Round the World Part Four

Our flight on Cathay Pacific was another morning flight. It looks like we'll be doomed to spend the rest of the trip gathering our stuff together early in the morning (because we couldn't be bothered the night before) and dashing to the airport. The Hilton Garden Inn furnished a not quite palatial van to transport us over to Terminal Five or Seven. Maybe Eight. It was early and I was a little bleary eyed from consuming too much pizza the night before. No beers because the Hilton didn't run to a mini-bar.

As valued First Class passengers we were permitted to go the British Airlines Terraces Lounge. Mary was of the opinion that it wouldn't be entirely appropriate to drink every single Heineken on the premises so I didn't. I thought about it though, because they were free. Snacks were not up to my requirements as they didn't have a single bag of pork flavored potato chips. I think the Empire is in decline.

The Cathay Pacific flight was pretty damn good and I'll touch on it in some more detail at a later time. The total flight time was around 15 hours and due to time changes we arrived in Hong Kong early in the evening. In order to get back in sync time-wise, we decided not to take more than a nap on board. A deeper sleep would leave us wide awake when we arrived.

Arrival at Hong Kong was smooth and really efficient. We were through Immigration and Customs in around 15-20 minutes total (getting off the airplane pretty close to first may have helped slightly) and collected our luggage and started looking for an ATM in less than half an hour of deplaning. Couldn't ask for more.

We caught a taxi to our first hotel. Interestingly, taxis in Hong Kong are color coded. If you need a taxi to Disneyland you take a green one, to Hong Kong Central a red one, and so on. This is really cool. Oh, and the taxis don't just have a plaque with the color code - the whole taxi is painted the right color. Our first night we were scheduled to stay in the Hong Kong Hollywood Disneyland Hotel or was it Hong Kong Disneyland Hollywood Hotel, or maybe, Disneyland Hong Kong Hotel Hollywood? Something like that. It's a hotel located on the resort grounds that was built using feng shui and Art Deco in equal measures. Possibly some bricks with a smidgen of concrete too. It was nice in the usual Disney way.

Anyway, we spent the first day in Hong Kong at Hong Kong Disneyland but that's a tale for another time, or actually another site - MouseSavers.com.

We stored our bags before we checked out of the hotel and entered the park for the day. Hot tip. Many of the other guests of the hotel appeared to do the same thing, but they didn't use Bell Services to collect their bags - they just brought them down to the desk in the lobby. This resulted in quite a large line around the time we were ready to take the shuttle to the park. It seems that paying out a few bucks in tips to the bellman bought us avoidance of a significant headache.

Anyway, at the end of our day at the park, which was fairly early - around three in the afternoon -we returned to the hotel and retrieved our bags and caught a cab to our next destination, the Peninsula Hotel in Kowloon, across the bay from Hong Kong Central. I was at this point a little confused and didn't realize till sometime the following day that we weren't in Hong Kong itself but across the harbor. Sometimes, I'm a little slow.

The Peninsula is an old and much beloved luxury hotel constructed during the height of the British Empire in 1928. A much more modern tower has been added on to the back of the original hotel, though we were lucky to score a room in the original building. Or unlucky - hard to tell, we were in the original building but only on the third floor and our view was of the YMCA across the street. The tower rooms can have a bay view.

After settling into the hotel we wandered about a bit to see the sights and get a feel for the hotel. It has the most shops of any hotel we've ever seen, and all of them pretty high end like Prada, Bulgari, and the like. Nothing we'd be interested in, or so I thought. On our wanderings through the shopping arcade we discovered a Coach outlet and in the window was the exact bag in the exact color that Mary had been looking for the last six months or so. Mary's birthday came a little early this year. Mine will probably be set back for the next two or three years.

So other than doing some shopping we spent a quiet time in the hotel during the evening as we had a voucher for dinner and we were tired from wandering around Disneyland all day. We did pop by the hotel bar but the fact that they not only permitted cigarette smoking but also cigars was a bit disconcerting. Normally I'm all for cigars but only my own - I don't want to have to sit and inhale other people's smoke. So we ran for it as soon as we finished our drinks.

On day two of our odyssey we decided to visit the bird market, following which we visited the flower market, the Ladies Market, and the goldfish market. All of these are located in close proximity in the Mong Kok area of Kowloon. There were many birds, flowers, women's clothes and goldfish to see. And some puppies. The markets, except for the Ladies Market, aren't really street markets in the conventional sense. They're not actually in the street - they're storefronts where the wares have spilled out onto the sidewalk and force most people to walk in between towering mounds of stuff or in the gutters, dodging traffic. They're quite interesting, or so Mary tells me, since she's the flower fancier in the family. I liked the puppies. The birds were interesting but I'm not a huge fan of caged birds, I like them flying free. Still the variety of the species available was remarkable.

Ladies Market was the most conventional of the places we visited. Street stands set up on a number of blocked off streets so the paths between the stalls are dark and narrow. Most of the clothing on display was lower end stuff as one might imagine. We basically did one pass through and went on to the goldfish market. These seem like the perfect pets for a Hong Kong inhabitant as an article in the local paper announced while we were there that the average price for a square foot of apartment space now exceeded even Tokyo and New York. Needless to say we won't be moving there anytime soon.

After a long afternoon reviewing the wares on display in Hong Kong street markets, we were tired and ready for a little relaxation back in the hotel. We did contemplate popping out and getting a meal somewhere, but decided that we weren't all that hungry and so we contented ourselves with some of the fresh fruit left in the room. Strange and exotic fruits. The hotel had included a handy guide to local fruits, but interestingly enough at least one of the items in the room (which we later learned was a dragon fruit) wasn't in the booklet. I suggested that Mary take the first bite and see whether or not it was actually a fruit or a means of reducing the world population of American tourists. Mary didn't succumb, so my worst case analysis was a bust.

On the last day in Hong Kong we contracted for a tour through the hotel. Not a tour inside the hotel but one arranged by the hotel. It was surprisingly well attended with people from many of the hotels in the area. We don't usually like guided tours, but Hong Kong was rather confusing to get around for a first timer and since our time was pretty limited, we decided to take a half-day tour to visit the highlights of the city. It also meant that there would be a couple of shopportunities, including one where we had to hang out in a jewelry store till they let us go. Not my favorite. On the other hand we did get to view the whole city or at least a bunch of it from Victoria Peak, which from appearances is not actually the highest point in the city. It was still pretty high with great views, well, as great as they could be with a persistent haze. It appears for part of the year Hong Kong does have a fairly thick haze which may also be some smog. It makes sightseeing a little difficult.

Anyway, the tour was all right as a quick overview of the city. We enjoyed it but would have liked it better if there was less shopping and more seeing. We did also take a harbor cruise in the evening that was a free tour offered by the hotel. This, we concluded, was awesome and they had champagne, which ratcheted the awesomeness up another notch. The skyline of Hong Kong at night, as seen from the harbor, is spectacular and easily the highlight of the visit to the city. After the cruise we found a restaurant on the harbor front and had another Cantonese meal. It was quite good even though we ordered a strange combination of things because we were unsure how much came with each dish. As was usual - too much.

Hong Kong was really an interesting place to visit. The apartment towers located in all parts of the city and region are amazing feats of engineering. And up in the mountains that make up a large proportion of the land on the central island and in the New Territories there are buildings perched on the sides of slopes that don't seem they could support a shack much less a thirty story building. The people are really frenetic - you try and keep moving cause you're afraid that if you stop in one place to long someone will set up a stand and seel your clothes. Maybe even body parts. One fascinating item we picked up on our tours was that the Hong Kong inhabitants are totally insane over horse racing. It's like the biggest thing in the city, they go nuts for it and gambling on it. Funny.

And that concluded our visit to that mystical entrepot of the East, Hong Kong. It was fun, but as Mary and I talked about it later, out of all of the cities we think of as World Cities, like New York, LA, Paris, London, Tokyo, and so on, we think that Hong Kong is the place that we would feel least likely to ever live. The people are nice and the scenery is certainly impressive, but the overall impression is that everyone is running all day and all night long, trying to get ahead. There's something about the sell, sell, sell, attitude of the inhabitants that is both very exciting and very exhausting at the same time. It's certainly a great city to visit and shop in, but living there just leaves us a little cold.