Hong Kong again

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.