Hong Kong 14th - 18th December
My comments (not complete)
The memory card of my camera (a Sandisk memory stick) died and I lost most of my photos of Hong Kong, so I apologise in advance. HK reminded me of a colder version of Singapore. It had a similar history, both being small parts of the British empire until the 20th century. It's about 20 degrees further north but that still puts it on a similar latitude to northern Africa. We did cock up in a major way as we didn't notice that the World Trade organisation was meeting while we were there. There were lots of police and security guys all over HK while we were there. We were in the metro trying to figure out how the system worked (as every tourist does no matter how many you use) and one approached us. He was very helpful and polite. I've no idea how many security people you would see during a normal day in HK. We both got rather annoyed when we turned up at our hostel (by the way Hk is very short of land, this means that almost all buildings on HK island are high rise), the Wang Fat hostel, rated by the Lonely Planet. It was in a high rise building on the 5th floor I think. We'd made a booking but the guy said that some people had decided to stay a while longer and that he'd moved us to a sister hostel. NOT HAPPY. We moved out the next day on principle.
Narration by Jessica :-)
Obviously we didn't do too much between JKL & Hong Kong except launder & get ready for Hong Kong !
The trip got off to an early start, with our cab picking us up at 5am for a 7am flight. The advantage was that we arrived in good time in HK & headed straight for the hotel on Hong Kong Island. We walked from the station, which was about 20 minutes, and gave us a chance to see the Statue Square , Chater Garden , Santa's Village & the main Christmas Tree & the Law Courts, plus a few other things. On arrival at our hotel however things went a little awry. No one had checked out & so our reservation was not being honoured. But hey, the guy had a friend with a hotel! So after a stiff complaint to someone who spoke very little English, we were taken to another hotel. It was grot. Teeny tiny, with a grubby little bathroom. Decided we would look for an alternative later in the day, gritted our teeth & headed for the History Museum , which was free on Wednesdays :-) It was really interesting, starting with the natural history of the area, geology & formation of the island & peninsula & so on, on to the earliest settlers, the British & the Opium Wars, World War II & through up to post handover Hong Kong, where everything is of course fantastic. They did briefly mention the Tianenmen Square "incident", which I thought was very big of them......There were some really cool part though, re-creations of houses and theatres, a Chinese dragon, loads of costumes of the different races that make up the modern Hong Kong mix. It was really well done, and I'd love to have had more time, as the last part, post War and beyond, was a little rushed.
Still, we had an idea now of where we were & who we were meeting. So then it was time to head back to the Island (most of Hong Kong is actually not on the islands which I didn't realise, it's on Kowloon Peninsula ).
Before leaving the Peninsula we watched the Festival of Light, a Christmas light show in which most of the skyscrapers participate! The show is set to music and all the buildings flash their Christmas lights & beam lasers into the skys part of Hong Kong 's Christmas extravaganza. It was pretty cheesy, so of course, I loved it!! After that, we walked down the Avenue of Starts playing "Spot a name you've ever bloody heard of". Pretty low scoring game it was, I think we managed Jackie Chan, Bruce Lee & that someone Fat bloke whose films I have never seen. Then the cold got to me & we decided to head for dinner & home (looking for a new home en route ;-)
We decided to take the tourist route of the Star Ferry, a lovely old wooden ferry that trots back & forth across the bay for a couple of HK dollars (€1 is about equivalent to HK$10 £1 to HK$15). It's a very civilised way to travel even though it's only a few minutes journey time. The view of Hong Kong Island as you travel is wonderful too, it's the real stereotypical of Hong Kong , the skyscrapers on skyscrapers, all lit up to the nines. There's no sign of the slums and ramshackle, tumbledown multistory shacks where half the population lives in a few square meters. Hard to believe the contrast really.
Making our way via Santa's Town, which was chockablock with all ages looking at Santa's Grotto, Snowy Chapel and the wonderful Christmas Tree, we found a new hotel & after a spot of dinner decided to turn in.
Thursday was my Disney day, which meant I was desperate to be up & out, but being nice, we did a walking route round Central first, taking in the Magistrates Court (formerly the French Mission Building), the Cathedral perched on a. Hill, Hong Kong Park, a lovely park with fish & terrapin ponds, fountains, a Tai Chi area, a lovely walk though, free flight aviary, greenhouses and the Museum of Tea ware, in a fabulous old Colonial style white house, then the Governors Residence (the current chap in charge actually doesn't live there- says it has bad feng shui, I reckon he just doesn't like the hills.). Then around 11 I was off!
In typical Disney style, even the train there is in character!
You change trains at the delightfully named Sunny Bay , on to the the Disney line, where the train windows, and even the hand-grips are Mickey shaped!! Between each horse-shoe group of seats is a golden statue of a Disney character & of course, the music plays, until you alight, and if you're me, leg it like a loony to the entrance!
oN THE TRAIN I HAD CHECKED OUT THE MAP, AND TO BE HONEST I WAS LITTLE DISAPPOINTED WITH WHAT I SAW. No Pirates, no Haunted Mansion , Small World, Thunder Mountain ...What's a girl to do??? Well, Space Mountain first off I decided ;-) And great news!! Dean had decided against the Disney magic, so I was all alone - and Space Mountain has a single rider queue - wait time - "next car approaching, all aboard!". Woowie!! So feeling a bit boosted, I planned my attack so I wouldn't miss a thing! And I didn't! I saved the world from the evil Zorg as one of Buzz Lightyear's Space Rangers, I bounced and wobbled round the Hundred Acre Wood with Pooh & Friends (&Tigger is not as ginger as my boy either, ha ha), I joined Tarzan in the tree house, I journeyed through Africa & Asia on the Jungle rIVER BOAT AVoiDING MARAUDING ELEPHANTS & and poison darts, heard Minnie & Mickey award the Golden Mickey's in Cantonese, watched poor Donald in 3-D trying to rescue his hat as he traveled through a dozen Disney adventures, marveled at the Spirit of the Lion King, which tells the story of Simba & Narla, complete with an African story singer with the most amazing voice in Asia, I watched the parade, the lighting of the Christmas Tree (in sections so as not to trip the power - a la Cyprus Gardens, Mum!) and finally, I watched as the Disney Castle turned a myriad colours under the array of fireworks and lasers. Quite a busy day all in all! I was pleased, as I got to go on Space Mountain & Buzz Lightyear three times, and Winnie the Pooh twice. Sad but true, I adore Disney and it doesn't get any less magical with age or location. It was a wonderful day.
Sadly though at 7 I had to part company with the park, and head back to the Island where I met Dean to do another tourist staple, the Peak Tram, a tram the goes up the steep hill to one of the best vantage points on HK Island. It's quite fun as you trundle & rumble up the hill side, and the view is pretty impressive. We were there at night of course, so it was all lights and prettiness. Sadly, it was also about 3 degrees colder at the top then the bottom, and it wasn't exactly ambient at the bottom, so we nodded our agreement that it was indeed a lovely view, Dean took his pictures, and we came back down to earth.
Time to sample the new hotel. A bit larger, the bathroom was a little better, but the bed was like a bag of cement wrapper in chicken wire. Try as I might, I could not get all my bones between the bits of wire for a comfortable night's sleep. Hmmm.... strike 2.....
Still, it was Friday by now and time to explore more! We decided to really tax the public transport system by taking the MTR, KCR & LRT up to New Territories to follow a Heritage Trail - many Ancestral Halls and temples - Dean was over the moon, as you can imagine - culminating in the strangest little shanty town you ever saw, all walled in and with the tiniest houses ever, I couldn't believe these little rooms were actually whole houses until we'd passed a dozen and all were the same. Nightmare....honestly, they were less than one quarter the size of my old flat, I'd say not even 15 square metres in total. And whole families live here, and they claim to be a civilised country. I know land is at a premium, but so is it in Singapore , and they've done a much better job of managing what they have.
Anyway, back on the trail, which ended in one of the few pagodas in Hong Kong , and then we re-traced our steps back down South! We decided to head to a place called Kowloon Walled City Garden . Just 15 years ago, this was one of the worst, no-go slums in Hong Kong , even the police refused to go there. Actually, it wasn't really under anyone's jurisdiction, somewhere along the lines it simply missed out and no one took responsibility. And the more lawless it got, the more no one wanted to take it on. Until it hit melting point. And they just raised it & created and award-winning park, which is really beautiful. There are some parts which have been preserved, the gateway into the original walled city for example, but it's mostly just a lovely peaceful park within a park - the park is a regular park, with sports facilities, a bmx track etc, the Walled city park is within that. There are all the components of a Chinese park, water, stones, a meeting hall, an area for chess & mah jong, it's super. Sadly, the park is ringed by blocks and blocks of buildings not much better than the ones which were torn down. Hong Kong really does have plenty of slums, it's surprising - too be honest, it's what I expected to Singapore to be like, but Singapore has really done a good job at making the most of what little it has and drawing the balance between open space and domestic space. Hong Kong hasn't even got to past the post-War slump.
Anyway, it was an experience, which we enjoyed and we even got our own personal guide, in the form of a retired teacher who liked to practice his English!
Saturday, we had to do the ultimate horror - an organised day trip. The reason was that we wanted to do a trip out to try and spot pink dolphins. However, in order to do this (we thought) we had to join a trip to Lantau Island to the Giant Buddha and monastery, and their sites on the Island . Not that we didn't want to see these things, I just hate trips where someone tells me what to do & when. And now children, we're all going to look at the Buddha....oooooooooo. So anyway, the trip across was nice, a catamaran across to Lantau, which takes about a half an hour. The first "highlight" of the trip was Silvermine Bay , where we....got off the boat and on to a a bus. Well I never. Next off to a beach, which was pretty, but nothing earth-shattering. Next we were finally taken to the Giant Buddha, the largest sitting statue of Buddha in the world, perched atop a huge hill, and looking not East but West, to avoid staring into the prevailing wind! It's a magnificent statue, surrounded by six goddesses offering Buddha different gifts. You can go inside the Buddha and see the paintings that tell the story of Buddha's life and death, how he reached the state of enlightenment and became a Buddha, and about his Boddivista's (those who are almost as enlightened - equivalent to saints), You can walk around the outside of the stature's top too, and look out to sea and across the greenery of Lantau Island. It's wonderful.
Next we were supposed to rejoin our bus to undertake the treacherous journey to the bottom of the statue. We however decided to walk the staircase instead. Took all of about, oooh, 4 minutes,. But you get to admire the Buddha from a different level as you walk down, and it was lunchtime, with sky highest. In the sky, it was amazing to look up at the happy, dumpy little chap who has inspired arguable the most peace loving, harmonious religion on the planet.
At the bottom you find the monastery which built the Buddha. It's a huge place, with numerous temples & worship halls, restaurants, meeting halls, all in beautiful reds and golds admired by the Buddhists. I was pretty pissed because the tour included lunch, which was served 3 minutes late, thus giving me 20 minutes less to see what I had set out to see. So I had to rush around to see things, especially the Wisdom path, a series of huge timbers set outside of the monastery on the hillside, and carved with the lines of what is billed as the most wonderful Chinese poem of all time. I would have liked to have had time to enjoy the walk and admire the timbers with their picture perfect backdrop, but I had to rush back to meet the bus. Crap.
Our next step was the local village, where we were rushed around through a market with no chance to see anything or explore, being dumped on a boat, and whizzed around the bay at top speed with no time to really look for dolphins - we didn't see a sign - then we were dumped on a boat and taken back to HK, an hour earlier than advertised. That's why I prefer DIY trips. At least if it's crap, it's only your fault.
So to make the most of the day, we trotted through another of the parks and the Science Museum , where again. They had to chivvy us out at closing time. This is also where we had the first hint that coming during the WTO talks wasn't the greatest idea. The MTR station before ours was shut due to riots, and ours would possibly be closing soon. Oops. In the event, all that happened was that we got home faster, and all the roads when we arrived were shut to traffic. Cool! Anyway, it was time to switch to hotel no. 3 where the bed was comfortable, and the bathroom okay, so finally a decent night's sleep!
Not for long though. _ there were a couple of temples I wanted to visit, and I had to do those on my own, so I started early, and met Dean afterwards, for the sounding of the Noon Day Gun. Talk about blink & miss it! They ring a bell very quickly, then BOOM, ding and done. It lasts less than 30 seconds, but it's cool to see.
After that we decided to highlight a few things we liked the look of, and pootle around on trams and feet to see a few more sites. They have double decker trams in HK, which are cool, but total bone-shakers! We shook our way round a bit and saw a couple more sites, including the world's longest escalator, which is a cheat, because it's just lots of normal escalators all in a row. Then it was time to chill in Starbucks for an hour before heading for the airport to take me home to my poor deserted boys!!!
