It’s a pretty swanky place it has to be said, and the views from the bar out over the island were pretty special. There can’t be many bars with views to beat it!
We settled down for our steak supper, which was not cheap - it was so posh a knife sommelier came round to our table offering a selection of knifes from around the world. Choose your weapon, sir!
My first few days in HK then went by in a bit of whirlwind of partying with James and his buddies, all high-flying financial expat types, but it was great fun and nice to hang out with some English lads again.
After the chaos I was able to stop and take a look around at where I was actually staying - in the smallest room I’ve ever stayed in. It had a double bed and room for the door to open and that was it.
The hostel was actually on the 14th floor of a place called Mirador Mansions on Nathan Road in Tsim Sha Tsui - the Kowloon side of Hong Kong rather than the island itself. The entrances were surrounded by Indian hawkers pouncing on you morning, noon and night trying to sell you fake watches and cheap suits.
And the building wasn’t much better. Covered in scaffolding, which after I’d got over the shock of seeing that it was all made of bamboo, proved to be a bit of an eyesore.
And yes, that is someone’s laundry hanging in the corridor.
I stayed in this place for a week, but it actually began to depress me. I was hostelling again, but the paucity of space meant there were no communal areas, so I might as well have been in a business hotel for all the people I met.
I did take a trip to the New Territories to have a look at the Hong Kong Heritage museum in Sha Tin, which gave me an interesting insight into Cantonese Opera - it’s shit.
What was most interesting about Sha Tin though was the buildings. It’s essentially a residential suburb of Hong Kong and you really get an idea of how the average person lives here. In a high-rise. And there are a lot of them.
I did find a little shanty town by the station to have a wander around, but the landslide warning signs meant I didn’t hang around.
One of my other little day trips was to the south side of the island where they have beaches. I had no idea they had beaches in Hong Kong!
But even the beach couldn’t pull me out of the fug this hostel in Hell Mansions had put me into, so I threw my credit card to the wind, packed my bags and took the Star Ferry across to the island and a new hotel.
The hotel wasn’t grand, three-star at best, but it had a pool that looked down over Central. After the horrors of Nathan Road, this was blissful.
The new environment reenergised me and I set off exploring my new environs:
Skyscapers designed to look like koala bears hugging a tree;
Old men doing tai-chi in the street;
Palm-lined highways and walkways;
Dizzying skyscrapers;
And crowded little streets below;
Ah, this was better. The Hong Kong I‘d been looking for.
One particularly energetic day I decided to climb Victoria Peak. I say climb, I mean walk half a mile on the flat to the Peak Tram, but you know what I mean. It was hot!
I spent a wonderful afternoon enjoying the iconic views down over Hong Kong island, writing postcards, thinking of friends and family, and sipping chilled white wine. Does life get much more enjoyable?
Every Wednesday the Happy Valley races are on and if you’re not staying in Hong Kong for more than 21 days you’re entitled to a tourist ticket which gets you into the winners enclosure. As interesting as that was it took me away from the main public areas where the buzz was irresistable.
Bright floodlights bathed the whole place and with the crowds and surrounding high-rises setting the bright green turf of the track off perfectly, it’s hard to imagine a more thrilling sporting venue.
And the Chinese take their gambling VERY seriously.
It was a unique atmosphere and another sporting event in another country ticked off!
It was at Happy Valley that I actually had my first Chinese food in the whole time I’d been in Hong Kong. I think the Japan culinary experience had traumatised me so much that I’d become terrified of local restaurants - I’d been playing it safe and hitting the western restaurants for sustenance. A shame I’d waited so long as it was delicious. Even if chicken and celery is a bit of a weird combination!
I tried to be a bit more adventurous after that and had some lovely meals before I left.
My last big excursion was to get the high-speed ferry over to Macau. It only takes an hour, wasn’t expensive and as my plans to get into China proper had fallen through I thought why not? And it was another stamp in the passport, of course.
Billed as Las Vegas in Asia I was surprised to find Macau more like Buenos Aires than Vegas. It was all cobbled streets, Spanish (or I guess Portuguese actually) facades and old churches.
That is until I came across this monstrosity, the Grand Lisbao hotel and casino. It was undoubtedly impressive, but boy was it ugly.
Inside was equally gaudy but impressive, despite some pretty amazing artworks (in gold though, of course) in the lobby.
I’m not a big gambler but had to have a look at the gaming rooms. I wasn’t prepared for the scale of them.
Or for the scantily clad dancing girls who appeared on a stage behind the bar at 2 o’clock in the afternoon. I did try and take a picture (in the interests of the blog you understand) only for a barman to shout at me and forbid me from taking photos.
To say I was embarrassed is a bit of an understatement, so I beat a fairly red-faced retreat back into the bright daylight. What a weird place.
If I thought that was weird though, it was nothing to Macau’s Fishermans’ Wharf. I needed somewhere to hide my shame after the dancing girls episode. I presumed a Fishermans’ Wharf would be chock full of delightful seafood restaurants, but it looked more like a theme park than a restaurant district.
It did have a Roman quarter though,
an old English quarter,
a Moroccan quarter,
a New Orleans quarter,
a Dutch quarter,
a Byzantine (quarter),
and weirdest of all a volcano quarter.
That'smore quarters than a whole, but the place didn't add up anyway. And the really weird thing was just how empty it was. I guess everyone was too busy gambling.
It wasn’t quite as odd a place as Jesus World in Buenos Aires, but is was definitely up there!
By the end of the fortnight I was ready to go. Not because Hong Kong is boring, it definitely is not. But something is changing in me. I thought everything else I’d done so far was just building up to the region that would be the highlight of my trip - five months in south east Asia. But the prospect of another five months backpacking isn‘t thrilling me as much as I expected it too.
All the travellers who’d been on the road for a while that I’d met at the start of my travels talked of burn-out - not another airport/hostel/waterfall/shrine/view. I couldn’t really understand what they meant at first, how could you not love this lifestyle, there are so many awesome things to see? But I was definitely beginning to feel it now.
Hopefully it’s just a phase - The Philippines next and who knows what that will hold!
