A first taste of Asia
Trip Start
Jan 05, 2009
1
13
15
Trip End
Jun 30, 2009
Hong Kong,
China
Thursday, April 30, 2009
Massimo's never been to Asia and when planning our trip we decided to stop to Hong Kong first in order to get a smooth introduction to Asia after 2 months of easy life in Australia. It was a good decision.
As said, we loved Hong Kong even if the first impact has been really negative. In fact we booked the most reasonably priced guest-house we found on the internet (290 HK dollars = 38 USD, bargain!) in a location Massimo's HK resident friend Alessandro recommended to us (Tsim Sha Tsui in the Kowloon neighbourhood).
Location was perfect, guest house a bit less. First of all, the building: on the main road of Kowloon (Nathan Road), and so far nothing wrong, busy and noisy but really close to everything. We started being suspicious when we first entered into it: it was like an open market in a dark lobby, full of people and elevators. After a bit of trouble we finally found our elevator and we had to queue to get onto it: exactly "queue", because it was an old and small elevator serving 15 floors of guesthouses!
We eventually got to the 11th floor to find that the "new international guest house" was like a flat with a million doors: our door opened on a tiny room (7 sqm max.) with a fake window opening on a air circulation conduit inside the building but the best had yet to come as the bathroom was a significant exploit of micro engineering, something like 1 sqm and the space was so efficiently used that you could shower sitting on the toilet (no kidding unfortunately)!
Clearly first thing we did, was to 1. increase the budget for the hotel; 2. find another hotel. We ended up in very cosy room (we maybe upgraded by a couple of sqms) but with a real window and a nice view on Kowloon park.
Hong Kong is made out of two principal islands (plus a couple of smaller ones) and a big peninsula: Hong Kong and Landau islands and the main neighbourhood on the peninsula is called Kowloon. We thought we were going to explore them pretty quickly but it actually took us the whole week to get a decent but still superficial idea of the three of them.
On Hong Kong island you find bit of every element of this incredible city: the super modern sky-scrapers with huge shopping malls; nice, cosy and elegant neighbourhoods where you mainly see occidental people (like Soho); the beautiful nature (on the Peak mountain); the old and decadent buildings, with each window coupled with a airconditioning system which results in quite an impressive visual effect; the temples and pagodas that sometimes come out of the blue after a very modern building; the markets where you can buy pretty much everything, every area of the island has its own one (the dry food market in the western area, the antiques on Holliwood road...). The dry food market deserves a special mention: every food that you can imagine has been dried and is sold there. The most impressive examples were in the fish: we saw dried octopus and muscles and we can assure you, they were not inviting, at all.
Kowloon is where you find the main shopping and also where the majority of offices are (apart if you are a banker or a lwyer than you stay on HK island). You go from Gucci, Prada, Louis Vuitton, to a million shops of cameras where the same model can be priced in a range going from 8000 to 4000 HK dollars (personal experience) and where there's huge space for negotiation even though it's always the sales man who wins (personal experience too!). Also you are constantly approached by two kind of salesmen: the first kind is quite outgoing and asks if you want to buy a tailor made suit for a 100 dollars (tempting, but no thanks!); the second one, even if less explicit, is the funnier one. First comes close to you and asks you whispering..."copy watch?", when you politely decline, he comes even closer and he whispers even lower saying "hashish, marjuana?"...it took us quite some time to understand the second part but luckily we constantly used our default answer "no thanks", which the third day became simply "NO", evolving to zero attention on the fourth day!
Landau on the other hand, apart having the international airport and being famous for the giant Buddha that sits on top of a hill which you reach by "cablecar" (for us it was like catching up with the winter skiing days back in Switzerland), looks like a tropical island, with few houses and a bunch of fishing villages here and there where time seems to have stopped and you are 30 mins away from the lights and businesses of the centre.
Even if it is big and busy and noisy, we found it an easy town: almost everybody speaks English (probably the only good thing they got out of having been part of the Commonwealth...), transport is very efficient and clean and we felt absolutely safe, also in the middle of the night.
We also had the opportunity to catch up with Alessandro, a very old friend of Massimo's who has been living here for around ten years, and we now understand why. He took us out for a beautiful dinner in a restaurant with a stunning view and he made us eat one of the best pastas in quite some time, so thank you again Ale!
Soon coming M&M's in Cambodia.
