HONG KONG

Global Adventure-Part Four

HONG KONG
-Jackson Blair

Hong Kong may well be the most fascinating city in the world.

It is big, boisterous, shiny, proud and growing every day.
It does not remind me of New York, Chicago, San Francisco or Los Angeles.

It is a city unto itself.

If I were making a small replica of Hong Kong, I would collect those cleaning canisters, like Comet, and paint them white. I would set thousands of them close together on flat land and on hillsides. I would paint small squares, representing windows, on every canister. Hong Kong is like one huge collection of round apartment buildings. There are thousands of them, and hundreds of thousands of people in each one of them.

When you are on the streets of Hong Kong, there are people everywhere. If you could simply stand above and look down you would see the resemblance to a busy anthill. Everywhere you look there are people, and they are all going somewhere.

Of course, the traffic is horrible. The sign of wealth here is that you have a driver. No one wants to have the responsibility of driving, navigating and parking in this behemoth of a city.

Another thing that surprises most visitors is the lack of houses, or homes. You do not even see mansions here for the very rich. People who want land, of any size, live in the suburbs. There is no place, and no interest in any housing that would be horizontal here. This is a vertical town.

On one of my first visits to Hong Kong I dined with a family of some means. They had a Mercedes and a driver and they owned their own company. So imagine my surprise when they told me that the apartments were so small most people had to choose between having a washer or a dryer, space would simply not permit both. That explained the lines of clothing always hanging outside the apartments on the terraces, floor after floor, often reaching 60 stories into the sky. Now when I see that, I am reminded that those folks decided on a washer. They let the wind do the drying.

Most visitors to Hong Kong travel up to an area known as the Peak. The Peak sits atop the highest mountain and provides an incredible view of the entire city below. You can drive up a long winding road to get to the Peak, but most tourists prefer to take the cog railroad. When you are on the Peak and you are looking down it is hard to believe there could be that many people living in such a confined space.

A visit to the Peak after dark is an incredible experience. Then you are looking down on the city when all those apartments are lighted, and all the ships in the harbor are lighted, too.

Fantastic view.

Hong Kong claims one of the busiest harbors in the world. Perhaps it is the busiest. As you drive into the city from the airport you pass hundreds of shipyard locations where containers are being unloaded or loaded onto freighters for trips all over the world. The big cranes required for this kind of work line the waterfront for miles.

When you look out at the South China Sea and you see so many freighters, you also see cruise ships, private yachts and small sampans bumping along and sharing the same churning water.

While it is a pleasant sight, this is also dangerous territory. Hong Kong is said to be the home of many dangerous triads. “Triad” is their word for “mob”. With the huge waterfront, the gambling across the pond at Macau, and the international trading ,it is not surprising that this element has a foothold here.

Homegrown triad members are not the only concern. On an earlier visit, some friends took us out on their large yacht. It had a crew of about six and had three staterooms with large beds and beautiful furniture. We sailed to an island out in the South China Sea and docked to have a dinner at an open-air restaurant.

I commented to our host that he must have enjoyed some really wonderful trips on weekends or vacations on the yacht. He commented that he had never slept on it and probably never would. In answer to my inquiry as to why this was the case, his one word answer was: pirates.

Evidently, folks in Hong Kong with multimillion-dollar yachts only spend nights on them if they go in unison, tie up together for the night, and hire armed guards to stand by the rails.

I couldn’t help but think this fellow would be better off with a Winnebago!

For all the hustle and bustle on the streets of Hong Kong, when one enters the hotels or fine restaurants things slow down significantly. The Chinese are proud of their attention to service and every flower is studied before it is placed on a table, each dish is presented in a previously agreed order, every dirty dish is removed and replaced with a new one prior to the next course, and even the serving is done with as much grace as one could expect from a ballet dancer.
Hong Kong is a fabulous place to visit. That said, it is no more China than New York is representative of what America is like.

As I continue my travels in smaller cities in the Far East, I realize just how different the sophisticated, cosmopolitan, international jet set in Hong Kong is from the remainder of this vast land.

My trip has taken me to Guangzhou and Shenzhen, two of the other largest cities in China. Before I depart China I will also visit Shanghai, Dalian and Beijing.

Fortunately, my wife and I had previous visits to Guilin and Xi’an and we have seen how the more typical Chinese live.

Would you want someone to visit America and stay in New York, Dallas and Los Angeles and then assume they knew America and Americans?

Do yourself a favor. If your travels take you to China go and see The Great Wall, the Terra Cotta soldiers, and the Peak in Hong Kong, but don’t miss out on a trip down the River Li in Guilin, or a visit to the small school houses where the children sing to you, a Tai Chi lesson conducted with a group of others in the early morning along a river bank, or a great foot massage in a small village outside Beijing.