Day 58 - Friday Feb 24 Hong Kong Day 2

Hong Kong Day 2 photos

position at 6:30am: N22 17.48 latitude E114 09.55 longitude
(Hong Kong)
temperature: 62F, 98% humidity
distance since FLL: 20,509 miles

Foodwise, the day started out great as there were chocolate croissants this morning. Breakfast was being served very early this morning (6 am) in LaVeranda since there were a lot of passengers disembarking today. We got up there about 7:45 and behold, there were croissants. But from there, the food story takes some expected turns later in the day causing great trauma in some parts.
Our goal for today was to go back to Hong Kong Island, take a long walk among all the buildings over there, looking at their general architecture. Then we would wander through several parts of the island, just taking in the sights. During this wandering, we would catch lunch somewhere, and then take the tram up to Victoria Peak. After that we would make it back to Kowloon, catch dinner on the ship, and the go out to see the light show and take in Temple Street Night Market. Believe it or not, we did all this and more today, even with the food trauma. Here are some of the details.

We left the ship and made our way out of the Harbour Center mall to the street. This is about a 100-200 yd walk through part of this huge mall. Again, the only line of defense was the ship security station swiping your cabin card as you left and entered just outside the Coffee Corner. If there was any Hong Kong Security/Customs personnel around, they certainly were well hidden. (Forgot to report that when we returned to the ship last night we did not find any screening/x-rays, etc. We walked up the stairs to the gangway platform on the building, like a balcony on it, and just outside the door was a man. We were ready and showed him our keycards. He held out a handful of watches and asked, Rolex? We shook our heads and took 5 more steps to enter the gangway to the ship's side balcony. Washed our hands at the sanitizer and got our keycards swiped. The man with the Rolexes was less than 30 steps from the keycard swiper, but not in view due to the physical layout. Also, our high pressure hoses are gone here. We guess we are feeling pretty safe and secure here in Hong Kong.) Once outside, we walked another 100 yds to the Star Ferry building to catch the ferry across the harbor. Clay was ready this morning with currency of the proper sizes and we had no missteps in getting on the ferry. The ferry just goes back and forth, never turning around, so the seat backs flip back and forth like the seats on the street cars in New Orleans. After a quick ride and short walk out of the building, we found ourselves outside the ferry terminal on Hong Kong Island looking up at the sky line, getting our bearings and plotting our path to the points of interest we wanted to see. Our walking tour is loosely based on one or two walking tours that Debbie found online or in tour books in the library last summer as she was researching Hong Kong. She had printed them out for reference, but as we left the ship yesterday, there was a brochure display where we found a 3x8.5 booklet that detailed several of the ones we had printed, and we used the little booklet as our guide today as it was more convenient than the 8.5x11 loose sheets.

The HSBC building was easy to spot at about the 11 o'clock position as you walked out of the ferry terminal. This bank is one that handles the PLUS system that we can use as an ATM so it was an easy landmark for us to recognize and the building itself was equally unusual looking with its strut and ladder facade. The HSBC building is 'one of the most important buildings of 20th century architecture' according to our guidebook. The building is open underneath and supported by corner pylons. Everything is glass and metal and you can see the inner workings of the escalators and elevators that take you up and inside. It has as open-air ground-level atrium that goes up a couple of floors due to the fact that the harbor-facing side is built on lower ground than the other side. The really unusual thing is that the top of this open-air atrium is a curved glass ceiling, that appears to be the floor of the inside atrium above. So, we walked under this building to look up through the glass floor to see inside the building. It was indeed an unusual building. In front of the HSBC building is a open area called Statue Square. The land was purchased by HSBC and donated to the city with the proviso nothing could be built on it that would obscure the HSBC building from the harbor. Since HK is constantly reclaiming land, what is currently waterfront may not be waterfront in 20 years, and this is an attempt by HSBC to preserve the view to its building. Adjacent to the Statue Square to the east is the Legislative Counsel Building. It is a mix of Victorian and Chinese architecture, and was built in 1912 as the Supreme Court building. Now it is used as the advisory Legislative Counsel which now serves as a debate forum since 1997 where HK was ceded back to China.

Also, next to the HSBC building is the old BanK of China building which is an Art Deco building. This building was dwarfed when the HSBC building was put up. In the nature of HK competition, Bank of China decided to build a taller building close by that towers over the HSBC building. It was the first building built here to break the ridgeline of Victoria Peak. This new Back of China building appears to be constructed of triangular modules due to solid strips of building material that make their way up the building facade in triangular patterns. The BoC building has a public observation level on the 43rd floor, about half way up the building. We went up there to see the sights, but it was really foggy, so it was one of those 'on a clear day you can see" .... But even so, it was worth the elevator ride. The area around the BoC building had water gardens and they were trying to get the fish out of one side to do maintenance work. We saw a bank employee with rubber boots and a net trying to snag a few stragglers. We immediately commensurated with his plight from our expereice of trying to empty our small fish pond of fish before our long trip. (Animal lovers, don't worry. They were adopted by the goldfish pond of the City of Raleigh's Pullen Park and have a new, larger home.)

It was about 10:30am when we left our architecture walk to start on what is known as the Central and Western District walk from the Hong Kong Walks brochure. We sort of did it in reverse ending up at the Western Market instead of starting there. We also added a trip up the MidLevels Escalators which is not part of this 'official walk'. Here are just a few of the areas we hit. It took about 3 hours, not counting lunch, which Debbie is trying to block anyway. We first started out trying to locate the MidLevel Escalators which are about 1/2 mile long and move people down the hill from 6 to 10AM. Then their direction is reversed to move people up the hill the rest of the day. From our buildings tour, we walked west along Queens Road Central until we hit Wyndham St. which we followed uphill to catch the escalators. Along the escalator, there are steps leading back down the hill. On these steps are lots of little shops and restaurants. After the escalators, we started thinking about lunch. The escalators lead up to the Soho section of Hong Kong and Hollywood St. One guide book mentioned this was a good restaurant district, but we did not find anything that jumped out at us. Reading further in the guide book, we saw mention of lunch DimSum places and thought that might be good idea. (Wow, was that wrong!) So we continued on our walk taking in the stops and looking for a Dim Sum place. One stop was Man Mo Temple. It was build in 1847 and is the island's oldest Temple, and is dedicated to the gods of literature and war (Man and Mo). If you go into this temple, beware that you will be overwhelmed by 170 years of burning incense, so be prepared if you have any respiratory problems. It is completely overpowering. Another stop along the way was a browse along Upper Lascar Row aka Cat Street. These were little street stalls with souvenirs and antiques and other things. It was here we were first interviewed by middle school children, probably 12-14 years old. They were looking for English-speaking tourists to interview on local tourism in English. (Can't imagine why they picked us!) Anyway, this was the first of 4 such interviews we had throughout the day in various and far-ranging tourist locations. They were, literally, all over the place. But it was fun speaking with them in English which they were clearly learning. After being interviewed, they asked to photograph us with them. We obliged and took photos too. We continued our walk down the hill toward the bay, casually looking for a Dim Sum place. Well, in about 5 minutes, after a second interview by another group. Debbie spotted one. We looked inside and it was bright and large and spacious and had a lot of Chinese people in it, so we figured it would be as good as any. Well, we got seated in non-smoking at a table set up for 4 people, and were given a menu in English. We chose 5 dishes that we thought we knew what they were: steamed pork dumpling, BBQ Pork buns, glutinous rice in Lotus leaf, pork dumplings in soup, BBQ pork with rice noodles. Purposefully, we chose nothing we thought had any relation to seafood. We selected from an English language menu with item numbers on it. After a little effort, we thought we had communicated our choices to an order taker who checked them off on an order form by the numbers next to the English descriptions. We heard no English spoken in this place the whole time we were in there and we were the only Anglos in the place. At this point, Clay got up to go to the restroom (which turned out to be fine), but when he came back, there was a little old Chinese lady sitting at our table in front of Debbie. Evidently, the woman tried to sit there and was first run off by the wait staff in the restaurant. But as soon as the staff left, she was back and finally Debbie told her it was OK to sit there. As Debbie was waiting for Clay to return, the old lady pulled the paper wrapper off her chopsticks and scoured them, her cup, plate, spoon, and bowl. Then she poured hot tea in the bowl and used it to wash her chopsticks, bowl, spoon and plate. Debbie strictly wrote this off as some mental problem of the old lady. BUT, then she noticed several other new tables being seated, and them doing the same thing. This was the first hint, that we were out of our element. By the time we realized we should have washed our dishes in our hot tea, our tea was not hot enough to do any good so we decided to brave it, and eat our Dim Sum with unwashed chopsticks and plate. Debbie was already close to getting hives over this thought. At this point, the people at other tables around us were smiling and talking about the little old lady at our table. We realized she was probably there to sponge off our uneaten food which again was fine with us. THEN, our food started coming. The first thing to show up looked and tasted like crispy fried bean curd. The problem was that we did NOT order any crispy fried bean curd. But it turned out OK, and was tasty for fried bean curd. Then we got 4 dishes in steamer baskets. Debbie first opened the glutinous rice steamed in Lotus leaf. As she unwrapped it, she spotted little shrimp around the edges. She immediately re-wrapped it and put it back on the plate. The little old lady had her first dish from us. The next thing Debbie picked up looked sort of like steamed pork dumpling. But after taking a bite and finding it undercooked in the center and pink, she undertook a closer inspection (and Debbie closely inspects everything new), the meat was mighty gristly and also she thought it tasted fishy or just off somehow. (Debbie still suspects that this was an undercooked cat ball. It is not so much the being served cat that she did not order that upset her so much as the fact that they did not even cook it through!) Clay did eat 2 of these dumplings, but the little old lady made another score with Debbie's portion. Essentially, the same process continued with the other 2 dishes. They all had something objectionable or unknown in them, the little old lady ended up with Debbie's (and sometimes Clay's share). This adventure cost us about 115HKD (or about 15USD) and significant worry the rest of the day regarding what we might have ingested, and the dirty dishes issue. But I will have to say, a day later Clay had no noticeable effects from the meal. Debbie however suffered a purge, that Clay thinks was just stress-related, perhaps rightly so. In which case, Debbie has a highly evolved protective digestive system. Or maybe, it was something she ate!

After the meal, we meandered on down the hill to the Western Market, taking in the sights on the way. At this market of upscale shops, we caught one of the double decker trollies for a ride back to the Star Ferry dock where we caught the 15C bus that took us to the Peak Tram Lower Station which is a 100-year old tram that takes you up to Victoria Peak. They say when it was first done, it turned a 3 hour pedicab ride up to the peak into an 8 minute ride. The tram is a very steep ride up the hill with 15-20 degree picthes. The whole thing is on angle, there is not a flat straight surface. On occasion, it will come to a complete stop, and you are just hanging on the side of the mountain. You sit on wooden benches, but at an angle for shuttle launch! It is more than a little disconcerting, but we all survived. There was little to see because of the fog and clouds. It was another 'On a clear day, you can see'... situation. It was even more fogged in than yesterday when we arrived and decided to save it for later. But, we did not want to put it off to the last day because Jamie is warning that rain is expected here. But we did it, and the ride made it interesting. We also got interviewd for the 3rd and 4th times at the top. After this, took the tram back down and you sit the same way. So you ride backwards on the way down. Debbie did not handle the ride well, though she had another meclizine and put on her seabands before we started out. Then back to the ferry station on bus 15C, and we caught the ferry back to Kowloon. We stopped in the mall on our way through and priced glasses for Clay. We picked the lower priced one and Clay got his eyes examined and frames picked out and his new glasses will be ready tomorrow after 5:30pm. Then, we picked up some essentials in a drugstore and on back to the ship, dodging the tailor hustlers and middle schoolers still doing interviews. We got back to the ship at about 6:10pm. This was just in time to get to Compass Rose and have a quick dinner so we could try to catch the Light Show after 8pm down at the waterfront on the Avenue of Stars. At 8pm each evening, they put on a light show which lights up the skyscrapers on each side of the harbor with the dynamic lighting being synchronized to music that you can hear on the Avenue of Stars. It was really quite impressive. The fronts of these huge buildings would dance with lights and several of the tallest ones shot colored beams of light from their tops. It was a wow moment. Note, that the guide books and brochures just say that this lightshow takes place after 8pm. The buildings are lighted all night, but that show started at 8pm and ended at 8:15pm. The recorded English language announcements did not say that it would happen again or happen in another language. It was sponsored by the Hong Kong Tourism Board.

After the 15-minute light show, we caught the MTR (the subway) out to the Jordan Road station and from there walked up to the Temple Street Night Market. That was another WOW situation. It was as big and as crowded as the Sunday Flea market in Rome, but without all the Gypsy children trying to rob you. We are sure there may have been pick pockets and prostitutes and hustlers around, but it felt safe and unthreatening and no one bothered us. It was big and you could buy just about anything there. We took the MTR back down to Tsim Sha Tsui. We finally got back to the ship about 11pm and we had had a full day.

We found the public transit to be very convenient. It runs on a pretty quick schedule, we never waited for long. The Peak Tram and its shuttle buses were the only thing that was really pricey and did not seem a good value. But, of course, it was a monopoly run by a private company apparently and was not part of public transit. We paid between $.25 and $.60 for buses and subways and less for first class on the ferry. It was all well-used and busy with convenient locations and helpful bus drivers. The local populace was helpful too. Whenever anyone saw us studying a map or bus sign, there was an offer to help us.

Hong Kong Day 2 photos