That's all folks

That's it, I'm back in Australia now. I'm going to start a couple more blogs, but I haven't decided quite what to call them yet. Details here when I know.

Thanks to all the readers, especially those who commented.

Take care.

Not just the main bits

It seems to me that every time I get to HK I spend a few hours in or around Kowloon-side's Tsim Sha Shui and or Central. Central is a dystopian pre-mall, where only the poor and the labourers actually walk on the streets. The rest of the population, which in Central is very white - not exclusively, but very - travel through air-conditioned passages from lift lobby to shopping centre. It's not quite possible to avoid unmediated air yet, but that seems to be the common vision behind the architecture & urban planning. It's the weather.  Like many of the colonies, it's a good place to make money, but you wouldn't want to live there. I don't know how long it will take HK to stop being a colony - but ten years hasn't made much impression.

Although, to give HK it's due, it's not alone in wanting to create a perfect synthetic world. it seems to me that the underlying vision of all the marketing/advertising departments in all the world is that the perfect life is one that is conducted via electronic communications device in a fully designed space. It's a touching unanimity, given that a conspiracy theory probably isn't a reasonable explanation. 

This trip I was determined to see more of Hong Kong than the tourist-in-transition bit.

I sort-of succeeded. Anyway, I saw a bit more than I had previously managed.

 Being, as you may have noticed, a bit of a sucker for boats, I was keen to see Aberdeen which is famous for retaining a chunk of the old-fashioned live-on-a-boat ambiance. As you can see, it  should be famous for adapting brilliantly to the consumer age. Once, dinner on a floating restaurant was a something to be negotiated in a fairly ad-hoc kind of way (and I'm sure it's still possible to do it that way, although I doubt any of the boats see it as a sideline these days. Even on the small sampan restaurants, it's pretty clearly their main business. Not that I am complaining, it's just that what looks like a scene from 50 years ago ago is in fact uniquley touched by its current age) But now the main game is this floating restaurant, which has taken over the centre of the harbour. Well, this bit of the harbour anyway, Aberdeen ahrbour is not a simple place. In a triumph of pragmatism though, you can see the 
rear of the restaurant here. No use wasting paint on what the punters can't see. That may have to change though, because residential developments are starting on the shore opposite the backside of the Jumbo floating restaurant, and I'm assuming it won't be good business for them to antagonise the potential clientele residing in that building with a view of the water.

You can also see, in the top photograph, the three crossections that define hong Kong island - the water, the high-rise, and the hills. This is part of its undeniable charm in fact, because no matter how much I might mock, there is a great buzz in stepping off the Star Ferry, and passing through the lobbies of the skyscrapers to emerge into a mountain. OK, no Star Ferry around this side, but the rapid transition from water to mountain via construction remains the same. Well, the Chinese invented landscape painting about 1200 years before the Europeans (strange but true),, and it's called "mountain-and-water" painting still (and considered to be the most difficult painterly skill)  so I guess the fascination with the relationship between the water and the land is not unique to me.
Wanchai looks a bit like Central, and in fact it is pretty much adjacent to Central (the Admiralty subway station intervenes) but the difference is that the walkways aren't so polished as Central, and they largely take you down to the street where you find yourself in the kind of streetscape popular with Jackie Chan chase scenes; lanes, stalls, lots of people, neon lights, bars, a sex industry, small shops, crowded restaurants. In fact we had lunch in a crowded Vietnamese restaurant where the proprietor correctly identified as tourists (was it the three cameras?) and provided specific, clear and correct instructions on how to catch the bus - HK $10 - to Aberdeen rather than wasting Hk $70 on a taxi. We didn't manage to find the bus depot though, which is how I know the cost of the taxi. We DID catch the bus back, thus confirming our restaurateur's expertise.

I pretty much couldn't have said anything good to you about Tsim Sha Shui, which is the pointy end of Kowloon, until I found this park. In point of fact, I have walked past the sandstone walls of the park - raised about 10 metres from street level - about ten times in my life, each time too busy to stop and investigate, and each time promising myself that next time I would. Along with water, I'm quite partial to secret gardens. (More influences of childhood fiction consumption).

If you are in Tsim Sha Shui, don't do anything except visit the park. Don't shop, don't eat, don't talk to strangers. But do visit the park. The flamingos were the most unexpected nice feature of it, but the expected features (trees, lakes, walkways, flowers, seats, people) are just as nice. And I'm using nice in a very positive way here - oasis/refuge nice.

We visited a couple of other places, Mongkok (need a hotel room for an hour?) and Sham Shui Po (mahjong clubs with the swish-click of the shuffle penetrating through the smoked glass windows to the street), but primarily with shopping in mind, so no cameras which was possibly an error, since they were interesting places and we didn't find anything to buy. After China, what the HK tourist brochures call a "retail market" is a distinct anti climax, perhaps one or two smallish floors of stalls. In China there would be 4 adjacent buildings, each bigger than the last and each with 8 floors of stalls and things smaller than stalls (is there a word for that?). The effect on us was that we would walk through a HK market waiting to see more, and there there wouldn't be any. So we'd set off for the adjacent building, but there wasn't one. So then we'd give up. Of course, maybe we misread the guides, but I don't think so. It's just that Hong Kong is actually a small place, something that I never noticed before because coming the other way (from Australia) Hong Kong puts more people in front of you in ten minutes than you would ordinarily see in Sydney in a week of Chinatown restaurants, and that tends to make you think it's a big place, contrary to the map.

Pearl River journey

It has been a significant desire of mine to travel from Guangzhou to Hong Kong by boat. This has been ridiculously hard to organise - none of the locals seemed to know anything about it (note to self; how much do I know about Sydney?)

Anyway, after many false starts I finally tracked down 2 TWO! options. One from Nansha (which is in Panyu, the southernmost region of greater Guangzhou) and the other Lianhuashan, also in Panyu. Internet research turned up booking numbers for the Lianhuashan option, so that's where we left from. Subsequent research in Hong Kong revealed that it would also have been possible to come from Nansha, and in fact that there are several other destinations around the periphery of Guangzhou that also run ferry services down the Pearl. As originally expected, the Pearl is still, despite trains and highways, a pretty serious avenue for commerce.

Thinking about all this, I realise that Guangzhou has an official population of 12 million (estimated 16 m) and that that probably doesn't include the population of Foshan (West) and Zhongshan (South0, which are the two adjacent urban areas. I say adjacent and I mean exactly that - if you weren't armed with a map you wouldn't be able to spot the borders by any visible change in topography. So potentially that's 36 (48) million people, still in a geographical area not significantly bigger than Melbourne, and I still haven't included Dongguan, which occupies most of the space between Guangzhou and Shenzhen on the East side.

So maybe, with 60-odd million people in 6000 square kilometers, it's not surprising that I didn't quite find everything out about it in 12 months. In fact, it's not surprising that most of the people who live there don't know everything about it. It's almost surprising that they know anything about it. (Mind you, I probably need to check those population estimates out. They may be a bit on the high side.)

Anyway, HK by boat. A dream come true. It was, alas, a bit damp & a lot foggy, and the windows of the ferry were extremely dirty/salt-encrusted, so I don't really have photographs. In fact, by far the vast bulk of the boats we saw were fishing boats, ranging from 2 person outfits being rowed to massive multi-crane combination fishing & processing vessels. Quite a few dredges, also not surprising in a delta - if you look at aerial photos it's striking that there is in fact usable land in the region, and I'm guessing that managing the course of the river is a serious occupation for quite a bunch of people.

There were a lot of empty general cargo boats as well; I don't know if anything can be read into that because I don't know what the river looks like in good economic times. The boats we saw looked mainly like local cargo - either single container or small general cargo - so I'm not sure how they would be influenced by the export industry downturn. The internal Chinese economy is said to be holding up reasonably well. We did see a couple of international container ships though - one so big it seemed to take minutes to motor past it. It was colossally long.