Hong Kong is wow!

Hong Kong is wow, Hong Kong is science fiction. After twenty something hours in the air, I stepped from Costa Rica's eternal springtime into the coldest spell ever recorded in Hong Kong. It was instantly obvious how much more developed, advanced and better organised this city is compared to London.

Our doubledecker bus (a more powerful reminder of home than Heathrow had been) raced silently along perfect motorways from the airport to Hong Kong island. Huge and endless residential tower blocks lined our way, lights from people's rooms twinkling in the night sky. Each would be a notably tall building in London - but here one after another after another. And more and taller buildings were in construction. It was a scene from Blade Runner, and I was the wide eyed migrant, slack jawed at what the real first world was like. Hong Kong centre itself is a forest of towers, and at night they brighten with light shows and huge animated characters running down them. The obvious comparison is with Manhatten, but while I have always felt like New York's sky scrapers held its businesses, here in Hong Kong it feels like it is the population that have decamped to the sky.

So many things in Hong Kong seem to be more advanced, and not just technologically, than in London. Little things, like touch screen cashpoints, real 24 hour supermarkets in the central areas, the way at half past midnight on a Tuesday night Starbucks is still open with people reading and chatting, the way public transport is so immensely well designed. Hong Kong has trams, ferries, buses and an smooth and clean running underground - this just seems a place more in tune with what modern big city living really requires. And there are big crazy things that make me laugh with their grandeur, the most wonderful being the "midlevels escalator". Lots of people on Hong Kong island live some way up the Victoria Peak mountain and so everyone tries to descend in the morning and return later in the day. In England, this people problem would probably have just flapped in the wind for decades, but the HK government decided to alieve the issue by building an escalator up the mountain. The result is an awe inspiring series of escalators and walkways, switching on at 6am (going down) until 10am when it reverses direction, until turning off at midnight. It was apparently phenomenally expensive, but to my mind, at least it now exists and people can use it, an improvement on the apparent preference of the UK government to spend money without actually producing anything.

Another small example of how very 20th century I feel here: it is almost impossible to find an internet cafe. They exist, but seem very anachronistic - if you really don't have a laptop at home, there are banks of fast and free computers in public libraries, coffee shops, shopping centres... paying for the internet just seems a little silly.

I would highlight though, that more or less every Hong Kong resident I've met doesn't share this wide-eyed wonder. The people that I've talked to all say the same things: the city is too crowded, life is too fast, everyone has to live in tiny flats, standards of living are very low, the Hong Kong government is terrible. People seem either positive or unemotional about the handover to China, but the current Hong Kong appointed administration attracts immense scorn, held to be incompetent and destroying Hong Kong's liberties and special character in order to keep favour with Beijing. There is something of a pessimistic cast that I sense from time to time in the territory, as if the best days are gone, especially in comparison with the apparently booming centres of Beijing and Shanghai (and Taiwan).

It is great, as a traveller, to be in a self conscious community, a community that muses on its own nature, and does so in English. I read the South China Post most days, and follow as best I can the back and forth about possible democracy for Hong Kong; general Asian news; amusing stories from around China, like the man who had attended so many of his friends' weddings, he decided to pay a prostitute to pretend to marry him so he could get presents in return; a debate on the letters page about whether Confuscionist values have held China back or whether it is the perversion of these values that has done so; and read in amazed boredom the never changing news from England - apparently our most hated profession are our traffic wardens...

The interactions I've had with Chinese people have been very different to the ones I generally had with locals in Central America. I get a bit of a cold shoulder from a lot of the people here, and people definitely don't like meeting my eye the way they did in the Americas. Often people seem visibly uncomfortable about sharing a table with me, though it was pointed out to me that this may be them "giving me face": showing respect by leaving me the table to myself. At this stage in my travels in China, I have no idea.

But also I've met some incredibly welcoming and talkative people, and really have no clue which camp each new person I meet is going to fall into. On my first evening here I shared a table with three young guys and they later showed me around the festive market in Victoria Park and gave me a present from their stall - an amazing gel pack type thing that heats up and solidifies if you press the metal disk floating in it (!?). A girl called Heinan who was on the same plane as me from London later gave me a tour of Hong Kong's old style district Sheung Wan and took me to some traditional shops like Chinese apothecaries. Listening to Heinan talk about how she felt a citizen of nowhere, not really part of China but clearly not in reality British, I realised some of the illusions we permit ourselves in England. Principally: "of course Hong Kong must prefer British democracy to Chinese dictatorship" - but Hong Kong never had democracy under British rule. Until Chris Pattern in the last chimes of Britain's time in Hong Kong, the idea was, I understand, little discussed.

Cold Roast Pigeon

It is a shock to be in Asia, after months of getting comfortable with Latin America. I feel a lot like I did crossing the border into Mexico, unable to speak the language, utterly pig-ignorant. Slowly I am losing the impulse to speak Spanish to Chinese people, and had one incredibly embarrassing moment when I realised I'd put all my toilet paper in the bin by the side of the loo, rather than flushing it down... Many hardwired responses are being rewritten.
A confession is that despite years of loving Asian food, I am still crap with chopsticks, and somehow manage to make my fingers ache by the end of each meal. But I think I am improving through chopstick immersion. I have been wandering the streets, trying strange foods at random, sometimes just navigating Cantonese menus with inexplicable hand gestures that even I don't know what I mean by, and eating what is brought to me. I've eaten a whole and rather cold roast pigeon (I chickened out and didn't eat the head), mystery pies which usually turn out to have meat in them rather than a sweet filling, for breakfast had white strips of something slathered in six different sauces, also noodles with egg and ham in a soup. And lots of dim sum. I developed a rather intimate relationship with the many varieties of these steamed dumplings in San Francisco, and like experimenting whenever I come across a new dim sum restaurant. Together with the restaurant manager, we reveal each new bowl of mystery dim sum, I peer in, have a mental sniff and decide to maybe add them to my list of eatings.

The interplay of the two languages fascinates me: some adverts and shop signs have Cantonese most prominent, others English. Trendier places seem to prefer English, cheap restaurants usually only Cantonese. Some corporations more expert at marketing play with the two: In Orange's "Orange Shop" the O in "Shop" has been replaced by what I would guess would be the Chinese symbol for shop; an advert for a Chinese health pill has lots of western style medicines with the ailments written in English, while the description of this special curing all pill in Chinese. There are also lots of lovely odd translations: an office block called "Effectual Building";"Relax Shop", selling wine and cigars; a notice ordering, "No one may obey the call of nature in public places"; and a bewildering sign for a park saying "No cycling, no dogs, no paraphrenalia".

Both the street markets and supermarkets have a lot of live food, especially fish. I walk among the crowded backstreet markets and watch in fascination fish trying to swim and breathe packed in tight dozens, fish slapped out onto wooden blocks, quivering as they try to suck in non-existent water, occasionally managing a leap into a lower fish tank or onto the pavement, fish being descaled and sliced open, fish lying dead, cut in half from head to tail, their white intestine like a small party ballon gleaming amid their blood scarlet flesh. One could get all "Oooh, disgusting" about this, but we in England eat the same fish and chickens. This seems a little closer to reality than our pastel-pink water-injected Sainsbury's five-chicken-breasts-for-the-price-of-four.

Horror Mansions

I arrived at the Wang Fat Hostel, having booked it over the internet under the belief that there would be loads of tourists here for Chinese New Year. Erroneously: I was amazed how few tourists there seemed to be - but I've since had it explained to me how many people are visiting from the rest of the Chinese world.

Wang Fat was a fun place, a lot of English travellers on the first stop of their RTW ticket. It was fun being the experienced, six-months-in world traveller, regaling with my stories of Mexico. At one point a quivering traveller came in to the hostel's internet room and asked if anyone was good at fixing things. This was her first stop on her RTW trip and her backpack had broken. With no one else volunteering, I found myself sitting in her room, trying to wedge the bottom zipper on her ruck sack back into the zip, with only limited success, as she looked on in moderate panic.

But Wang Fat was one of the more expensive places I'd stayed in on this trip, and after my booked period was up, I went looking for somewhere cheaper.
I read in the hostel's Lonely Planet about Chungking Mansions and the nearby similar buildings like Mirador Mansions, across the water on the Kowloon side. These are buildings about fifteen stories high, old and decrepid, honeycombed with all kinds of shops, restaurants, workshops, and cheap places to stay. The Lonely Planet and Heinan both warned me that Chungking was awful, a fire hazard waiting to happen, and shunned by most travellers nowadays, but I wanted to test myself and see what it was like.

Nathan Road is the "Hello sir, Fake Rolex?" part of Hong Kong. At the entrance to Chungking, I was bombarded by demands that I purchase a tailored suit, a watch, an Indian meal, a bed in one of the guesthouses within. I take the lift up to the "Travellers Hostel" on the fifteenth floor. Strange smells of cooking past and present, tired white washed walls, cheap hospital-like swing doors. Tall Africans move past me and I am invisible, these migrant workers are the inhabitants of these budget accomodations, not preppy backpackers. The dorm room was sparse, uninhabited and looked to be devastatingly cold at night. It shook its head at me, warding me off. There was a restaurant, in it sat men of many nationalities unknown, their faces suggesting a harder and unrelenting life than I was prepared to live next to right now. The sense of being out of my depth, an urge to flee back to comfortable beds, book exchanges and free internet access. This was a taste of the rough sandpaper face of reality, people who travelled without the benefit of thousands of pounds of savings, people who actually were "budget travellers". Not quite giving up, I asked about the kitchen, for I had long entertained the idea of buying some fresh fish or meat in a market and cooking something up. The kitchen door was surrounded by mounds of waste and dirty bowls. The tiny stove and sink was encircled by two large women in dark patterned one piece dresses and headscarfs, cooking an enormous communal curry. The image of me squeezing in between them to whistle up some simple cooking made me realise the depths of my pretensions at "roughing it". I made some excuse and left for the ground floor, the metal lips of the lift doors closing leisurely around me.

I moved on to the Mirador Mansions, apparently a step up, according to the LP. Walking past shops to the lifts, everyone who looked at me for more than a second started shouting, "Guest house, guest house"? No thank you, I'm visiting the third floor first - I tried to retain some independence of action. The third floor hostel was gone, it's number A9 freshly painted white. I felt incapable of getting out the LP again, the urge not to reveal my utter naifness to this citadel. The only option left was the thirteenth floor Kowloon Hostel. Up to the top, and they showed me the dorm, essentially a wide corridor with bunks. Matresses for monks, I slapped one bed and it slapped me back. "Lockers?", I asked - "Keep your valuables with you, it is safe". How protected and distanced so much of backpackering is. My head spun, but this was the best option I had seen. "See you tomorrow", I whimpered.

I stumbled to the pavement, the rending of illusions was physically disorientating and I sat heavily on a shop front ledge. Not for long though, as passing women started offering me massages.

The happy ending to this story is that my room mate back at Wang Fat told me to find the Garden Hostel in Mirador, where I am currently staying. It is clearly an improvement on the others I had visited, and seems largely inhabited by long term language teachers from England. So, the physical endurance test I largely sidestepped, but each day in Mirador does remind me to be less pretentious about my "rugged" journeying.

Daniel, 30 January 2004, Hong Kong