Hong Kong

Hi all!

I spent six months working in Hong Kong in 2001, so it was good to go back and visit friends still there,and revisit some of the old haunts. It was strange to be back after seven years. The place has changed a fair bit, the incessant construction forces the city continously upwards, theres been more land reclaimed for building work and seemingly even more people. Endless expensive shopping centres, each looking exactly the same as the previous one, have appeared. They are the main walkways interconnecting Central's buildings, making it maddening trying to find where you are going amongst the shops. At the other end of the retail scale, there are millions of small food shops, with just about every type of dried fish you could imagine.

Looking at the food on sale in this shop, it was hard to argue with the name!

Returning to HK made me realise just how good three features of the place are. The Mid Level's escalator, a series of interconnecting covered escalators that ferry people down to Central and back each day are a genius invention (the peak is very steep and it's very humid in the summer so you don't appear at work like a sweat monster). These escalators ferry the 27.5 billion residents around the city each day, cunningly timed to go up or down with the commuter flow. Secondly, you can check in for your flight in the city centre, drop your luggage and go and enjoy a night out before getting your plane (or, as it was in our case, find out at the in-town check in that those numnuts at American Airlines had forgotten to amend your ticket and cancelled it instead, and have to rush to the airport to go on standby - more on that later)! Finally, their version of an e-payment card for trains and buses can also be used to buy a coffee, or in foodshops, for a newspaper and in lots of other small purchases. Genius. Some things have changed for the better. That massive escalator that takes thousands of people on the daily commute has improved, there is less barging at rush hour that I remember! SARS seems to have had a lingering effect, with some people still wearing surgical masks......not just any masks - this is HK after all -but designer branded ones nonetheless! Including Burberry ones too (HK, along with Essex, are about the only two places where Burberry's brand image hasn't been destroyed)!

We arrived on Sunday night and met up with Jason, a friend from the HSBC graduate trainee days who was kindly putting us up. We went to the main drinking area, conveniently situated right between the offices and the Mid Levels ex-pat residential area. Even Lang Kwai Fong had undergone some form on makeover. The next day we went across Victoria harbour to Kowloon, on the iconic Star Ferry. These ferrys have been chugging away in the harbour for 100 years (some of them look every day of it too), but they are very quick, and impossibly cheap. You spend the five min journey wondering how they can charge only 10p each journey. It seems the one oasis of good value in a place with rampant commercialism, where normally people are out to shaft you at every opportunity. Over in Kowloon is Nathan Road, a frenzy of activity with electronics shops (where you will get shafted unless you know exactly what you're buying), more clothes shops and endless dodgy blokes in the street offering you fake jewellery, fake handbags and a tailored suit, should you need it (or even if you should not). It's hard to walk a metre without someone with a deal that's just so good they had to come out on the street and harrass you into it! Amongst all this chaos is the notorious Chunking Mansions, the near squalar accomodation with cult ex-pat curry house. The food is actually ok, but riding in the rickety lifts or worse avoiding the rats and occasional person sleeping on the dingy stairwell is, as they say, all part of the experience.

In the afternoon we took a walk around Central, admiring the many fine buildings. These pictures are of the Bank of China and HSBC buildings, which are the most stunning skyscrapers I've ever seen. At night they are lit up like Christmas trees and look even better. Afterwards I took Vania round Mid Levels to some of my old haunts and to where my flat was. "Fullview Court" has quite rightly had to change its name due to the Trade Descriptions Act (like they'd have one of those in HK) to "No View Court". As we wandered around, I couldn't resist stopping at my old laundry service for a picture of the name. Fortunately the clothes didn't smell of wee wee,

although they did do a handy line in wrecking shirts and shredding ties! That evening we met up with Kieran, Marcus and Jason. Alex, the Barco's manager, actually recognized me. Were we there that much in 2001?!

On the next day we took a trip to Lantau Island, an oasis of calm in HK, which even has green spaces (well, except for the huge international airport and Disneyland)! As we made our way to the Po Lin Monastry, the mist descended and the temperature plummeted.

We arrived at the Big Bhudda statue and could only make out a knee and perhaps an elbow! It was a shame as it is a fantastic sight. We didn't hang around too long, it was below 5C and we were feeling the transition after being in Cairns a few days earlier. We decided against the cable car ride after hearing some of the cars have dropped off the cable overnight. Curiously there was still a huge queue to go on it. We returned to Central to warm up and met up with Jason for a chinese meal. Thankfully, he didn't repeat his old trick of ordering me chicken's feet!

The next day there was more skyscaper gawping in Central, followed by lunch with Sarah, another friend from HSBC days. Sarah recommended a good tailor (ie not one of the street ones) so after lunch we went across to Kowloon and each had some shirts tailored. After much faffing around with rolls of material and description of styles, interspersed with awkward questions from Vania about what styles women wear in the office, we finally managed to order some shirts. These places are hives of activity, a whirl of tape, stacks of rolls of material and filled with industrious staff. They can knock a suit together in a few days and the frontman is usually a bit of a local celebrity. On the walls there are loads of business cards from previously happy clients, the more impressive sounding the company the more prominently placed the card. After a while I found the HSBC section somewhere down by the skirting board! £20 each including postage to the UK for top quality tailoring isn't bad. That evening we met up with Yue Zhen, another friend from HSBC who was having her birthday celebrations that evening. After a meal in a spanish restaurant we went to another of the endless shiny new bars that have sprung up.

Thursday began with us packing our backpacks for the last time (well, the last time in this trips that is, we'll still be lugging then around London for a few months) and heading off to the Man Mo Temple. This is right in the centre of mid levels, and the waft of incense leads you to it from afar. Given its situation, its size is quite impressive. Lunch with Kieran, Ted and Jason followed, again happily involving no chicken's feet. We had a good meal, with endless food arriving. Vania and I, with our sound chop stick skills, were struggling with the slipperiness of some of the food. After lunch, as the pollution was a bit better, we went up on the Peak Tram to look down on the city. The view from the top is impressive with all the skyscrapers tucked into the hillside. After that, we walked around HK's token park, and paid a visit to my old building, the Citibank Tower. Then we made a quick dash across to the market at Mong Kok. Mong Kok in chinese translates as 'bucket loads of chinese people' (ok, I might have made that up). It is one of the most densely populated places on the planet, and we were off there for a shopping trip. Oh good. Fortunately it wasn't too bad at that time of day, and we rummaged around the marketstalls trying to spot any genuine products. This place is unbelievable, a sea of endless consumer goods in just about every colour, size and shape you could think of. It was conterfeit central, you name it they'll conterfeit it for you. We had to admire the scale of the production. The bartering was generally good humoured too, although you get the impression that in a set up with this many customers the people are doing pretty well for themselves. We bought a few items, then decided our backpacks would fit no more stuff and it was time to return to Central.

With our sightseeing finally done, we went to in-town check-in, unfortunately only to discover that the highly flexible cross company Oneworld tickets that we had were not so easily changed after all. Back in Australia, we had phoned American Airlines customer services and postponed our return flight to London by two weeks. At the time we were lucky to find out that someone at AA had forgotten to cancel our previous flight and double booked us. Fortunately we found out in time, and cancelled the earlier dated booking. Then, in HK when we tried to check in at the British Airways desk we were amazed to find out there was no booking - they could see that AA had changed the flights, but had forgotten to tell BA about it so we had had our ticket cancelled. The news got better when they told us the next available flights was six days later. Instead of the relaxing dinner with Jason we had planned, we ended up rushing to the airport to get our names on standby lists. We spent the next three hours going from desk to desk trying to sort our problem out. In the end we managed to get in a Cathay flight, which actually arrived in Heathrow one hour earlier than the BA flight. In the end it was fine, at least we still got home when planned. We were happy to have made it back to London, although only knowing we had a flight home twenty minutes before it left made it hard to realise that we were finally returning home.