Notes from our travels

The first thing that hits you in Hong Kong is the heat. Within five minutes of leaving the airport, you’ll be itching to have a shower. The next things you’ll notice will be the pollution and the crowds. We had decided to stay in Kowloon, the main shopping district of Hong Kong where all the locals flock in the evening, and where many of the budget hostels are (budget hostels which have some pretty interesting pasts, such as unaccounted for bodies being found under beds and other wonderful things like that). Our room in our hostel was 14 floors up, had no window, and the most cramped shower/toilet that I’ve ever seen. But there were no dead bodies, and the hostel owners were lovely and friendly, and we had air conditioning – it could have been much worse!

Our amazing toilet / shower

Crowds in Kowloon

Trying to find dinner in Kowloon was confusing, and a massive headache, especially as the jetlag was starting to hit us. We wandered around for ages – it was a Friday night and everywhere was absolutely crammed! We ended up in some fast food place and passed on the meals containing things like shark fins, cow stomachs, intestines and tendons (they don’t even try and make the meals sound appetising). Even though Hong Kong is very westernised and most things are printed in English, we still had a bit of a hard time getting by when ordering food, although we probably would have been fine had we chosen to eat in a more upmarket, touristy area. Tom kept pointing out how bizarre it is that a country that eats so much rice and so many noodles would invent something like chopsticks; in the end I had to admit defeat and ask for a fork. When you’re jetlagged it’s all a bit too much.
The next couple of days were better. We discovered a bakery round the corner where we could grab a hassle-free breakfast, with interesting things such as curry dohnuts (literally curry in a dohnut… they didn’t even try to make the combination work in any way). We had a wander around the city, just getting a feel for the sights and smells and headed up to Victoria Peak via the Star Ferry and the incredibly steep tram, where you get some awesome views of Hong Kong Island (and the pollution above it). It was nice up there out of the city – the air was almost fresh. The view was just as impressive at night.

Tom’s curry donut

Hong Kong Island from Victoria Peak

The view at night

The funny thing about Hong Kong is that it is actually really green – once you get away from the only bits of land that are able to host buildings. The next day we travelled to one of the other islands and visited a big Buddha statue and a Buddhist temple. We ate a vegetarian lunch here, and funnily enough it was the best meal that we had in Hong Kong. Turns out the meat you get in Hong Kong is even grottier than the meat that you’ll be given in a Chinese takeaway in England (even if you get something in a more upscale restaurant in Hong Kong). Call us fussy but it’s a bit offputting when your dinner has loads of hard shards of bone in it, with little meat attached.

Big Buddha statue

NO SKATE BIKING

Overall, it was a good experience, but Hong Kong is not really somewhere that I’d actively choose to visit again. Seeing the rest of China would be interesting but I don’t know if it would be an enjoyable kind of interesting!

This entry was posted on Friday, October 10th, 2008 at 11:31 pm and is filed under New Zealand. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.