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This morning was a reasonably early start – unexpectedly 2 hrs later than we thought as of last night: Paul was under impression we had 8am flight so we arranged airport transfer etc appropriately. However, quite by chance we looked at the print out of the ticket the night before and discovered the actual time 2hrs later – good job we found out- saved us more time in bed!
The plane journey was really cool: we flew with Qantas and the service/food/entertainment was just brilliant. We had good seats and a TV screen each with remote control and movies on demand. They had over 20 films to choose from plus the games etc. That together with two hot meals and loads of drink rounds made the 9 hr flight go very quickly. We watched 3xfilms each: I watched the Brideshead re-visited – pleasant enough, Miss Petitgrew lives for a day- very light-hearted, and the Ghost town with Ricky Gervais – very good, funny and feel -good film. Paul watched the boys’ films – Hancock, Wanted and Trophic Thunder – the latter was very daft even though it had Tom Cruise in it. Flights like this make you want to fly just for the sake of flying.
We arrived to Hong Kong early evening – only 1 hr time difference from Perth. We decided to travel from the airport in a backpacker style – ie. the good old public transport. The airport express train to the Central Station was quite straight forward. We then got fully engulfed into the Friday evening Hong Kong rash-hour/the last week-end before Xmas madness. The underground was bursting, everyone running around like crazy chickens so we with our big backpacks like snails got on the way of Hong Kong flow. Navigation was quite easy – unlike the Moscow underground they had English names for each station as well as the Chinese characters. Our hostel was near the Causeway bay tube – in the area well known for its high-end designer shops and classy shopping centres, as well as restaurants, cinemas, bars etc. In fact, the street we stayed on (Patterson str) is called the Fashion Walk. We emerged from the underground looking forward to a breath of fresh air and escape from the tube grounds…. I almost wanted to get back under the surface as soon as we got out. I have never seen anything like it: there were rivers of people all moving in different directions but each individual one very determined, very focused trying to get from A to B in the most direct and efficient way. They were all making some form of loud noises too – most on mobile phones, or talking to each other trying to over-come the overall hum. In between there were cars trying to fight their ways through the human traffic. Plus various street sellers pushing their goods trolleys. Plus the buses. Plus the trams. People aside, the whole place from the ground level to high up somewhere in the sky was lit up in a quite a crazy way: hundreds of different signs, pictures,adverts – all trying to be the brightest, the flushest, the most colourful, the biggest. and you can’t quite tell where one sign stops and next one begins – they all merge into one big neon bubble. As the result, we even felt like it was day time – it was so light. And the smell…. It was quite remarkable too. Even though we were totally outside, it seemed that we were inside some huge kitchen – so big that fitted tens of different cuisines all generating its own aroma – mixed into one heavy cloud. The smell was so strong I almost wanted to touch it. And, did it stink! I can’t describe it, but it was bad. Stale, like gone-off food that was re-heated with extra smelly spices thrown in for extra strength. We were quite hungry while on the tube but this certainly put us off any dinner. I must make it clear: we were in the top end of town. on one of the most fashionable streets of Honk Kong! We fought our way through the crowds, smell, dazzle of lights to our hostel. Or the address of where the hostel is supposed to be. We found this hostel in our guide book as the best value for money in Hong Kong. Paul’s parents recommended a nice international hotel to us – Marco Polo, but it was fully booked when we inquired. So we decided to be adventurous. The location was very good – central, in the busy area of Hong Island itself, as opposed to most other budget hostels which tend to be far inland in Kowloon – the tip of the mainland of China. Our hostel was on the 3rd floor of a massive blocks of flats above the ground floor of designer shops. As we got to the lift, we noticed a big sign on the main wall, and few other places around the place later. In big letters in Chinese and English it read on the line of: The hostel in this building is illegal. The hostel does not have the legal license and the residents association of this building are in process of trying to close it down. Any injury to guests or property within the hostel premises are the guest’s responsibility. Great! So, we managed to find some dodgy illegal hostel and we are the subject of the building’s hater and misery. We thought we’ll just keep quiet and pretend we haven’t seen the signs. I attempted to ask the girl who gave us the key about the current situation from a legal point of view – she just shook her head as she spoke not a word of English. Neither could she use the credit card machine – so we were trusted not to run away overnight without paying. The hostel itself was essentially two floors of flats that been converted to tiny tiny rooms – some dorms, some private. We had our own room. This included enough floor space to fit a double bed and a tiny wardrobe which was also a shelf for a small TV. plus a wall mirror with a shelf. The rest of the floor space was required to be empty so that we could actually the room’s door. It was en-suite. This meant a tiny tiny tiny space or a wardrobe, walled off the room with a sliding plastic door. On the other side of of it there was a western style toilet with a tiny sink, altogether enough space to be able to sit on the toilet without getting your elbows or knees sticking into the walls or the plastic door. In the book this was described as en-suite bathroom. In reality, Paul identified it as a wet room. This meant a shower had suspended from the wall right over the toilet seat. The ting to do when you want a shower is to close the toilet seat (otherwise the water from the shower will go straight into the toilet bowl and might splash out etc…:-) ), remove items such as toilet paper, towel etc and not move our arms too much or you catch on the walls. Ad try to dry within that space afterwards otherwise the whole room floor – all that big space – will be covered in water. The tiny tiny window was facing the main shopping street and its bars /restaurants. Even with the best efforts you couldn’t quite close it so we got the street noise as a little extra too. It was clean though and somebody emptied our bin daily.
We damped our bags, had a quick shower in our wet room and ventured back outside for some food – by then we were so hungry that even the smell didn’t put us off.
Back on the streets there was chaos. It felt more like inside some sort of movie than reality – like some part of a movie set – this cannot be their everyday life?! Maybe it was especially busy because of Friday night, or because of Xmas or both. The shops we full to the rim with everyone loaded up with tonnes of designer bags. It really made Oxford street on the last w/e before Xmas look tame and empty. Hundreds of restaurants with big neon signs, bars etc and people queuing outside on the streets to get in. We had to walk along the streets very slow due to the sheer number of people trying to squeeze onto the pavements. Dinner-wise, we weren’t sure what to go for – all the places we walked past just had Chinese characters, some had pictures of food or plastic models in the windows – which all looked unrecognizable. And many more signs for food places were suggesting going up the floors so you couldn’t see from the street what it looked like. We took a gamble and went for a big shiny sign of Seafood Restaurant – it was in English as well as Chinese and it was only on the 1st floor. When we went upstairs there were at least a dozen of people waiting to get in – but we figured out it would be the same everywhere. So we waited too. Once seated, they did produce a menu in English – it looked like the core staples of the restaurant rather than the full translation of every dish available. Probably a good thing – we weren’t in the mood for duck webs or intestines or sea cucumbers or chicken cartilage etc. Reading the menu it also said they won many awards for their cuisine- and we did see many certificates on the walls. In retrospect, that was reflected in the prices. However, since we ordered quite “safe” dishes like fried rice with fish etc it was nothing different to an average Chinese. We got a feeling that to appreciate the difference we would have to order the very expensive signature dishes- like abalone, or birds nests, or whole duck or chicken. We were the only white people in the whole place and got a few looks from the locals.
We made our way – it was nearly midnight by then, but the streets were still just as busy and the new customers were still coming in for dinner as we were leaving.
