Mersey paradise

Monday, 12/11/2012 – 151 A.D.

Rise and shine, Hong Kong Phooeys! We both slept absolutely fine, neither of us waking once in the night. This may have been due to the tough two nights previous, or maybe this room in Chungking Mansions isn’t actually that bad? It’s difficult to move about first thing in the morning though, but even with the smallest bathroom ever constructed, we still managed to get some hand washing done and hung up to dry. We are British, after all.  

Unfortunately it was a bit of an admin morning – yawn! More time stuck in a miniscule room. We have three train journeys to book; Hong Kong to Shanghai; Shanghai to Beijing; and Beijing to…wait for it…Xi`an. We need to make sure we get the train numbers totally correct and, after the Nanning-Guangzhou experience, we never again want to spend the night sleeping in a seat. Once that was all sorted we headed somewhat apprehensively out into the Hong Kong weather…but it was perfect temperature, absolutely just right for shorts without getting a sweat on. Still, this is the best it will be for a while. As good as the climate is here in November, I already miss the Indochinese warmth, even though the sweating really annoyed me at the time. But I probably only miss it because it’s gone for good as far as this trip is concerned. Yes, and I know this is incredibly perverse of me to mention, given that most people back home are currently freezing their bits off! Don’t worry, I’ll have to buy a coat soon. Possibly a woolly hat as well.

At the main station ticket office we were told we could get all three of our fares from the China Railways stand nearby. They are essentially an agency that gets allocated a block of tickets – if they don’t sell them all then you get the situation we had on the Guangzhou train where people in the seats were upgrading to beds that had magically become available. The woman behind the desk who dealt with us was extremely abrupt and tried to answer several peoples’ queries at once – they really do not respect the system of the queue here! Plenty of times I have been standing in line and people try to sneak their way past as if I’m a hologramatic spectre. Now I know that I have to physically stand across them, but in the early days (i.e. err yesterday) my queuing quota was doubled, in some cases trebled. Anyway, back to the trains – our Hong Kong to Shanghai train was sold out for soft sleepers, so we decided to “risk-it-for-a-biscuit” (a popular phrase of ours) and opt for the hard sleepers. Next up, the Shanghai to Beijing sleeper train we wanted was completely sold out and only the snazzy high speed ones were left, the ones that cost the Earth, sun and moon for a ticket. We decided to try our luck at the Shanghai booking office with that one. And as for Beijing to Xi`an, well, that journey was over ten days away so the tickets weren’t yet available. As the popular song doesn’t go, “…now don’t be sad, coz one out of three ain’t bad.”

It wasn’t far to walk down to the waterline and this time get some great views of the Hong Kong skyline by daylight. Down here they have “The Avenue of Stars”, which is the Hong Kong film industry’s equivalent of the Hollywood Walk of Fame. I’m afraid that, despite the large size of the Hong Kong film industry, we only knew Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan! And Bruce had his statue displayed, but I wasn’t in the mood for posing next to him and giving it my best roundhouse kick or one inch punch.

As we were strutting around by the water, the following happened... 

...two middle-aged Japanese men approached Tim and wanted their picture taken with him, then with me as well. No sooner had that photo shoot finished and some Japanese women jumped on the bandwagon and got their own piccies posing with us. By now we’d realised that they didn’t mistake us for famous people, just wanted photos with us, for some bizarre reason. Do I stroll around Southport Pier looking for Japanese tourists to snap myself with? Nope! This continued for quite some time as we strolled along. Sometimes they were blatant about it and came up to us to ask permission, other times they took sneaky “guerrilla shots” from a distance, some of which we saw, but goodness knows how many we missed. The whole thing was a bit weird, but also kinda funny. For a while. Then it became a tad annoying.  I don’t know how Beckham stays so cheery all the time!    

The cheapest way to get across the water from Kowloon to Hong Kong Island is by the Star Ferry. We booked our passage over to the central ferry terminal for about 30 pence. Hong Kong is already a bit of an anomaly – pricey accommodation, yet cheap-as-chips public transport. The cost of food and drink seems to fall somewhere between the two. The crossing over the water was pretty choppy, but I’m too old `n` ugly to get seasick these days, especially as the journey lasted barely ten minutes. Altogether now, “Fe-rry…cross Victoria Harbour…coz this laaaaaand’s...the place I think is pretty cool to stay in for four nights…”

Hong Kong Island (the bit where the famous skyline is located) has skywalks and subways all over the place that make walking around a piece of cake. Gone are those days tentatively crossing treacherous Vietnamese roads with babysteps, here you just stride above or below it all. Around the central point of the island is the escalator up to the mid-levels, i.e. the buildings halfway up the hillside. This escalator, or rather series of escalators, holds the record for being the world’s longest covered walkway. And it was a leisurely ascent to the top, though we thought it might have been a bit steeper and, dare I say it, even a bit longer – never satisfied, are we?

The mid-levels were cool for a stroll, which developed into a bit of a rambly walk under the emerging November sunshine. If town planners mix enough greenery with their concrete then they’re always onto a winner. We both decided at this point that we quite like Hong Kong, and we prefer it to Singapore, that other famous Asian island city of similar size that has become vastly rich from being deliberately lax with its tax. Or maybe we just like sunny, hilly places a-la-San Francisco? We got a reasonable view of the harbour from up here, but thinking about it we probably should have gone a bit higher. 

After a steep descent to the western suburb of Kennedy Town, we looked for the nearest tramlines. The website Wikitravel has become a bit like our online Bible for telling us all about every new place we arrive in. Yes, yes, so any fool can log on and edit the articles, but overall the info seems pretty trustworthy and reliable. One thing the website recommended doing was catching the tram from Kennedy Town right across the island from west to east, through the financial hub, and ending up in Shau Kei Wan – a more traditional area (read ‘working class’). That was fine by us, because we needed to rest our legs after all that climbing (whaddya mean we went up an escalator???) Took a while for our particular tram to arrive though, and of course we had to deal with more sneaky Chinese queue-jumpers, the little tinkers!

The journey was great to start with, the breeze blowing in my face through the open window, the people rushing about in all the hustle and bustle below. I didn’t care that every ten seconds or so the tram had to stop for traffic lights or pull up at another stop. It was only costing us 25 pence to get from one side of the island to the other. But after a while it got a bit samey and by the hour point every new district we entered had already blended into the previous one well before we left it. There were high rises everywhere, so many in fact that I’m surprised there are not more than seven million people living in the place.   

[Journey's end, the night market at Shau Kei Wan...80 minutes after first getting on the tram!]

We got the subway back to Kowloon. It was a pretty swift trip, but we timed it to coincide with late rush hour. When we changed lines at the station called Admiralty (Hong Kong's equivalent of London's Victoria), there were more people waiting on the platform than could physically get on the next train, maybe twice as many. But a new train seemed to come along every minute and there are young ladies holding big STOP signs who are employed to push the punters back once each train is full. They're a little like the underground's version of Lollipop Ladies, but with licence to use kung fu if you don't step back when told to. 

That night we went for a curry. I had a madras, as usual. It wasn’t that hot. In fact, the temperature was just right, which summed Hong Kong up to a tee.