Little India?

Hong Kong didn’t get off to the best start.  We hadn’t even gotten out of the arrivals terminal when we realised we were missing Georgie’s Goretex jacket.  She had to think back to where she’d last had it and worked out she had left it in the bathroom at the luggage carousel.  Great!  That was
on the other side of Customs – there was no way they were going to let us through but I asked security if someone could just walk the 40 metres or so and grab it for us. 

Of course that would be too easy – no you had to go to the 7th floor and fill out a lost property form in triplicate and then maybe in a month or two they might contact us.  Paul (aka Frank) decided that the Customs guy wasn’t being as helpful as he could have been and with Georgie providing the added incentive of standing there crying helplessly, he convinced Customs to get
on his radio and get someone to check the bathroom.  Luckily for us it was still there and within  30 minutes we had the jacket back.

By the time we did all that, got tickets on the airport bus and actually rode to Kowloon, it was almost midnight and we were exhausted. 

Accommodation in Hong Kong is crazy expensive and we were booked into the top rated hostel in Nathan Road.  They had sent us an email with directions and to be sure that we only dealt with the owner who was Chinese and not to follow any Indians.  We thought this was bizarre at the time but when the bus dropped us off outside, we quickly realised what it was about!

The hostel is in a building called Chungking Mansions.  It’s a massive complex of apartments over 15 floors, with the ground floor and basement being fall of shops and a laundry, money changers and Indian curry stalls.
The hostel itself is one apartment that has been converted into 6 teeny tiny rooms that were super clean and organised with everything you needed.  Getting to the 5th floor where this was located was the challenge.

When you walk in off the street, you are accosted by Indian men shoving business cards at you and telling you all about having a custom made suit made by them.  There are 3 different elevator channels and each channel
has 2 lifts – one for odd floors and the other for evens.  Once you’ve pushed through the suit makers and the giant African men wearing long pajama type shirts and little box hats and the seemingly million of Indian men, you must stand in line to get on the lift.  This is because the lift is rediculously slow and also cannot take more than 150kg at a time.  Most of the people in the line had goods of some sort – like 20kg bags of rice or some sort of machinery parts – all sorts of weird paraphernalia, sometimes carried, sometimes on little trolleys.

As a result, getting to the maximum 150kg did not take long and every elevator lobby had queues snaking up the alleys between the shops.

We believed this was God’s way of preparing us for India.  This was just like New Delhi in downtown Kowloon. It wasn’t until we went outside the next day that we actually saw a woman or a Chinese besides the owner of the hostel.

So compared to our hostel lobby experiences, the rest of Hong Kong was very low key.  It’s kind of like a mixture of  Bangkok with Singapore – plenty of Asian food and smells combined with old British architecture and red double decker buses and British place names.

We did all all the tourist sites in the few days we were there, including the Light show, crossing the harbour on a Star Ferry, riding on the longest escalator in the world and taking the funicular up the mountain to Victoria Peak.  This is where you should get the best views of Hong Kong CBD and harbour but typical to our other experiences with “views” it poured rain and the clouds were actually below us, so we saw nothing -but had a really nice lunch and re-lived Forrest Gump at the Bubba Gump shrimp restaurant.

We also took a bus around to the other side of Hong Kong Island to Stanley, which is a beautiful harbour with a little beach and lots of little cafes including a British pub and places selling fish and chips etc.  To add to our excitement, we discovered a wallet on the bus full of money and a ferry ticket.  So off we went to the police station and whiled away a half an hour
while a policeman filled out a variety of forms and promised he would try to find the tourist who had lost it.

We all delighted in having Chinese food again (even the kids who said if they never had Chinese again it would be too soon!) and walked around the shops.  I say walked – because buying anything would’ve meant making an appointment to be seen at Chanel, Gucci, D&G etc etc.  The prices were rediculous. 

The most obscene demonstration of comsumerism we have seen was here.
In the basement of this massive shopping centre was the kids floor.  There was a Toys R Us and kids clothes shops but not just any old shops – they were all boutiques of D&G, Armani, Burberry, Prada etc etc all for kids.  We looked at a t-shirt which was $90AUD!  Crazy stuff.  We’ll stick with the markets…