Flight to Hong Kong

The following is my first fractured set of journal entries from my visa run to Hong Kong.


Mountains! Islands covered in tremendous green-and-brown mountains. I searched for any islands small enough to be uninhabited (and thus colonized), but it was hard to tell from several thousand feet in the air.

The buildings are so tall, so massive, you'd think the islands would sink under their combined weight. For a moment, it almost felt like there was a danger of the plane's belly being scraped by these gargantuan towers.

The city in the distance resembled a crop of crystals growing in a field, the regular geometric patterns of the quite aptly-named skyscrapers. On the train to the main island, from which I now write, I see them set against mountainous backdrops, and some look like serious competition for Nature in the race toward the heavens.

How odd to see ads for Ben Stiller films on a train into Hong

Ye gods, the heat! Twenty-five degrees in the middle of November. Is there any wonder why I'd want to colonize an uninhabited island hereabouts?

...(later)

Much of Hong Kong posts signs in both Chinese and English - a remnant of British rule for which I am quite thankful - meaning it's a hell of a lot easier to get around than Seoul seems to be. Not too expensive either, depending on what you're trying to do. Granted, I have so little money left in my chequing account after paying for my flight to Korea, I can't really afford to take advantage of this. When I got in, I withdrew $800 HK - about $100 CDN - and decided to spend no more.

Train to the city: $100
Visa: $400
Train back to the airport: $100
Three bottles of water: $4.50 each


I determined then that it was going to be difficult budgeting, especially since I want to eat and sleep at some point in this mission. With only $300 left and $100 needed for my transportation (I HOPE it's the same fare both ways), that leaves me $200 (in Canadian funds, about $25) to cover food and shelter.

I was completely dehydrated - wearing a long-sleeved shirt and carrying a big wool jacket in 25-degree heat will do that to you (give me a break; Seoul is cold) - so I needed cheap food before anything else. I figured I'd look for a hostel on the way, since that was Priority Number Two and there was no way I was going to be able to afford an actual hotel on Hong Kong's main island. ...But how? I couldn't find any unsecured wireless signals (making me feel a bit of a chump for bringing along the extra weight of a useless laptop), and my only guide to the city a cartoon-embroidered tourist map from the Korean consulate with all the text in an alphabet I can't understand. Luckily the street names are all in English - thank you, Colonialism! - so finding my way to the section with the highest density of cartoon images of food was fairly easy, aside fromt he learning curve involved in street-crossing.

Busy streets tend to have rails on the sidewalk and no crosswalks, in addition to being crowded with eight lanes of speeding vehicle at all times. You have to find the occasional set of stairs upward, cross a bridge above the road, go back down, and hope to find the direction you came from on the other side to get to the point you wanted to cross to.

...

After exploring a little in the neighbourhood of the Korean consulate (with some fruitless searching for a place to sleep) and visiting a Japanese/Korean comics exhibit at an art gallery, I headed toward central Hong Kong, which I figured (erroneously, it turns out) to be the most likely area to find food and accommodations without the help of a travel guide or prior research. (By way of explanation for this - I was SUPPOSED to be doing my visa run in Fukuoka, Japan, but my school changed it on me at the last second. I didn't do any research for that, either, but it's an excuse I'm taking.)

Remembering my t ight budget, I peered at signs and in windows to gauge prices, occasionally having to remind myself to divide everything by eight, so $40 for a meal really isn't a bad price.. Still, if I was to find a hostel and keep enough money to cover whatever they might charge, I had to be extra careful.

I started taking turns following what looked interesting rather than what I could recognize on my map, and so wandered down a number of alleys filled with people selling clothing, jewelwry, plants, and random rubbish and into areas where the signage contained less and less English until there wasn't any and I was lost. At this point the dehydration really started to get to me - happily, there was a restaurant nearby with menu prices around $15 and $20 and $6. Assuming the $6 was for drinks and therefore the rest for actual food, I went in.

I was greeted by a confused-looking woman who I would later find out was the cook and couldn't speak a word of English. She said something to me in a questioning tone, and I blanked. She said it again and gestured toward the menu, so I pointed at something marked $15 and hoped while she nodded and turned away. I... stood there gaping like a fish who didn't know where to sit in a restaurant where the staff doesn't speak Fish and also was not underwater, until she noticed me and pointed to the nearest chair. Gratefully, I sat.

She then wrote 15 on a card. I assumed that meant $15, so I nodded, then she nodded and said something... so I took out my wallet, which seemed to confuse everyone.

Finally the guy at the cash came over and said, in passable English, "It's $15." I held out to him the $20 bill I'd been clutching and proferring to the staff for the past few minutes, to which he responded, "Huh? .. Oh, okay," took it, and gave me my change.

What a country.

My meal turned out to be a fairly large and pretty good noodle soup with shrimp dumplings as big as a child's fist. I've never paid under $2 CDN for so much food that was actually GOOD. I can't wait to go to Hong Kong again sometime when I can actually afford it.

Having determined that the cashier spoike English, I asked him about cheap hotels nearby, but he had bad news for me. Central HK is an expensive area, he told me, and I was best off going to another island.

For the $80 it would cost me to take the train there, not likely.

I continued my wanderings, formulating a plan, when I came upon a book shop. Now, anyone who knows me well knows that I have a hard time simply passing by a bookshop, even with no money to spend, so I followed my instincts and found (but did not purchase) a Lonely Planet Hong Kong! Huzzah! ...Apparently there is only one hostel in the city that operates on any kind of regular schedule, and it is both on a mountaintop and too busy to simply walk in and expect a room. That left one next-level hotel at $440/night, and the next one at $1800.

So I'm staying up all night.

What else can I do? Granted, I know nothing about how safe or dangerous Hong Kong is at night or if I'd get rousted for staying in one place too long, but I don't have many other options.
Besides, it's all part of the adventure.

As a bonus, this frees up a little bit of money for luxuries like food and water. And even a little entertainment to while away the time - I found an HMV, which was inexplicably selling new copies of Trainspotting (the book) for $65 - about eight bucks. Huzzah! Now it's just a matter of having a reliable and lit place to read it.

BUT the West has helped me yet again. I have found (potential) succour in a 24-hour McDonalds right in Central Hong Kong with an $8 value menu ($1 CDN). I figure I can weasel maybe a buck an hour to hang around in here and read with a bit of food in front of me without the staff getting to antsy. It's just a matter of getting over that built-in aversion to McDonalds food... but when times are desperate...

...I figure I'll stop in here just once in a while at first, to rest my feet. There's still exploring to do after all, and it's not that late - 10:45 HK time. Though it is late when the six hours you got last night was the only sleep you'd had since two nights before you left Canada. I'm so tired that my sentences aren't even making sense.

I think I'll use McDonalds as my refuge until 4 or 5 AM, or whenever the sun rises. It should be a lovely thing, to sit in a park and watch the rising sun in the corner of the globe where it's supposed to begin its journey across the sky. At that point, I may be too tired to write anything, but one must try. I shall attempt to update this jorunal as the status changes.

...

On the basis that there were no VISIBLE people on the route up the mountain and very little light, I decided to abandon my idea of checking out the botanical Gardens and such things at the peak to pass the time. Strange how one feels so much discomfort (and by "one" I mean "I") going off alone in the dark in a foreign country, yet I'd be perfectly at ease wandering through Montreal's gardens in the dark, would the opportunity arise. Perhaps it's that, while there may be rapists and murderers in Canada, they're rapists and murderers I could communicate with, and I'd at least be able to tell people where I was raped.
Geographically, I mean.

On my meanderings I discovered what I gather to be a pastime amoung HK youths - hanging around in large groups outside the 7-Eleven, drinking.

Also, what I judged to be a woman from the skirt and voice, though it was hard to tell, shouted at people while sporting an elaborate headdress and enormous beard composed entirely of plastic bags.

I'm apparently familiarizing myself with McDonalds food. First a McChicken, then McFlurry.
I feel dirty.

...

Well, it's now 2 AM HK time, and already I'm starting to get the waking-dreaming and occasional collapsing that comes with massive fatigue. This hasn't been a very successful experiment. Damn them for changing the location... if this was Fukuoka, it would've at least been my fault for not being prepared.

Hong Kong architecture is really quite spectacular, compared to the standard rectangular shapes with the occasional slant if the architect was feeling daring that you get with the office buildings of Toronto and other Canadian cities. Here, every major building seems to stand out - whether they're one of the ubiquitous Towers which seem to fight for supremacy and suggest that either the people here have some kind of complex about their genitalia or that this might be the site of the legendary Babel - particular if you don't speak Cantonese -
or the curved blue-glassed triangular prism wherein entire offices form pillars within the superstructure, or the vast curving walkways that allow pedestrians to cross the busy eight-lane streets.. you might believe you were in the future.

..You know what's conspicuously absent from every Hong Kong shop and restaurant I've seen, as compared to every Canadian Chinese shop and restaruant I've partronized? Those tacky waving cats. Good on you, Hong Kong.

...

At about 3:30 AM, I got sick of McDonalds food (well, sicker) and decided, screw it, I'll wait it out outside. I found a spot near the water under a bridge with benches, and read Trainspotting, anticipating the rising of the sun.
Sadly, at the street level, HK's beauty is almost entirely manmade - the enormous buildings b lock any view of the sunrise; when day breaks, it merely gets brighter out. I began to feel that HK had sacrificed natural beauty for the inorganic, sterile attractiveness of modernity. With a sigh, I decided to set out for breakfast.

Navigating my way along the huge crosswalkless streets, I eventually had no choice but to use a foot bridge. The one available to me, I found, led not to the street but into an enormous mall. I figured if I continued crossing, I might get out to the other side, but my options seemed to be bringing me only upwards. But I'm exploring. So I kept on.

Imagine my shock when the mall exit led to a plant- and bird-filled Elysium! I had stumbled upon Hong Kong Gardens, a massive botanical garden up a mountain, a "natural" paradise accessible through the inauspicious wossnames of a mall, of all thins.
While much of HK is best appreciated at night, when buildings are lit up wildly and their colours seem somehow richer in the artificial glow of the street lamps and neon, THIS aspect of HK is definitely to be witnessed in the early morning, as the birds are waking up with a song and the old people come up to do their exercises - a combination of Tai Chi and vigorous pelvic thrusts, so far as I could tell.

I might be starting to fall for this island city. I will have to come back.

ho, and the banyan tree is now my favourite. I must get myself a small one... it won't look like much to begin with, but if you come back in 500 years...