Michael's Round-the-World honeymoon

It was never our intention to stay very long in Hong Kong. We're coming back here on the way out of China after our second entry (assuming we can get the visa, but more about that later), so I reasoned that if we liked it more than I expected we can just stay longer the second time.

Hong Kong is more-or-less as I expected: a commercialised UK with Chinese writing, although I had expected super-fast broadband. I had also been prepared for bad news on the cost of beer; the beer in this photo cost over 10 pounds. At least the peanuts were free! In fact that was yesterday, and the first time we have bought any beer in a bar.

Joanne in the Hong Kong Brew House

Until then all we had done was walk into a bar, see that the happy hour price for a draught beer was about £5 and walk back out again. But the guide book suggested the Hong Kong Brew House, and earlier on that day I sampled one of their micro-brewed beers from a shop (for substantially less money).

Nice microbrewed beer (available in the Hong Kong Brew House)

So all the drinking we've done here so far has been in our room. You can buy "quarts" (640ml) of OK beer from a supermarket for about 50p, so considering how tight our budget is this was the only realistic option. Only after we booked our hostel on-line did we realise that it was in one of the two buildings specifically recommended against in the guide: Chungking Mansions and ours, Mirador Mansion.

The appropriately named Mirador "Mansion"

And here's a little selection of photos from our first room.

And here's the Mansion from the internal courtyard and from the street.

Both Chungking and Mirador are in the Kowloon district of Hong Kong, which is on the mainland of Hong Kong (it's not just an island as I had thought) and apparently Kowloon used to be the most densely populated place on the planet. Some information I read in our hostel boasts that tourists staying there can experience the authentic life of 70% of Hong Kong locals, who live in this style of building.

This style of building is like an entire city under on roof. When you enter the buliding on the ground floor, after battling past the people asking "foot massage", "copy watch, copy bag" and "nice suit, tailor", you see corridors and corridors, set out rather like streets, of shops selling all sorts of stuff: electronics, curios, take-away food, clothes -- it looks a bit like a market. Then there are very very slow lifts, which complain when they are overweight -- usually after I get in! The lifts usually come in sets of four, each on stopping only at every 4th floor, presumably to ease the congestion, but it doesn't work; there is always a queue to get into the lift, and the last person ends up tip-toeing around the floor to try and find the spot which will not set off the overweight alarm. On the upper floors there are plenty of residential apartments, lots of hostels (at least in Chungking and Mirador), laundrettes, restaurants, internet cafes (where I am now), and an occasional shop, but most of the shops are on the ground floor. It's pretty grotty, but it is quite cool. Our room costantly smells of different food depending, I assume, on which take-away is cooking at that moment. It's got more than a hint of Bladerunner about it.

When we first arrived they manouvered us into a bigger room than we had booked, but it had two single beds which we did not think appropriate for a honeymoon, and it was just a bit too horrible; so we got moved into what was probably the room originally reserved for us, but it hadn't been ready when we arrived. The room we are in now is tiny. It is exactly the same width as the double bed, which is handy because it means you don't lose things down the side of it. Which is just as well because the rest of the room is so small that you constantly have to use the bed to put things on. It does have an ensuite, as booked, but it's a shower-cum-toilet affair with no extractor fan. However the lack of extactor fan does not matter because we have the huge luxury of a small window, which our first room did not have, and I imagine is quite rare.

Anyway, I'm hoping soon my style will settle down a bit and I will start telling you things you actually want to know.

The first impression I had of Hong Kong on the bus on the way to Kowloon from the airport was that there is a lot of impressive engineering: loads of skyscrapers and some very long and intricate looking bridges. The next impression was just how commercial the place is: people hassling you in the street trying to sell you things, and loads of huge signs sticking out from the buldings, advertising what they are.

It's a commercial place

Bowingly apologetic worker

Then I started to notice the amusing things like bowing apologising signs
We haven't actually had much time to do anything here yet. Most of our time has been spent trying to organise China. We've been trying to organise somewhere to stay via couchsurfing, transport, and our visa. Not organising the visa in advance was a big mistake. There seems to be a mark-up of about 400% when going through the travel agents to obtain a visa, however it was the only way we felt likely to succeed. We should be getting our visas at 6pm tonight; two working days from when we handed our passports over on Sunday. If we had our visas in advance we'd have already left Hong Kong but arriving on Saturday night meant we would lose two days before we could apply. Also, they've apparently "run out" of 6-month visas, which is what we need, since we're flying into Beijing from Tokyo in June. This means we've had to shell out £80 each for a single entry 1 month visa, currently with no idea how we'll get the second vias we will now need. Apparently foreigners can't get them in Japan, so we we'll have to see if we can get it in India, or else we'll have to re-route.

The second oversight on our part was not finding out that Chinese New Year is very soon. Oh lovely, you might think. Chinese New Year is the largest human migration on the Earth. This means we can't book train tickets to get out of this place, even if we do get a visa which, in turn means that we can't organise our accommodation since we don't know when we'll be able to get there.

Anyway, all being well, we'll get our visas tonight, get the local train to the border tomorrow morning, where you can walk across the border to Shenzhen, where we can hopefully get a bus to Guangzhou, where we have a couchsurfing contact. Guangzhou is a big place (although I think it's only middling-to-large by Chinese standards) and we've been warned of the pick-pocketing there, but we'll be meeting someone who knows the place, so hopefully it'll be ok. After staying there for a couple of days, soaking in the China-ness (apparently it's nothing at all like Hong Kong), we plan to move onto Guilin and Yangshuo, probably to spend New Year there. I think transport to there is going to be tricky, because then we'll be moving away from big industial places where people work, towards pretty little rural places, where peoples families live.

So yesterday, after sorting the visa application out, we finally got around to doing some touristy things and seeing some of the place. We got the ferry across to Hong Kong island, which is the original British colony, to get the Peak Tram up to Victoria Peak. The tram route is very steep, quite impressive considering it was opened in 1888. Scottish engineering of course! Apparently at that time land was already running out in Hong Kong and they wanted to open up the higher parts of the island. The tram precipitated the rapid population of the upper parts by rich colonialists. It looked to us like they are still the ones living there, although there are also expensive hotels now too. After taking this rather nice historical tram (new carriages though) up a roller-coaster-like ascent, we were again face-to-face with the commericalism of Hong Kong: the whole of the top of this peak is covered in a mall and several restaurants. And to get to the Peak Tower with the viewing platform at the very top it costs the same as the tram just to go up the final escalator. Still, the city-scape views were very nice.

And now with Sunglasses!

On the way back from that we managed to get another tourist activity in and watch the symphony of lights. The harbours on the Kowloon side and the Hong Kong Island side both have tall buildings flashing lights down their sides, and lasers from their tops, all "in time" to music blasting out from boat on the water between. Quite impressive. Another I've been noticing here is the advanced technology, not that much of it, but there are some things -- another is the Octopus card which is like an Oyster card in London apparently.

Symphony of lights

[Sorry about the photo formatting and typos in this. I'll edit it later. And I'll get the hang of it one day]

Ok I finally managed to upload the photos, although I've got such a backlog of blogging to do I think it may be a while before I have time to hook them up to any text, or tag them with useful information like descriptions. I've just wasted another half our on this damn computer in our hotel! This time when I started to type it tried to translate everything I typed into chinese characters assuming I was typing Pinyin. Great software and very useful under the right circumstances but infuriating if you just want to type English.

Joanne warms her hands on Coals

So finally after a reboot I'm sitting typing in the lobby of our hotel with all the clothes on I mentioned previously, as well as my gloves. I may have to take the gloves off soon and sacrifice my fingers to improve my typing speed! The lobby is about as cold as outside. The only thing that keeps the owner at all warm, through the 24/7 he appears to sit here, is the bit pot full of burning coals under him. Ok that's Joanne using the same sort of thing in a restaurant we were in yesterday.

So to the catch-up... and some food bits I missed out.

Squid Lips!!

When we first arrived in Hong Kong the first thing we ate was Indian food. A strange choice I thought, but I let Joanne decide. It turned out to be really quite good, probably because of the large number of Indian immigrants living in Chungking, where our restaurant was. The next day I wanted to be a bit more adventurous, so we had sushi for lunch, which was a bit more extreme than the sushi you get in Glasgow. I didn't get the "Fried Squid Lips" although I really wanted them when I saw that. Unfortunately we'd already just about blown our daily budget, and I'd eaten loads already. I'll make sure I have some when we re-enter Hong Kong. That evening we decided to take it up a notch again and we went into a proper chinese place where there was no English outside. They did have English on the menu

, although it turned out that it was open to misinterpretation. I saw other people eating form huge bowls and assumed that this must be the "big bowl of noodle with all item above stated". When mine arrived it was even bigger.

No way of eating it in one go. So I had to get the remainder as a takeaway an have it for breakfast.

The day that we went up the peak we ticked one of my boxes by getting some dim sum from a street vendor. Dim sum are a Hong Kong speciality, so it would have been unthinkable to miss out. They were very tasty, so I went back to order some other stuff and ended up with fried tripe with curry sauce poured all over it. Actually not too bad apart from the texture. In fact I could see why tripe appears to be popular in Hong Kong (we'd already seen in a couple of places, translated), because the texture, and whole appearance actually, is really very like the charred squid tentacles I'd had the other night in my sushi; since seafood like that is so popular it seems to make sense that tripe is too. The last in the selection were fish balls in curry sauce, which were nice enough for Joanne to bagsy them leaving me with crunchy tripe.

Elevated walkway

Then our last day in Hong Kong, which didn't make it into the blog at the time, we took a tram from one end of Hong Kong Island to the other.

The guide book (SE Asia on a Budget) said that this was as good as any Hong Kong tour you could get, and at only HK$2 per person (20p) it seemed like excellent value. It gave us a pretty good sense of what Hong Kong is about I think. Sky-scrapers.

Lots of Sky-scrapers.

And some rather cool overhead walkways, which you need to go through shops and offices to get to. I suppose the idea is that the cars aren't slowed down by any pesky pedestrians. Anyway, the tram ride convinced me that Hong Kong isn't anywhere I want to live. It's just never-ending characterless city.

Whole smoked ducks (I think) at the market

However when we got to the very end of the tram journey and got off to look for the way back, I spotted an interesting looking market, which we decided to have a wee look around. Just walking through this market was the most fun I'd had since we arrived in Hong Kong: finally a bit of real life instead of nothing but characterless commerce. The things on the right are whole smoked ducks I think. I neglected to take pictures of any of the more exotic things on offer.

Most of the smoked ducks were so whole they still had, not only their feet still on, but their heads as well. There were turtles; live of course. Apparently when something dies at one of these markets it's not fresh any more, so it just gets chucked out. I was a bit upset about the turtles at first because I thought they were endangered, although Pietro later assured me that it's only the giant ones which are endangered. Still, I'm going to look it up before I have turtle soup. The fish were all swimming around, with air bubbling through their containers, making sure they made it through the day. We even say an eel chopped in half; the half that remained was still alive, so I suppose that must have been ok.

That night we went to another chinese place and I ordered something I thought sounded fairly exotic: Congee with Sliced Pork and Pig's Blood. I had no idea what congee was, but the waiter assured me "it's like noodles". My sister, Lorraine, always talks about her favourite dish in Thailand which invoved "pigs blood", in some sort of a jelly-like state, which is apparently very nice. Anyway, it arrived, and the blood part looked very much like Lorraine's descriptions, but congee turned out to be over-cooked rice or rice porridge or something. And the dish has almost no flavour. It was very very dull even after adding soy sauce and chillis, so I decided that exotic didn't necessarily always mean "good".

Sliced pork and pig's blood congee

Pietro's apartment

Then we were in Guangzhou. As I mentioned we were helped by a friendly chinese guy as we failed to order food on arrival there. The food was pretty grim: all bones and gristle, hardly any meat. That night, after arriving at Pietro's fantastic place, I was telling him about this, the congee, and the market, etc. He said that he was surprised we hadn't seen dog at the market we went to, and that the Chinese attitude to what is good on an animal seems to be the opposite to Europeans'. He said that you can go to his local market first thing in the morning and they are selling fish heads for more than the whole of the rest of the fish, and the hooves / knee caps / neck / whatever grim bits are more expensive that the fillet steak, which is on the same animal, at that point whole. Apparently, you can then return later on to find headless, tailess, finless fish; and (cheap) steaks cast aside in favour of nose, testicle, and spleen. It's just meat, who wants that? -- it's boring! Not as much flavour as sinew, tendon, and skin.

A range of drinks, including the infamous "Great Wall"

Anyway, that night we just settled in and drank wine with Pietro, resulting in us getting up late. I got up and did the Guanzhou blog, then we went out for lunch, where we were too late to eat dimsum at the place Pietro had recommended, so we went to the muslim restaurant next door, where we ordered on very nice dish and another "chicken curry" where the meat was grim again, all bone and fat, and ribs looked rather smaller than a chicken's; rat-sized perhaps. Pietro has assured us that rat is often sold locally as chicken, so I didn't mention this until it was finished. That night we walked for ages, failing to find a particular restaurant from an online guide, but found a quite-nice Macanese place instead. When we arrived back, we drank a bottle of Great Wall cabernet sauvignan. Hmm. And some local brandy, which wasn't too bad. Also I had bought some Budweiser, only because I was shocked to find an American product so Chinese-endorsed.

But it wasn't the only one.

That night we drank more with Pietro. He was proving to be a bad influence. The next day we had intended to definitely do touristy things, but woke up late again. So we went for lunch with Pietro to the dimsum place he had recommend, actually it was more like an aquarium-cum-restaurant, where we chalked up another weird food experience: durian pastries. Durian is the large spiky fruit reknowned for smelling like drains or something. It tastes quite nice actually, but not much like a fruit; the pastries tasted like cheese an onion pies. After lunch Pietro took us for a walk round his local market, which was pretty much the same as the last one, except he was there to point out the little dogs faces sitting on the counter, and the dogs legs hanging up above them. That night we went out with all the Guangzhou couchsurfing crowd for "KTV" which is what they call Karaoke in China.

This was their Chinese New Year party, so they thought they should do something Chinese.

Pietro examining his cake at the KTV Night Guangzhou

Pietro had whipped up a couple of cakes to take along as he's a very good cook, apprently. The cakes were nice anyway. Then on to play pool

and then onto a night club.

It was here I realised that China is still behind us after all: they were playing techno from the 90s! Actually I've subsequently thought about it more and the only serious thing I can come up with is the fact the water isn't potable, which is a major thing I suppose, but that is it!

Aivic and Joanne at the flower festival

We had failed to get bus tickets the previous day due to communication problems, so we called up Aivic, who had very kindly offered to help us any time after helping us so muc hthe first day in Guangzhou. He agreed to meet us and help us buy bus tickets to Yangshuo. He didn't want anything; he just wanted to make sure we were ok. Afterwards he took us to the flower market, which appears just before Chinese New Year, as buying flowers for the New Year is traditional. Here's a photo of our good very kind and helpful friend Aivic.

The next day, thanks to Aivic we were off to Yangshuo just in time for Chinese New Year!

Oh yeah -- and you're not expected to tip in China.

written by

The Happy Couple on January 26, 2009 from Yangshuo, China

from the travel blog: Michael's Round-the-World honeymoon

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Michael's Round-the-World honeymoon

a travel blog by The Happy Couple

Port Edward, South Africa

Johannesburg, South Africa

Hong Kong, Hong Kong

The trouble with blogging...

Kowloon, Hong Kong

Last full day in Hong Kong (hopefully)

Kowloon, Hong Kong

Arrived in China!

Guangzhou, China

Weather

Yangshuo, China

Tipping really isn't a place in China (Guangzhou catch-up and food)

Yangshuo, China

Chinese New Year in Yangshuo

Yangshuo, China

Leaving China

Yangshuo, China