The new airport in Hong Kong - well, new to me - is not at all spectacular, but I'm sure it's a lot less hellish for the locals in Kowloon who used to live next to the old one. Apart from being expensive, the public transport access from Lantau to Central is fantastic. In fact, it's a pretty fair model of the perfect airport-city combination.
I was in Hong Kong in 1990 but I spent 3 days confined to a hotel room so most of what I remember is actually from 1975, when I wasn't paying a lot of attention. In 1975 Central was full of expensive shops. In 2008 Central is full of very expensive shops. The tall buildings above the expensive shops have changed - they are taller and shinier, but you know, tall shiny buildings are just tall shiny buildings. There's a Leunig cartoon from the 70's in which all the building reflect each other's reflections so they just disappear.
It's possible to walk around Central without ever actually going outside - walkways link most of the buildings. There's two possible explanations for this - architects are all geeks who grew up watching/reading dystopic science fiction, or it's a good idea never to be outside. You can choose.
It's not so easy to decide where to meet in a city you don't know - one of the landmark hotels I thought of actually has vanished - especially when the transport is not completely reliable. We decided to meet at St John's Cathedral - fairly easy to check that there was only one of those. So it proved to be, and we met there on the first attempt. (The cathedral may still be in the same place, but someone has managed to build a shopping mall underneath it while no-one was looking)It's a short walk to the Peak tram from St John's, so we went there. It's very steep - it is so steep in fact that it gave me the chance to use the word vertiginous in conversation - another lifetime ambition realised. The tram terminates in a shopping mall, which makes it another typical piece of Asian public transport, but to be honest, it would be a great thing to live on the Peak. There are a lot of trees, and a fine view. I presume it costs an arm & a couple of legs to do it, but to get off at one of the intermediate stations - Macdonnell, say - and wend your way home across the mountain would be a fine way to end the day. On a par with catching the ferry home to Balmain.
Hong Kong is a complicated place. Central & the rest of the island generally are rich & polished. There are obviously a lot of extremely rich people there. Kowloon-side the shops are smaller, the building older and the streets are more crowded. If you go out to the outer edges, then the whole place starts to look seriously run down. It's hard to believe that there aren't a lot of extremely poor people as well - in 1976 they were made visible in the form of a very large shanty-town; the sort of slum where everybody lives under their own bit of corrugated iron, but no-one has any walls. I didn't go looking for it this time, and I hear it's been moved on.
Anyway, we got down from the peak and it was time to move to Shenzhen - we tried to catch a ferry up the Pearl river, but the ferry terminal has been converted to a shopping mall and we ended up on the MTR (which has taken over the KLR, the line that runs up to the border). Nothing much to say about that trip, except a tip for young players - don't assume that because Tsim Sha Shui & East Tsim Sha Shui have similar names and a connecting tunnel you can easily walk there. Better to catch the train at one and zig-zag via the connecting station (which we didn't do, so I can't tell you the name). Still, it wouldn't be Hong Kong without a trip on one ferry, the Star from Central to Kowloon. Unlike every other form of transport in HK, it's ridiculously cheap. I guess it's subsidised to allow the workers a cheap way to get over from poortown to richville.
Since then it's been mainly work. More later.
No comments:
Post a Comment