Hong Kong

Hong Kong is a place that doesn’t really lend itself to backpackers on a budget due to the amount of mega rich people that live there, good budget accommodation is not something that has too much of a place in the market. As such, the backpackers’ choice of digs is pretty much limited to one of two equally horrendous old tower blocks that are falling apart in pretty much every way, the ‘Mirador Mansions’ & ‘Chungking Mansions’. We had opted for Mirador Mansions of the two, possibly the slightly better option, but still horrendously overpriced for the standard of room you get. Rooms are set back off the main hallways on each floor in blocks of about 5 rooms, behind a barred gate giving the place a nice prison cell feel.

The ‘double en-suite’ room Claire & I had booked was a joke, the room was only just wide enough to squeeze a small queen size bed in, the only way in & out of the bed was via the end of the bed, as there was no space on either side of the bed too squeeze along. The ‘bathroom’ consisted of a 3ft x 5ft space at the end of the room where you pretty much had to stand in the toilet bowl, or on the seat to actually get under the shower. All this luxury for the mere price of about £25 per night...

Jonny’s room on the other hand was still equally rubbish, but had marginally more space than ours. So for another few pounds a night we ‘upgraded’ to a room that wasn’t quite so blatantly a converted broom cupboard as the room we spent the first night. It turned out after speaking to some other travellers who were staying in Chungking Mansions that another benefit we had in the Mirador (depending on your requirements I suppose..) was the lack of pimps, prostitutes & drug dealers that were plying their trades openly on each floor of the building.

In their favour however for both places is their location, right in the heart of Kowloon & just a short walk from the ferry terminal to take you over to Hong Kong Island. The streets of Kowloon are lined with Indian tailors, incessantly trying to get everyone to get a new suit made up. Alongside each of the tailors is another guy selling fake designer handbags & watches – equally as persistent as the tailors. Funnily enough, as three jobless pikeys we didn’t really have much call for a Louis Vuitton handbag, sharp new suit or fake Rolex; but if you were in the market for something along those lines then it’s not a bad place to come.

The traffic around Kowloon is pretty relentless, and as a result they have developed a network of pedestrian subways that you have to take to cross the roads, spurring off in all directions underground with signposts to the various locations, which is great once you know where you are going, but makes just ambling around a little more difficult.

Every night Hong Kong puts on its own light show, called ‘The Symphony of Lights’, watched from the Kowloon side of the harbour all the sky scrapers on Hong Kong island perform a synchronised lights & music show by flashing their neon lights, like a huge graphic equaliser display...which we pretty much missed, arriving just as everyone was leaving due to us getting a little side tracked by a few beers. The main lights stay on all night though, & it’s still an impressive sight looking across the harbour – you wouldn’t want to be paying the electricity bills for any of those buildings though!

Hong Kong Island has a much more British feel about it than the Kowloon side, all road signs are in English first, with a small Chinese translation underneath, even though we gave Hong Kong back to the Chinese in 1997. There is even a Marks & Spencer in the main street, making for a great lunch option down in the food court. I never thought I would ever get excited about going into M&S, but after a year or so away from typical English foods it was great. How sad.

There is an old British style tram that takes you up to high point on HK Island with a viewing platform & shopping mall at the top, offering great views back across the harbour to the Kowloon side.

Another frustratingly bureaucratic Chinese element comes into play when you go into Hong Kong in that although part of China, it is still treated as a separate country in as much as you have to go through border controls to enter or exit Hong Kong from or into China, & it also means that if you leave China to enter Hong Kong, you then need another Chinese visa to re-enter China again, just another way to sting you for cash really. Claire & I already had dual entry visas for China as we hope to go to Tibet later in the trip, so we had to use our second entry just to get back into China again to take a flight out of the place. Jonny only had a single entry visa though, as none of us had really looked into it that closely & just assumed that as part of the same country he wouldn’t need a dual entry visa. Anyway, £80 later he was all set to get back into mainland China.

There are some advantages to this different treatment of HK, such as the lack of restrictions that are imposed on the internet versus those in mainland China. The famous ‘Great Fire-wall of China’ that blocks access to all social networking sites such as Facebook, limits as much access to free speech as possible by putting a blanket ban on all blog sites & sites such as You Tube and returns ‘cannot locate page’ messages when you try and search for anything remotely controversial about China. Thankfully this was not in place in Hong Kong. While we were there the whole issue with Google pulling out of China was going on, adding to the difficulty of using the internet.

We were only in Hong Kong for 3 days, which on a budget is long enough to be honest, as it’s not a cheap place. It is a great place to be though if you have plenty of cash, every designer label & big global brand has several shops in Hong Kong, & the food is a great mix of influences from all the Asians & Europeans that have made it home over the years.

Leaving Hong Kong, we re-entered mainland China in the city of Shenzhen for a flight across southern China back to where we started our Chinese epic, Kunming, to make our way south across the border into Laos.