couple decent restaurants on the north side, near the exit. Basically it's worth it to take your time and make a day of it.
So, although we did indeed find the north entrance, complete with ticket counter and sign proclaiming pricing for entrance and audio guides, we opted against entering so late in the day and put it off for the next day. The rest of that afternoon, I think, was spent in Jingshan Park, famous for its hill which provides a good view of the Forbidden City, and a tree where one of the Emperors hanged himself to avoid the consequences of a rebellion brought about by famine and corruption.
We also got in some good loitering to top the day off, in Tiananmen Square of all places. We parked ourselves in front of the series of huge, fantastic TV displays and did some highly amusing people watching, particularly of the casual-looking police officers on segways, and the always popular "naked papa's" [bang ye](1) of Beijing - portly and generally middle aged men who tuck their t-shirts and tank tops up into their collars to expose their stomachs and lower back. Not sure if it made the heat any more bearable, but they're certainly cool in my book.
(1) They're so famous they got mentioned in a news story about Shanghai.
2015/08/28
2015/08/21
an Absquatulating Cat. Asia 2011
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.
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)