Hong Kong. What a trip.

I'll try to keep it short for now, just focus on the highlights. I already wrote a really long email (read: novel) to my parents about the trip. I don't think I want to rehash that, although I may refer to it for ideas.

It started with me leaving home at some ridiculous, ungodly hour that should be declared illegal. Something like 5:30 in the morning. Truly, morning flights are evil. Anyways, I walked out of the gate of my complex and discovered the only transport around was two lonely and forlorn-looking motor-tricycles and a solitary driver. Fortunately I wasn't looking for a ride all the way to the airport, only as far as my former school where I was to pick up a colleague. He also had a flight at some evil hour of the morning. So I piled my stuff in, the driver told me several times to take it easy, there's no hurry. I probably would have bitten his head off, literally, had I had some caffeine and food in my body, but fortunately for him, my stomach is not especially happy with the world, and even angrier with me, when it is forced to be awake at times I would normally only see at the end of an all-nighter.

Anyways, I picked up my colleague, we jumped in his friends car, we got to the airport. I sent him through customs and reassured him one last time that if he relaxed and simply followed the signs, he would be fine. He's not a very experienced traveller, yet, and he'd admit it himself. Then I went looking for breakfast and a place to rest and wait for my travelling companion. Y'see, my colleague was travelling back to New Zealand, and so needed to be at the airport a lot earlier than I did, even though my flight to Shenzhen left not long after his flight to Singapore.

Oh well. So we're wandering down towards our plane and notice there's a bloody great big Boeing 747 sitting at our gate. What? We're looking for a flight to Shenzhen, not Europe or America! But no, this 747 was our plane and it was flying to Shenzhen. And it was almost full. Huh. Never would have thought there'd be so many people flying to Shenzhen early on a Thursday morning, but there you go.

The plane loaded up and we pulled away from the gate and started taxiing out to the run way. Then we turned a different way from usual. It looked like the pilot was going to drive us down the airport expressway and maybe take off from one of the ring roads. Then we stopped. And waited. And waited. And waited. We would move forwards only a few meters at a time and then stop and wait again. Eventually we'd moved far enough to discover we were on a bridge over the airport expressway. And then we moved a little further forward and found ourselves between the airport fire station and a construction site. And then a little further forward and we could see another construction site and what may have been the end of the runway. And then eventually we took off an hour late. You know you're in Beijing when you get stuck in a traffic jam at the airport entrance, and then another traffic jam on the taxiway.

Whatever, we got there. And we got lunch and tried to figure out how to get to Hong Kong. After spending ten or fifteen minutes doing a very good impression of a pair of headless chickens, we found a counter selling bus tickets direct to Hong Kong. We bought tickets just in time for the next bus to leave. Having changed bus twice and walked through both mainland and Hong Kong customs (direct, my arse) we washed up in Mong Kok, just a hop, skip and a jump from Nathan Road. Right road, just about two or three k's north of where we were wanting to be.

Ah well, so we found ourselves a room in Mirador Mansions, we sorted out our visas as best we could. We were both disappointed, him more than me, but his situation is arguably dodgier than mine, so fair enough. And then we set about enjoying the next few days as cheaply as possible. Well, not so much as cheaply as possible, but as cheaply as we could while still downing pint after pint of Guinness down the pub. Down the pub usually meant Murphy's in Tsimshatsui. Beautiful place. The staff really know how to treat their customers, and they know how to get rid of the occassional obnoxious git.

No, they didn't throw us out. One evening we showed up, and quickly realised it was time to keep to ourselves. Some bloody loud-mouthed and extremely drunk Aussie was making a complete fool of himself and pissing off a lot of people, not just customers, but the boss too. The duty manager, a rather short woman with a strong northern English accent and kinda English-Chinese looks gave him a fairly stern and very clear warning. Not too long afterwards, with a mate of slightly stronger and more masculine build (ok, he was one of the many young South Asian inhabitants of Tsimshatsui, but he looked a lot better built and much fitter than this bloody Aussie) as backup, she told him where to go. After a bit of whingeing about how the manager had been rude to him, he stumbled up the stairs, and everybody breathed a huge sigh of relief.

But not everything involved drunks or booze. Our first three days there Hong Kong turned on the most beautiful weather I've seen on my four trips there. The views from Victoria Peak were nothing short of spectacular, as was the scenery on our trip to the Big Buddha on Lantau Island.

Yes, the Big Buddha is really very big. According to the brochure, he's the world's largest seated, outdoor, bronze Buddha. Sorry to sound all disrespectful, but the rate things are going, to get in the record books they're going to have to start getting really silly: The world's largest seated, outdoor, bronze, top hat-wearing Buddha, for example. Anyway, spectacular scenery, really big Buddha, pity about how boring it all seemed. I've been far more inspired to burn incense in the Lama Temple here in Beijing. Maybe all that extra religious freedom takes everything that is special out of the experience. I mean, the Lama Temple in Beijing feels spiritually alive, like an active place of worship should feel. The Big Buddha and the Po Lin Monastery felt..... like beautiful scenery. Maybe I should have wandered up the hill and read the Daodejing while communing with nature. Never mind, it was beautiful, and I'm not a Buddhist anyway, but I really needed to get out of the crowds, heat and steam of Tsimshatsui/Wanchai/Central, so the trip there achieved everything it was supposed to.

We found ourselves stuck an extra day because of a lack of train tickets back to Beijing. What the hell, we used the time to take a ferry out to Cheungchau/长洲. Unfortunately, that was the day the typhoon struck Taiwan, and the typhoon had pushed a mass of hot, humid, still air over Hong Kong. According to one report I read, even though the actual temperature at Cheungchau may have been only 34, when the effect of the humidity was factored in, it felt like nearly 40. I pity the poor bastards working on the tarmac at the airport that day, where the official temperature was 37. At Cheungchau it was miserable enough. So having got some lunch and wandered around the northern end of the island a bit (and the breeze at the top of the hill was by far the most beautiful part of that trip), we went back to the restaurant where we'd had lunch, got ourselves rehydrated, and then got stuck into the only serious business that could be done in such a situation: Drinking ice-cold beer while absorbing the sea breeze and watching what little activity there was in Cheungchau's fishing port.

Which reminds me: Probably the best part of the trip, apart from the easy access to Guinness and Kilkenny, was the Tsingtao. For some reason, the Tsingtao brewed for export to Hong Kong is really quite different from that sold on the mainland, and no, it's not just the traditional characters on the label. Our first late afternoon/early evening in Hong Kong we went to a bar in Wanchai I'd found last time I was there. We were the first customers. I don't know if that says anything good about our drinking habits.... Well, we discovered it was happy hour and they had Tsingtao. We thought, what the hell, and ordered a couple of Tsingtaos. Impression number one: The flavour. It was much richer and maltier, like a beer should be, even a lager. Impression number two: Bloody hell! What's the alcohol content of this stuff? I'm going to need some food very soon! At 5%, it was noticeably stronger than the mainland version. Tsingtao with flavour and a kick in its tail, AND no formaldehyde hangover, damn, they've got to start marketing this stuff here on the mainland!

Ah well, all in all it was a good time. Like every other trip I've been on, especially those that involve crossing borders, it was crazy, chaotic, full of mistakes and minor disasters, but it all came together anyway.

So there are some of the highlights of my trip. But the best part was getting back. I must be getting old, travel is getting more exhausting than it used to be.