Hong Kong-Phewy!
Trip Start
Sep 25, 2008
1
11
29
Trip End
Apr 01, 2009
Hong Kong,
China
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
And this was it, the furthest point we'd reach travelling entirely by train. As the crow flies, London and Hong Kong are about 6000 miles apart. We are not crows, and the actual distance we had travelled was a lot more!
We stepped out of Hong Kong station to be hit by a wall of hot, humid air. For all its pollution Beijing air is pretty easy to breathe, perhaps as I'm used to London, but this was very different. Fortunately we didn't have to put up with it for very long as we jumped straight in an air conditioned taxi to get to our hostel.
We were staying in Mong Kok, one of the most densely populated districts on earth! Mong Kok is in Kowloon, part of mainland China that was given over to us after we stole Hong Kong island and returned undamaged in 1997.
I say undamaged. It's hard to know what this place was ever like before, it's like all the craziest parts of every city rolled into one. Neon lights everywhere, markets selling fake everything and shop after shop selling mobile phones, cameras and televisions.
And then there are the people. So many people. We stepped out of the hostel and didn't really have a choice as to which direction we walked, we just went with the flow of bodies. At a cross roads the lights turned green and two or three hundred people crossed from either side of the road, this was not somewhere you spend a quiet couple of days,.
Mong Kok is home to many hotels with very cheap rates for rooms if you only need to stay for 1 or 2 hours. This must be great if you're tired and just need a quick nap, or something?
After a wander around Mong Kok we jumped on the Mass Transit Railway (MTR) which is their Metro system. Not as cheap as Moscow or Beijing but just as efficient we travelled to Central on the Island before catching the ancient Peak Funicular Railway up to the highest point in Hong Kong with very nice views of very tall buildings.
We caught the Star Ferry back to the mainland, had some noodles for dinner and went to bed.
Day 2 was fairly uneventful. Infact so uneventful I don't really have anything interesting to say. There's not a massive amount to do in Hong Kong, no great buildings to look around or anything, and not much to do other than shopping or eating. We did a bit of both.
Oh yeh, we had Dim Sum for lunch, which was very nice, and a surprisingly good recomendation from a guide book.
Experience has already told me not to write these entries until we've left a place, something interesting, funny or eventful might happen!
On our last night we met for dinner with Gloria, an old school friend of Sarah's. We wanted some typical Cantonese food and so she took us a restaurant for Hot Pot. You're give a plate of meat, vegetables and noodles which you then cook yourself in a heated soup bowl, a bit like Fondue. I chose the Beef and Chicken. That's raw Chicken, which I did find a little unsettling, don't they have bird flu in Hong Kong? Anyway, I seem to have survived it and this is not really the point of my story.
Your soup is heated by a little parafirn pot with a wick in it, the wick is lit by the waitress and burns at a nice steady rate throughout the course of your meal.
We'd had a few servings when Sarah asked why my soup was boiling much faster than hers. The reason was that not only was my wick alight, but the entire top of the parafin pot too, and it was spitting! Not to worry, I thought, I'll just put it out with the little putter-outer they'd given us.
That didn't work. It only served to make the fire more angry and transfer buring parafin onto the putter-outer. This burned off within seconds, but the pot was still blazing underneath my soup, and the soup pot was too hot to remove!
Gloria called for the waitress, who eventually sensed the urgency and not the fact we wanted more tea! The waitress, now in her role as Fireman Sam came equipped with....a small damp cloth, which she'd been using to clean tables. The first thing she did was use the cloth to remove the soup, to good effect, but the fire was now properly blazing.
Fireman Sam picked up the fire on its little metal tray and placed it on the floor, right at the feet of some other poor diner who retreated in fright. She then used her slightly soggy cloth to somther the fire, when this didn't work she flicked the cloth at the fire. This was not the right thing to do, I tried to explain to her with Gloria translating.
But she continued to spank the fire. Eventually they followed my suggestion to find a metal pot to place over the fire to starve it of oxygen. This worked, but when they removed the bigger pot it filled the area with thick black smoke, right in the direction of the poor other diner who'd nearly had her legs set on fire!
So that was Hong Kong. Go and have a look some time if you're passing through, but don't stay for long, infact maybe one of those 2 hour hotels will be enough!
