Andy Carvin's Waste of Bandwidth

Exploring Hong Kong

Today was my only full free day in Hong Kong; my meetings would start Monday afternoon. But after the 30-hour commute from Boston, I needed to sleep in until 8am; after that I had a quick breakfast at the hotel restaurant, giving me just enough time with my tour book to plan a day's worth of events.

Women light incense at the Tin Hau temple

The first thing I really needed to do was get money, but I was eager to see what was going on at the local Tin Hau temple. Tin Hau, the Chinese goddess of the sea, was to have her annual festival later this week, so I guessed that they’re might be some activity at the temple.

The temple was about a two-minute walk from the hotel. Incorporated into the surrounding buildings, the temple did not stand out at first. I had to climb two flights of stairs before reaching the main hallway, which was packed with several hundred Chinese worshippers. Men and women alike were lighting incense and bringing offerings to the heart of the temple. Some were chanting, but overall it seemed more like a festive cacophony – old friends chatting, parents instructing their kids what to do in the ceremony, etc.

I made eye contact with one of the men who was working near the main altar. I motioned at my camera to see if it was okay to take pictures, so I stood to the side and tried to capture some images with my digital camera. I managed to do this for about 15 minutes, until someone off to the other side yelled something out at me in Chinese.

“No picture,” another man said a few moments later. I looked over at the man who initially said I could take photos, and he gave me a shrug with a look that seemed to say, “What can I tell you? It’s not like I’m in charge.” Not wanting to cause offense, I put away my camera and returned to the periphery of the temple, observing for a few more minutes before taking the stairs back down to street level.

I still needed to get some money, though; having $60 in U.S. cash wasn’t going to get me far if I wanted to take a ferry ride or get some lunch. The ATM around the corner from the hotel wouldn't accept either of my cards, so I began walking west down Causeway Road, past Hong Kong's beautiful public library. I stopped at a hotel to see if they had an ATM, but they told me to go into Causeway's main shopping area, just west of the Victoria Park. I stopped in the park for a few minutes, where thousands of woman were picnicking and gossiping with each other. Around the corner I spotted an HSBC ATM and managed to get some quick spending money for the day.

Dried produce for sale in a Hong Kong market

It was hot and humid, particularly among the pavement and the skyscrapers, but I wanted to walk as much as possible before it got even hotter. I soon spied a small market area -- two or three blocks' worth of shops selling fresh produce, meats, fish and dry goods. The smell of durian permeated the air -- the world's worst smelling fruit was reaching the peak of its season, and you could see the large, spiky fruit in almost every shop. On two occasions, shop owners beckoned out to me asking if I wanted to try some. "English like durian!" one of them said proudly with a devious grin. "Yes, but Americans think it taste like old onions," I said back to her.

Leaving the market I slowly wandered westward, meandering a maze of pedestrian bridges and skyways that interconnected many of the skyscapers in Hong Kong's Central district. Somehow I managed to find myself at the entrance of the convention center, site of the 1997 handover from the British. Apart from the nice view of Kowloon and Victoria Harbor, there wasn't much to do around there, so I started walking west and uphill, towards the Peak tram.

The Peak is the most popular tourist attraction in Hong Kong. More shopping mall than vista, the Peak is home to a galleria of shops and restaurants, perched atop the highest hill on Hong Kong island. Half the fun of visiting the peak is taking the furnicular tram that runs the steep course up the hill. So I hiked up a busy road near the high court complex, thankful for the bottle of water I'd picked up earlier at a 7-Eleven store. Once I reached the entrance to the tram I had to queue for about 10 minutes with a small horde of fellow tourists. The Peak is also home to Madam Tussaud's wax museum, among other tourist traps, so the tram ticket center did its best to entice visitors with a sample wax figure - in this case, Hong Kong's very own Jackie Chan. I found myself staring at Wax Jackie for an otherwise disturbing amount of time. His skin looked real, his hair looked real -- even his eyes looked real. The whole thing was very strange. A Chinese boy behind me started to cry -- perhaps he was freaked out after losing a game of "who''ll blink first" with the paraffin Kung Fu master.

View of Hong Kong from the Peak

Soon enough, I got my ticked and climbed into the tram. The vehicle then began to huff its way up the hillside, through the residential high-rises of the Mid-Levels neighborhood, the ratio of greenery to concrete improving with every 50 meters upward. Eventually, we reached the top, and join the masses of visitors determined to spent two minutes enjoying the view and another 58 minutes buying chotchkes or eating overpriced food at one of the Peak’s many restaurants. I decided to strike a compromise, going outside to soak up the marvelous view of Hong Kong’s skyline below, then retreating inside long enough to get an iced tea at a coffee shop before following a stone path to a slightly secluded outlook. The outlook, a red Chinese gazebo with marble rails, was a relaxing getaway compared to the chaos of the Peak Galleria. The gazebo provided just enough shade to stay comfortable; with Hong Kong’s 75% humidity, every moment of shade was a moment well spent.

After riding the tram down the hillside, I decided to walk to Hong Kong’s Soho neighborhood, a maze of restaurants and bars. I started by looking for a couple of noodle shops recommended in the Lonely Planet book, but somehow I got disoriented and ended up in a different corner of Soho. Rather than hike back across to near where I started, I quickly spotted a Thai restaurant called the Siam Café, and had their fixed-priced lunch of coconut chicken soup, drunken noodles and dessert. The drunken noodles were very spicy, with fresh peppercorns still on the stalk, popping like grapes when you ate them. Dessert turned out to be two little morsels of coconut tapioca pudding, each wrapped in a dainty little palm leaf gift box.

Cutting west through the rest of Soho, I found myself on Hollywood Road, which soon led me to the Man Mo Temple. One of the most famous temples in Hong Kong, Man Mo was one of my favorite spots during my first visit in 1997. As had been the case seven years earlier, my second visit to the temple was fascinating. Huge coils of incense hung from the ceiling, constantly tended to by two volunteers. Deeper in the temple, several people were lighting incense sticks and candles, occasionally banging a gong along the side of the hall. No one seemed to mind that I had a camera, so I spent a while hanging out, observing people as they came in and out to say their prayers. For such a chaotic city, it’s hard to step away from oases of serenity such as this.

Leaving Man Mo Temple, I walked further west to visit a trio of temples in a neighborhood that was one of the first settled by the Chinese after the British planted their flag on the island. The first temple was reminiscent of Man Mo, with its enormous collections of incense coils hanging from the ceiling, but on a smaller scale. The second temple was surprisingly un-temple-like. After climbing a stairwell, I found myself in a room with half a dozen middle-age people sitting in chairs, either asleep or looking terribly bored. One person was praying in the inner sanctum, while several others stood the side and stared at me. For whatever reason, this didn’t seem like the type of place that welcomed outsiders, so I politely turned around and went back down the stairs.

Just across the street, though, I had a much more positive experience. The Pak Sing shrine looked more like a modest dry goods store that had been converted into a house of worship. There were six people inside, but the place was small enough that even this felt a little claustrophobic when I entered. Two of them saw me and smiled, motioning me to come in closer while the others prayed at the inner shrine, chanting for the spirits of their ancestors. I made eye contact with one of the first two people and motioned to my camera. He nodded his head and smiled. I got in closer and slowly panned my camera while taking a short video clip of the prayers.

Leaving the shrine, I walked downhill through Sheung Wan towards the waterfront, first exploring the antique stores and curio shops along Cat Street. Eventually I reached the Central Star Ferry terminal, where I boarded a ferry for the 15-minute crossing to Kowloon, on the mainland side of Hong Kong. The views of Hong Kong from Victoria Harbor were just as spectacular as I’d remembered from seven years’ ago. Reaching Kowloon, I first paid a visit to a tailor shop to see if I could get a suit made. While Hong Kong’s tailors are no longer legendary for their affordable first-rate suits, they’re still quite a bargain, so I ordered a suit, two shirts a tie for the equivalent of $250. After getting measured for the suit, I took a brief walk through the Peninsula Hotel, observing its well-dressed guests having high tea in the atrium. Susanne and I had come for high tea back in ’97, but doing it on my own didn’t seem like much fun. Instead, I went exploring up Nathan Road, admiring its famously garish neon signs hanging high above the street.

Neon signs in Kowloon

After a brief walk, I returned to the ferry and caught a boat to the Wanchai terminal in Hong Kong, where I caught the MTR subway train back to my hotel in Causeway Bay. Back at the hotel, I took a cool shower to exercise the humidity demons from my pores, then rendezvoused with a group of colleagues I’d met at the World Summit Awards judging event in Dubai last year. We planned to head to Kowloon for dinner and a view of the nightly skyline lightshow, seen best from Kowloon’s waterfront. By the time we reached Kowloon, though, it was 7pm, giving us barely any time to scarf down a meal before the light show. Instead, we took a walk northwest of Jordan street, in the Temple Street market, where there were rows and rows of hawkers selling clothing and appliances of all shapes and sizes. Several of my colleagues had just arrived in Hong Kong for their first visit, so they were quite absorbed by the giant neon lights protruding from every building. “How Blade Runner,” one of them said – exactly the same reaction we’d had during our first visit to Hong Kong.

We slowly made our way down Nathan Road, pausing briefly to pay homage to the notorious Chungking Mansion, made famous in the movie Chungking Express. By the time we’d worked our way through the crowds and across the busy roads to the waterfront, it was 10 minutes to 8pm, just prior to the light show. The waterfront was crowded with thousands of locals, undoubtedly attracted by the fact that tonight’s show would be accompanied by a Cantonese-language narrator. All of us became transfixed on Hong Kong’s skyline as tens of thousands of lights danced and flashed to an orchestrated history of Hong Kong, punctuated by bursts of fireworks from the rooftops. The view was spectacular, but the fact that it was narrated in Cantonese made it more than a little difficult to follow the story line.

The show lasted 20 minutes, followed by a molasses flood of people all trying to leave the waterfront at the same time. We struggled upstream, so to speak, trying to get further inland to a restaurant district just east of Nathan Road. But the whole area was cut off by road construction, so we backtracked along Nathan Road until we could find a safe place to cut westward by a few blocks. By now it was nearly 9pm, and we were all getting very hungry and somewhat dehydrated. Fortunately we found a pan-Southeast Asian restaurant that wasn’t too crowded, and ordered a combination of Chinese, Thai and Indonesian dishes, accompanied by the coldest bottles of Tsingtao beer available legally without a permit. It was a delicious meal, but by the time we got back to the Star Ferry terminal and caught the boat back to Central, we knew we were too exhausted to find the subway down the street. So we hailed the first taxi we could find and climbed in clown-fashion, five of us jammed in a car that probably should have only seated three. The taxi driver spoke no English, and the Cantonese-language directions on the hotel’s business card still didn’t prevent him from getting lost twice. On the second occasion, we gave up and got out of the taxi, preferring to walk the five minutes’ distance to the hotel than drive in the wrong direction for an equal amount of time…. -andy

Posted by acarvin at May 9, 2004 11:34 AM | TrackBack