Travels in the People's Republic of China
|
|
||
Travels in the People's Republic of China |
|
|
U.S. Government map of the Hong Kong S.A.R. (Special Administrative Region)
I arrived both times in Hong Kong late in the evening with no reservation and little plan beyond going to the Chungking Mansions and seeing what the touts would offer. Yes, the company I was teaching for would pick up the bill for a nice room in a business-oriented hotel, but only for the time of the course itself. And the Holiday Inn on Nathan Road in the Tsim Sha Tsui area (pronounced "Jim Shaw Joy") is pretty much like a Holiday Inn anywhere. Meanwhile you could have a far more immersive experience (for a tiny fraction of the price!) just a block down Nathan Road at the Chungking Mansions.
Tsim Sha Tsui is in Kowloon, on a peninsula reaching into the harbor, a strait between Hong Kong Island and the mainland. You will have arrived at Chek Lap Kok International Airport, on the north shore of Lantau Island. Fast buses and a high-speed train connect the airport to Kowloon. So pick your transport and stagger onto Nathan Road....
The entrance to the Chungking Mansions, 36-44 Nathan Road, Kowloon.
Looking north up Nathan Road in the Tsim Sha Tsui district of Kowloon, Hong Kong.
The Chungking Mansions are a 3-D labyrinth of apartments, guesthouses, restaurants, and shops built in a 16-story apartment building. It's at 36-44 Nathan Road, central Tsim Sha Tsui, just a few blocks up Nathan Road from the waterfront and the Star Ferry pier.
You walk in off the street into a maze of passageways filled with money-changing booths and tiny shops — food, clothing, low-end electronics, much like a not particularly nice Turkish bus station.
The first floor floor above the entrance level (what Americans would call the "second floor") is directly reachable by stairs from the ground floor, and after you get used to the clutter you realize that not only are there signs hanging out over the passageways as if they were small alleyways, but there are openings up to balconies on the first floor. Up there are more shops, tiny restaurants, and a couple of barber shops.
A Chungking Mansion stairwell.
An odd/even elevator pair.
There are five pairs of elevators, and one of each pair stops on the even floors 2-16 while the other stops on the odd floors 3-15. The pairs are labeled A through E, and thus the terms "A block" through "E block".
The hallway on any given floor within one block is fairly small, with maybe just five to ten doors off it, and you can't get to the equivalent floor on another block. You have to go back down to the ground floor and up another elevator. Very few places in the Chungking Mansions have windows, and many that do probably just look out into window wells.
The stairwells aren't nice, but they're not as horrifying as the Lonely Planet commentary leads you to believe. But then I've seen Russian apartment buildings....
The building was originally intended as entirely residential above the bottom two floors. But people started converting apartments or pairs of adjacent ones into guesthouses and restaurants. It's still largely residential, but there are lots of places to stay and get good meals.
A spare bedroom in the guesthouse manager's apartment.
A view of the room from the door. The bathroom is unusually large for a guesthouse!
The rooms are quite small. If you're tall, you'll find that even though the bed is as long as physically possible in the room, it's still too short. Even when you lie diagonally. So, the beds are a little smaller than at the Whitehouse Hotel in New York. But on the positive side, you get your own toilet and shower.
Places I have stayed include the following, selected pretty arbitrarily from a list in Lonely Planet or just by showing up and going with the first tout (asking to see the place first!):
The Fortunate Guesthouse was the first place I stayed. The tout on the sidewalk was the manager — the guesthouse itself was full but he rented me a spare bedroom in his apartment for HK$ 180 a night.
Tiny but nice, it was a bedroom and attached bathroom. The bedroom floor space was half occupied by a small bed, and much of the rest was taken up with a chest of drawers holding a TV and a telephone. The bedroom was about six feet long by five feet wide, and the bathroom was smaller. The chest of drawers blocked slightly less than half the door into the bathroom. A standard porcelain toilet, and the integrated shower arrangement where the room itself was the shower.
The telephone was sitting on the bed when I arrived, as the jack was on the wall above. If you placed the phone on top of the TV and hooked the cord over the bathroom door frame, it worked out. He showed me that the TV power plugged into the outlet in the bathroom, so it dangled through the doorway about knee-high. So, entering the bathroom during TV time required first stepping through sideways to fit past the chest of drawers, and then stepping high to get over the TV power cord.
The New Grand Guest House rented me a room with a wide but short bed, a phone, a TV, air conditioning, plus a toilet/shower/sink cubicle. The bed was built right against one wall, and there was just enough room to walk between it and the other wall. But that's all you really need. The guest house consists of an entry hall (which apparently has been, or perhaps still is at times, a barber shop or beauty parlor), with four bedrooms off a narrow hallway.
Almost all the restaurants are Indian, Pakistani, or Nepali, and the food is excellent. Some look pretty dire from the hallway, but most are far cleaner inside than the exterior would suggest.
There are some places on the first floor overlooking the entrance level where you can get breakfast while avoiding the "English Breakfast" prepared by people from the Indian subcontinent while living in Hong Kong. That does make it quite the British Empire experience, and may be your only chance for baked beans during the day, but it wasn't what I was looking for. I went with the subcontinental breakfast, sometimes at places on the balconies overlooking the ground floor frenzy including:
Great curry restaurants where I got dinner included:
Some of these advertise having halal food, meaning among other things that they serve beer but you have to ask. It will come Chinese style, meaning an huge (650 ml) bottle of Carlsberg or similar.
Looking across the harbor from Kowloon at night.
Speaking of portion sizes, in Hong Kong they're enormous. I got a carry-out Thai style curry for lunch one day while teaching the class. It came in a large styrofoam container for the curry and a smaller one for the rice. The price had seemed reasonable for a single meal, and I was a little embarrassed to take what seemed to be food for an entire family back to the classroom. But one of the students explained that no, that was the normal sized Hong Kong lunch.
The Kangaroo Pub is popular with the large expatriate British Commonwealth community. It's upstairs on Haiphong Street, a side street off Nathan Road. You can sit at the windows and watch the huge crowds of people below.
The Chungking Mansions are in the Tsim Sha Tsui area, in Kowloon at the tip of a peninsula of the mainland. It's just a few blocks down Nathan Road to the waterfront, with the open Promenade and the great views across the busy harbor to the Central district of Hong Kong Island.
The views across the harbor are great at any time, although they can be a bit hazy during the day. It's really spectacular at night, when many of the tall buildings are outlined or covered in animated multicolored light systems.
The Star Ferry at the Kowloon pier.
The Star Ferry crossing the harbor from Kowloon to Hong Kong Island.
The Star Ferry pulls into the Central pier after crossing Hong Hong harbor.
The MTR is the fast subway system connecting Kowloon and Central, but it's an unsurprising subway. The Star Ferry is a much nicer way to cross the harbor. Just HK$ 2.2 for a ride.
For the job on-site at the telecommunications company, I stayed at the Holiday Inn in Tsim Sha Tsui and traveled to their site in the eastern Central district by crossing the harbor on the Star Ferry. Then it was a ride on MTR for several blocks from the ferry dock to their offices in the Times Square complex. There's a certain romance or adventure about being able to say you've commuted to work on the Star Ferry.
For the second job, I was working in Central and staying in the Sheungwan district well west of Central on the Island. That meant just taking the tall and narrow double-decker streetcars to the job site and back. But most evenings I took the Star Ferry across the harbor to get dinner, to see the lights of Central from the Promenade, or just to ride across and back again.
It's a great setting — like İstanbul as far as being a huge city with dramatic architecture split across a very busy body of water, but Hong Kong is entirely different as it's ultra-modern, backed by green mountains, and East Asian.
A view down over Hong Kong from Victoria Peak, as taken with a US$ 10 camera on a hazy day.
Fantastic image from Wikipedia, a night view of Hong Kong from Victoria Peak. Someone else's image, which they enhanced with a form of localized histogram equalization.
The obvious thing to do in Hong Kong is to take the tram to Victoria Peak for the fantastic views. You look down over the big business buildings of Central, across the harbor, the Kowloon peninsula, and on to the hills of the New Territories in the distance.
The daytime weather was very hazy both times when I was there in December. Very hazy at best, cloudy with rain some of the time. As you can see from my picture, it was not as pretty as the postcards but it was still a great view.
The Lan Kwai Fong area is more trendy, with plenty of places to get meals. It's not too far from the Times Square office complex, and it's packed during lunch time.
The back streets of Hong Kong are just one fez-monkey short of Archie McPhee. The night markets are enormous surplus sales set up on folding tables in the streets, loads of junk with aspirations of an al fresco Big Lots. Prominent night markets include the Temple Street and Mong Kok night markets, and the big Night Market north of the Tsim Sha Tsui area.
The markets have everything you ever wanted, especially if all you really wanted was ballpoint pens, alarm clocks, acres of "Hello Kitty" paraphernalia, miles of cheap neckties, padded pajamas and robes (in case you can't decide whether to fight or sleep), children's kimonos, battery-powered waving cat statues, lighters, Osama bin Ladin T-shirts, Mariah Carey T-shirts (but no "Osama ♥ Mariah" T-shirts), and vast arrays of what would appear to be bootleg "Greatest Hits" albums by western musicians but are really covers by Philippino bar bands.
The day markets continue this theme indoors and during the day.
Stores with traditional medicines in the Sheungwan district.
I stayed in the Sheungwan district during the second course. The scent of Sheungwan is a pungent blend of curry, liniment, rancid fish, incense, and naphthalene. Sheungwan is full of traditional Chinese medicine and health food shops. Lots of sea life dissected and dried, some recognizable (dried seahorses), some barely so (dried shark fin cartilage), and some not at all (various grey lumpy fungoid things). There are also plenty of small restaurants, and stores with clothes, kitchen utensils, small electrical appliances and so on. Plus, the famous Man Mo Temple, up the steep streets.
HSBC HK$ 20 bill, from Wikipedia
The currency in Hong Kong can be a little confusing, as multiple banks issue bills. There are three sets of currency in circulation at once, issued by three banks following their own designs.
Two-thirds to three-quarters of the circulating currency is the HSBC notes. The Bank of China and Standard Chartered Bank notes split the remainder.
All the bills of a given denomination are the same color, like the blue-green HK$ 20 bills seen here.
|
|
|
|||||||||
|
|||||||||
|
| © Bob Cromwell Sep 2010. Created with /bin/vi and ImageMagick, hosted on OpenBSD with Apache. Root password available here, privacy policy here. |
