We made it to Hong Kong, but I didn't write anything in my journal. I managed to pick up a cold from somewhere on the first full day there, and it hit me hard and pretty much immobilized me for the rest of the trip. I think it was from going out into the heat and then coming back into the cold air conditioned rooms over and over. Anyhow, the fever hit and I'm piling on blankets in the middle of the night to keep from freezing while my roommate is throwing back the covers and trying not to die of heat stroke. I could feel the heat just radiating off my skin. The fever finally broke in the middle of the night and I sprawled on the floor under a blanket until morning, too tired and sweaty to get back into that bed. I'm still fighting off the remnants of that cold. Note -- 11 hour plane rides seem like an eternity in hell if you're seriously ill. I dehydrated and nearly passed out.
Anyhow, Hong Kong was interesting. I spent most of my time in Kowloon, where our hotel was. There's a ferry across to Hong Kong island which cost $1.70 Hong Kong each way, which is less than a quarter. Not bad. One of the days we were there, though, there was a demonstration by ferry and other boat owners against a new system of auctioning off berth areas instead of allocating them. They were worried that this would just give all the berth access to the big companies and run all the smaller ones out of business. So all these boats put up these signs of protest and sailed out into the harbor between Kowloon and Hong Kong and just parked there to disrupt the normal traffic. I was caught on one of the ferries while they did so -- they blocked the whole harbor. We'd spot an opening and try to get through, and some other boat would come up and plug it. One or two boats zipped right up in front of us, battering us with their wakes and then blocking us by nearly hitting us. Kind of scary. The coast guard finally came out and chased some of them away, but our 5 minute ferry ride lasted half an hour or so.
I picked up some used laserdisks for sale cheap. There was a photo shop and video rental place getting rid of old disks, so I picked up four films for about $100 U.S. Cool. That's what I wanted to find. I also found some places selling Video CDs at insanely low prices. At $10 per film I figure they're almost certainly bootlegs, but what the hell. I picked up Once Upon A Time in China as an experiment. Apparently I need an mpeg playback card to play it, though. Oh well. I'm only out $10.
When I got to HK, it immediately seemed to me that the women were much better looking than in mainland china. I have almost no impression of women in China, come to think of it. They just didn't stand out at all. The women in Hong Kong weren't particularly any better looking, I later realized -- they were just much better dressed and had access to makeup and such.
Fashion plays a near-central role in Hong Kong, it seemed to me. This was immediately impressive but ultimately oppressive. Every store in the shopping malls were designer clothing stores, designer sunglass stores, designer sporting goods stores, designer jewelry stores, etc. By that time I just wanted a Macy's to go to and buy a couple t-shirts so I could stop wearing the bright purple shirts we'd been saddled with the entire trip. No can do. If you wanted to buy a designer t-shirt, no problem. I just have a thing against designer t-shirts -- I don't see why I should pay $30 for a designer t-shirt that is just a $3 shirt with some French bozo's name on it. I roamed around until I finally found this one hole-in-the-wall discount shop. It was this little bargain basement place: cash only, no refunds, no trying it on... just buy it and get out. Just what I wanted. I found a few interesting shirts so I was pleased. The other downside to the fashion craze were the aggressive tailors. They pass out these little handbills for tailoring services at most streetcorners downtown, and they're as agressive about it as the guys in Vegas passing out bills for private dancers. I was a particular target because I had the gall to be out walking around wearing a non-designer t-shirt. Obviously I was horribly deprived and needed a good tailor to take me by the arms and show me the errors of my ways. Most of the ones that accosted me were Indian or Middle-Eastern. Maybe the actual chinese tailors are less aggressive, though, so I got a skewed impression of the tailors by only considering the ones that stood out.
Tried a chocolate shake at a McDonalds in Hong Kong. It was perfect. Don't know why they could do a chocolate shake in Hong Kong but not in Guangzhou, 50 miles north, but whatever.
I ate once at the Hard Rock Cafe in Kowloon, just because it was right across from the hotel. We would have had to wait for normal seating, so we went with the buffet instead. (Huh? Hard Rock has a buffet? This one does, apparently.) It was okay -- the decorations seemed rather sparse, actually. Mostly photos and posters. I only saw one guitar up on the wall. Maybe the second floor was where they kept the good stuff, and the first floor for us buffet losers got all the reject decorations. Oh well. Don't know how many Hard Rocks this makes for me now.
That's about it for my trip report. Was it worth it? Hard to say for certain. A lot of the things I was looking forward turned out to be disappointments. On the other hand, there were a lot of surprises and a lot of things I wasn't expecting that turned out to be very cool. Wudang Mountain and monastery was the highlight of the trip for me. The monastery was how I expected the Shaolin Temple to be -- isolated, authentic, and untouched. The Shaolin Temple was just so much glitz. The West Lake at Hangzhou was absolutely beautiful. Someday I'll go back there. We didn't hit Beijing or the Great Wall. We didn't find any weapons shops in Guangzhou or Hong Kong. In the end, my expectations were mostly wrong. But give me five years and I'll be back.