Visiting Hong Kong

On my recent trip home from the US, I had a 9 hour layover in Hong Kong, so I decided to explore the city a bit. I arrived at 6 am and waited a few hours before heading to the city, for fear of nothing being open at such an awful hour. After passing through customs and storing my backpack, I got on the high speed train (100 HK dollars) to the city. It’s too bad it was an incredibly foggy day, or I would have climbed "The Peak" to overlook the city. I, however, opted to spend my time walking around. Here are my observations.

I had no idea what to expect, but I knew it was a big city, the NYC of China, if you will. The first thing that awed me was that it is a beautifully mountainous region by the sea with lush green flora. On these small mountains there manufactured stairways and drainage areas, but that didn’t seem to detract from their naturalness. Juxtaposed with the beautiful natural environment were these enormously tall and narrow skyscraper housing complexes mixed with smaller and highly crowded housing buildings. These places reminded me of Co-op City in NYC, only much, much, much closer together. What was the most eye-catching about these buildings (besides their size) was that the residents had devised elaborate systems of hanging the wash out, including flag-pole type apparatuses (or is it apparati?).

When I arrived at the Hong Kong station, I was dumped out in the downtown in a maze of elevated pedestrian walkways with "street signs" one had to follow. For pedestrians to travel at street level in this area appears quite dangerous due to the presence of taxis, electric trams, buses, and other congested vehicle traffic. In fact, many of the sidewalk areas at street level in this immediate area were fenced off to prevent pedestrians from taking "short cuts". Moving on, this elevated walkway system led me directly into the ritzy shopping area, where I passed the likes of Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Calvin Klein, and a myriad of other designer label stores. Many of these places had finely-dressed security guards on watch. Word is that Hong Kong has some amazing shopping, but I wouldn’t know. I don’t know how much it is to shop in those stores regularly, so I can't vouch for the so called "deals", especially with the Hong Kong to US dollar conversion being about 7:1. I was too jet-lagged to be doing any kind of rudimentary math in my head.

After a bit of time navigating through the classy malls and elevated walkways, I ventured to street level and out of the main shopping center. The streets were alive with pedestrians, security guards outside of some more upscale shops, vehicles belching soot and exhaust, people with wheeled carts, vendors and small stalls on the smaller streets, and on and on. It was all very busy with people speedily moving to and fro. Even the elevators at the train station and airport move much faster! I had no idea whether to walk on the left of the right (if the elevators are any indication, it’s the left), and I was definitely not moving fast enough to keep pace with everyone. One of the most eye-catching things during my exploring was the bamboo scaffolding. That would NEVER fly in the US, but there were whole sides of buildings scaffolded with bamboo with twine connections. In addition, construction rubbish was being loaded into baskets and hauled away by old men.

After being in the city for a few hours, all I could think of was two words. Air Quality. The air quality was horrible. My eyes had started to sting, as well as my nose, and it was noticeably affecting my lungs. I am a bit sensitive to smells, I admit, but this was different. Besides it being obviously foggy, I wonder how much of that was due to the poor air quality from vehicular exhaust. I am not kidding. And the large construction machines involved in the harbor reclamation project appeared to have no exhaust system at all. I had all I could do to not duck into every store when a large truck was stuck idling in traffic on a narrow side street, due to the accumulation of its sooty, stinky, airborne effluent. Every surface in the city was covered with a thick layer of unidentifiable dust. I must say though, the city was generally clean aside from that. Though, it's always a bad sigh when you see some of the older residents walking around with surgeon's masks on. My friend Xu says he likes being here in Australia because he never gets sick – turns out the poor air quality inspires respiratory infections galore.

To get away from it all, I headed to the harbor to see if I could get a better view of the city or the surrounding area. I could see the city fairly well, but not the areas beyond the sea. I was very curious about the harbor reclamation project. They appeared to be dredging some areas and filling in others with clean fill. It was a big operation with several barges and dredging machines. Being a civil engineer, I watched for probably longer than I should have. The cityscape was great, but unfortunately, someone didn’t have the good sense to charge their camera battery before hand, and therefore I have no more pictures. Pretty awesome, I know.

Overall, I only spent a few hours in a very small part of the city. I wish I had planned better about where to go – parks, mountain peaks, the art museum, some temples, and other touristy things. I also could have taken an organized tour of the city and its sights for a few hours and $200 HK, but I didn’t. Though, I don’t feel too bad. As soon as I got out of the train station I vowed to go back to Hong Kong and China to explore. It really is an amazingly complex feat at human civilization. Well, except for the Chinese fascination with shiny, patent-leather type, plastic fashion accessories such as shoes and hand bags. I can do without that…. Forever.

You can check out some of my photos here.