Planet Trekker

Another day and another Disney park. Or at least that was what I decided when I looked out the window.

It was another overcast day but still not raining and I felt in the mood for a little bit of Disney. It had been about a week since I last visited one so I was long overdue after all.

This time the ride from Mong Kok MTR was in the opposite direction from the day before because Disneyland is out near the airport. It also meant having to change trains once at Lai King Station, not a great problem because the next train was waiting right there when we stepped off, and then another change at Sunny Bay Station for the Disneyland line.

Up until this last change it had been the standard MTR trains, clean and efficient and full of locals going about their daily lives. A short wait at the Sunny Bay Station and things changed for the magical. That may sound a little dramatic or even like the raving of a sad Disney obsessive but I defy anyone to see a train coming that has Mickey Mouse shaped windows and not smile. To then step into the train and find carpet and little statues of Disney characters as well as a star filled ceiling and not feel a little magic would take a hard hearted bast**d indeed.

The last trip on the Disney train is only a short one but on this day it was almost empty. This gave me some hope that I wouldn’t have the same problem I had in Tokyo.

We arrived in the Disney Station and, having been here before, I made my way quickly out and began the walk to the Park. The amount of space makes me believe that there are more plans afoot for this area. The walk from the train to the Park entrance is along a wide avenue with Disney music playing and pictures of Disney characters hanging from the lamp posts.

The main feature of this avenue is a fountain that has Mickey surfing on a whale and all of the other major characters arrayed around. Turn right here and you can see the Park entrance. I made my way in, along with just a handful of other people, and bought my ticket. No lines and hardly anyone waiting for the opening which was still half an hour away. It looked like it was going to be a day much different to Tokyo.

Ticket safely in hand and a bit of time to kill I decided to walk to the Disneyland Hotel. Continuing on along the avenue I felt a little conspicuous as the only person in a space and walkway obviously designed to accommodate many more.

The hotel is typically Disney. It is grand and has many of little Disney flourishes. I wandered the gardens for a little while but the wind had now gotten up a bit and as the hotel looks directly out onto the water it was a bit brisk. The parts I did see, like the wedding pavilion and the hedge maze, were impressive.

Back inside in the warmth I gave thought to my empty stomach. It was now 10am and I hadn’t eaten since the night before. I did some mental arithmetic on my casino winnings from the day before and decided that I had enough to shout myself a fancy Disney breakfast and nothing is better than a buffet, character breakfast at a Disney hotel.

I was shown to my table, passing Goofy and Mickey, and then had the run of the buffet. It was pretty good, a strange combination of western, Chinese and Indian food. I’m sure that I ate my money’s worth in smoked salmon and got hugged by Pluto and had my photo taken with Goofy. I even managed to avoid Mickey although I did get great satisfaction cutting the little ears off the Mickey waffles.

The best part though was watching all the kids. Some were so excited that they almost forgot to eat but others were terrified. Strangely, the more terrified the child the more the parent seemed determined to subject them to the large scary character. Maybe they think its character building or they are just determined to get their money’s worth at the cost of their child’s sanity.

I left the buffet feeling pleasantly full, which is one of the three best ways you can describe yourself. The other two being sexually satisfied and independently wealthy.

I walked back to the Park entrance, got through security and into the Park. The same as Tokyo I won’t go into great detail here but a few things are worth noting.

It was really, really quiet. Even if I hadn’t been to Tokyo so recently I still would have felt this was quiet. It was good though because it meant that I could walk onto any ride or show that I wanted and I saw that great majority of them.

There is little merchandise that is of a type to make me want to buy it. Maybe I’m strange or maybe I don’t have the Asian love of cute but I walked out with only a fridge magnet to show for my troubles.

I hardly ate at all once I was in the Park. I was so full from breakfast that I really didn’t feel like anything.

I walked a lot.

I took a number of photos.

I left.

I don’t want this to make it sound like I didn’t enjoy myself because I did. It’s just that Hong Kong is the smallest of the Disney Parks and with so few people it’s easy to get around. I enjoyed the Jungle Cruise. The Golden Mickey’s (a live stage show) was good even if I did have to read the English subtitles shown on a screen to the side. I went on the Buzz Lightyear Astro Blasters repeatedly and I saw my favourite, Mickey’s Philharmagic, enough to memorise the words. The Lion King show (another live production) was as good as I remember it.

It was another great day in a magic place but it was one I’ve been to recently and I’m kind of looking forward to Paris and a new one.

The return trip on the MTR was uneventful if efficient and I finished the day with a late meal of a plate of crispy fried goose in my restaurant.

Today has been a writing day. The sun is setting now and the lights are coming on…I think it’s time I closed the laptop and hit the streets.

Day two and I had no idea what I was going to do. Well, kind of no idea what I was going to do. I knew what I wanted to do while I was in Hong Kong but I had the luxury of a bit of time and no need to rush about trying to see it all like the last time I was here. I also managed to tick off a few of the more touristy things the last time I was here, something that added to my more leisurely pace this time.

The two major things I wanted to do were Disneyland and Macau. Waking up early it was just a matter of looking out the window at the weather and deciding which way to go. The night before a little card had been delivered to my room with the weather forecast for the next couple of days and it hadn’t looked good. The window proved to be a better indicator and although it was overcast it wasn’t raining. Macau called to me for some reason so I got my gear together and headed out.

It’s only a short walk from the hotel to the Mong Kok MTR station and when I got there a quick look at the map showed which way I needed to go to get to Central MTR and the ferry terminal. The Hong Kong subway is excellent and with a lot less lines than the Tokyo one it’s even easier to figure out as a tourist. A short ride later and I was getting off at Central. The coolest part of this particular journey is the knowledge that the last part is under the harbour itself and a crushing death from all that water may only be seconds away. Not that I was worried.

Getting from the MTR station to the ferry terminal proved to be a little more problematic but once I’d figured out I was walking the wrong way and then discovered the convenient walkway above street level that goes from the station to the terminal I was happy.

Ferries leave every 15 minutes to Macau so all I had to do was swipe my credit card in the vending machine, choose which time I wanted to leave and which class of seat and the little ticket popped out. A look at the departure board, waiting for it to cycle through Chinese to English, and I was off to the correct departure gate. It was just like an airport. I had to go through immigration and have my passport stamped to get out of Hong Kong and I had to show my ticket to get into the lounge. The ticket hadn’t had a seat number on it and I found out when I showed it that seats were allocated by means of a sheet of number stickers, one of which was peeled off and stuck onto my ticket.

Down the gangway and onto the Easyjet boat I was shown towards my seat. It was the same as a good train or average plane seat but more than adequate for a quick one hour boat ride. The boat was full but the majority of people looked like they did it every day and soon there was a sound like an air raid siren slowly winding up as the engine started and then we pulled out into Hong Kong Harbour. The ride was quick and relatively smooth but with the windows salt caked and scratched there wasn’t much to see. We berthed at the Macau ferry terminal right on time and I got through Macau immigration easily and with another stamp in my passport.

Walking out of the terminal it was really hard to see anything. That was because there was a line of young woman all holding large signs and trying to get you onto their free shuttle bus to their casino. I knew Macau had casinos and that it had some of the biggest in the world but I wasn’t entirely prepared for the onslaught. Thankfully a polite smile and shake of my head got me past the gauntlet and out onto the street. Looking one way I could see the harbour, big buildings and flashing signs, so I headed that way.

The first thing that struck me was the signs. Not just the road signs but signs on buildings and on vehicles. They were obviously in Chinese but they were also in Portuguese. I don’t know just how much influence Portugal has in Macau these days but those signs are probably going to be there for a long time showing the influence that they did have.

It was a Monday and already the 4^th of January but an awful of businesses looked closed. All of the smaller shop fronts I could see had their shutters down and the path along the harbour was virtually deserted. I came to a place called “Macau Fishermans Wharf”, a huge amusement park like place built right on the water but I seemed to be the only person there and the few shops that were bothering to open were empty. I wandered through and marvelled at what it must be like when it’s open. There was a part that was a replica of the Forbidden City, another that was a Mexican pyramid complete with volcano and even a Roman amphitheatre that looked set up for outdoor performances. All eerily quiet though.

Coming out the other side I kept going along the road and soon stumbled on the first of the big casinos. When I say stumbled I may be giving the wrong impression. It sounds like I didn’t know what it was until I literally walked up and tripped over it. The reality is that the amount of signage and neon and lights make it hard to trip unexpectedly over any of the casinos in Macau and I saw this one coming from a little ways off.

It may be a bit of a busman’s holiday but I had come here with the intention of going to the casinos. I even had a little bit of a budget to spend.

The first one I went into was the Sands. Impressive, big, gaudy, flashy, all of the things that you would expect from a Vegas style casino and it lived up to its American namesake. I wandered through and didn’t find much in the way of machines that were new to me or had any great pull on my wallet and the only table games seemed to be baccarat and pai gow.

This is where I had my first surprise. As is my habit I had stopped at the first ATM I’d found and withdrawn local currency. A good idea in usual circumstances but I found that all of the casinos took Hong Kong dollars instead. I changed the Macau patacas at a cashier, put a little bit of money into a machine so that if I got hit by a bus stepping out the door at least I’d be able to say I’d gambled in Macau and then left.

I kept walking along the water front and around the point with a strange looking building that may have had its inspiration from Jules Verne and turned out to be the Macau Science Centre. A quick look in the Babylon Casino gave me enough of a win to have a coke and a sandwich before I continued on. I passed the statue of Kun Lam which is a giant statue on its own little isthmus in the harbour. Kun Lam is a Buddhist goddess who bestows clemency on people who sincerely repent their sins, amongst other things. Having no sins to repent I bought a fridge magnet for my collection from a small stall and kept going.

There is, without doubt, a great deal of history in Macau but I spent the day wandering from one casino to the next. If you are looking for a loads of glitz and glamour and money in a small place then go to Macau. There are only 404 km of roads but if the fleet of Bentleys parked outside the Grand Lisboa is anything to go by…

Each of the casinos and attached hotels was trying to outdo the others. In true Vegas style the competition is obvious and combine all of that with the Asian sense of service and you have something impressive. Free bottles of water were everywhere for the gamblers and I was given free soft drinks while I was playing the machines. I even sat in a bar in the Grand Lisboa, eating a Monte Christo sandwich and watching g-stringed dancers.

The streets seem clean and tidy and the only sign of graffiti I could see was one small and plaintive plea to “plz tag here” which was painted on a wall in an underground walkway. About the only sour note was a slight stinky smell that seemed to hang around the waterfront and I couldn’t really figure out where it was coming from. It may be that the harbour is so polluted from centuries of use that the smell is going to be near impossible to get rid of but it did become obvious when I ventured from the casinos and shopping malls.

I explored all of the casinos within walking distance of the ferry terminal and then hopped on a free shuttle bus to The Venetian. I had been saving this one for last because it was quite a distance from the others and because I understood it to be the biggest and newest.

It was a bit of a drive from the others but worth all the effort.

It’s been a while since I was last in Vegas and I haven’t seen all of the newest resort casinos there but I find it hard to believe that any of them could outdo the Macau Venetian. It is a hotel on a massive scale and it is decorated on a spectacular scale. You can take the gondolas on a tour of the waterways in and around the casino. You can shop till the plastic melts. There are shows and entertainments including Cirque de Soleil. And there is the biggest casino I think I am yet to go into. I could go on about how big and how impressive and how golden and fancy it all is but I bet you get the idea.

The other thing that impressed me was winning. As soon as I walked into the casino I was drawn to the Star Wars machines. It must be the geek in me but the reels and the features were really cool. The other thing that was cool was winning. As it turned out I won enough to upgrade my ferry ride back, pay for my ticket to Disneyland the next day plus have some left over. I walked out of the Venetian, being smart enough to know when to leave, thinking it’s the best casino in the world.

On the shuttle bus back we passed three other giant hotel casinos that are right next door to the Venetian and evidence of more being built so it is easy to say that Macau is a happening place and that gambling is making it happen.

Back at the ferry terminal I used my credit card in the vending machine again but this time went for a super class ticket rather than economy. This got me a bigger more comfortable seat right at the front so that I had unobstructed views and a meal served aeroplane style. The meal was okay but the view was wasted because it was pitch black and I couldn’t see a thing. It was nice when all the other passengers had to wait for super class to get off first because it gave us a head start getting to immigration where I got another stamp in my passport as I re-entered Hong Kong.

MTR back to Mong Kok and a walk back to the hotel later and I was in my favourite little restaurant for a late night plate of crispy fried pork and a beer.

If you come this way then definitely take the time to visit Macau. If I get back again I’ll go and have a look at the more historical parts of town so that I can say that I wasn’t sucked in by all the bright lights.

It’s not very often that I have sat in a plane and hoped that the journey would take longer but the flight from Tokyo to Hong Kong was one of my briefest. The 5 hours flew by (no pun intended) because I was happily sitting in business class enjoying attentive service, good food and a seat that would recline into a bed at a touch of a button. Sometimes it’s nice to know that everyone else on the plane is somewhere far behind you and wondering what is happening behind that curtain. I think it’s something I could get used to.

Checking in at Narita I thought I may have misunderstood her when she said I’d been upgraded and I’m still not sure of the reason but I thanked her profusely and gratefully, got on the plane and enjoyed every moment of it.

Arriving in Hong Kong, refreshed and happy after one of the best airline meals I’ve ever eaten it was a relatively easy matter of finding the counter for the shuttle bus to the hotel, following the man with the flag through the terminal along with a crowd of other western tourists and then settling in for the drive to Mong Kok. Having been to Hong Kong when I was on the world cruise it was a place I had a feel for already and a place I was looking forward to returning to.

The hotel room is nice and easily twice as large as the tiny one in Japan. Japanese hotels, especially business ones like the one I was in, are notoriously small. This is the country that pioneered those coffin sized hotel rooms after all. Although it’s bigger it doesn’t have all of the little touches that the Japanese one did and Chinese TV is not quite as surreal as Japanese TV.

By the time I got to the Hotel, went through the normal procedure of checking all the drawers and cupboards thoroughly and choked on the prices of the mini bar, I went for a walk. Mong Kok is on the Kowloon Peninsula and is the world’s most densely populated area. Even the view from my window is one of nearby high rises and the hustle and bustle of so many people in the streets immediately gave me that feeling of vibrant humanity that I remembered from last time.

The next street down is full of shops displaying puppies and kittens in their windows and my first thought was that they must be like those fish tanks that restaurants have but it just turned out to be a street full of pet shops. Given the high rise living and size of the average dwelling here I did wonder about the practical side of having a dog though.

There are little restaurants everywhere and I found one that gave me the familiar feeling you get from having every eye in the place on you. I guess tourists are not meant to eat in places like this but the ducks, geese and suckling pigs hanging in the window and the smell wafting out gave me no choice but to sit down. For a little under $10 AUD I got a plate of crispy bbq pork and a beer, plus a smile from the waitress when I used the chop sticks in the little stand on the table rather than the fork she managed to hunt up from somewhere.

I stopped into a 7/11 (they are everywhere in Hong Kong along with other similar convenience stores) and got some supplies so I wouldn’t have to resort to the mini bar. A little local TV and I went to sleep with the sound of the traffic outside only being kept to a muffled roar by the window and curtain.

The next day was a set up day. I had never really had time to unpack in Japan and I didn’t really bother with any sort of proper packing before I left Nepal so my bags were a mess. I also had a list of things I needed to take care of, find and research, so after a bit of a sleep in I set to.

I emptied all of my bags onto the floor and sorted through them. I am a bit of a hoarder and keep absolutely everything that makes its way into my hands. I have all of the ticket stubs, receipts, brochures, notes and used tissues from the last few months. I managed to send all of the Laos stuff home from Bangkok but now I had another couple of countries worth. By the time I had sorted things into a few piles it was starting to make a bit more sense. There was the clean clothes pile – small. The dirty clothes pile –large. The stuff to send home pile – potentially expensive. The electronic rats nest of cables pile – necessary. The things still going with me pile – large.

I looked at the dirty clothes pile and even though I had no intention of doing it I worked out what it would cost me to have it done in the hotel. A total of $405 HKD. The night before I had found a laundry not far from the hotel so I took my clothes there and they charged me by the weight. It was a flat fee of $28 HKD for up to 7 pounds and I only had 4.5 pounds. Bit of a difference in price huh? Plus they had a three hour turn around. The moral of the story is never to get your laundry down in the hotel. My clothes probably also enjoyed the change of a nice gentle machine after a few months of literally being beaten against a rock in a river by little Nepali women.

I researched ways of sending my excess home and searched out the nearest office to do it from. Being a Sunday a lot of things were closed, including this DHL office, but I found it and know where to go when its time. It’s also going to be a bit like Christmas when I get home and find the package waiting there for me to open. Since it was in an MTR station I picked up an octopus card, the local stored value card for the subway system.

Then I sat down and devoted myself to writing my last Japanese blog entry.

That done, it was late afternoon. I headed out for a walk and wandered the streets. It’s a town that comes even more alive when the sun goes down. Markets appear in what were streets full of cars during the day and all of the restaurants seem even more inviting once they are lit up from within and hanging geese and ducks glisten like little lanterns. I ended up eating seafood in a place that was up a lane and had little plastic stools at little chipped Formica tables sitting on a bare concrete floor. The food was cooked by a few sweaty looking cooks labouring over giant woks in a corner and was fantastic.

The Chinese are nowhere near as polite as the Japanese though and footpaths become obstacle courses. There is an amazing sense of life and energy in the air and a walk through the densest part of one of the densest places in the world brings that home.

So ended my first full day in Hong Kong.