As I start typing, I can't believe how moronic I have been in delaying writing about his particular part of the trip - it being THE highlight of the entire trip and very close to my heart as well! It was an amazing day, when I saw, touched, tasted, heard - experienced in entirety - the true soul of Hong Kong City - all thanks to the incredible warmth and generosity of spirit of one HK resident, K.
As I said in Part 3, I had fixed up a "let's meet for coffee" meeting with K during my mandatory-sights-taken city tour of HK. K, who is a "friend's friend" had pinged me on Facebook when she heard I was planning a trip to Hong Kong and had suggested catching up since she'd moved to HK a few months ago. I had literally jumped at the chance, because even a simple coffee date at a local cafe with one of the locals seemed more valuable to me than the Disneyland day-tour our itinerary had included. But what was meant to be a quick-catch-up-session-over-coffee transmogrified into a whole-day city tour, a veritable first-hand-introduction to all the sights, sounds and smells that are the hallmarks of HK......all thanks to K's painstaking research, boundless energy and the most amazing willingness to show a near-stranger around her city. As a result of which, I saw Hong Kong in a way package-tour itineraries just cannot match.
K showed up bright and early AND ON TIME on Sunday morning at our hotel, just as I was finishing breakfast. Twang! went one of my heart strings - punctuality is something I admire and appreciate, often being the one who arrives first and the only one who's on time for group rendezvous! She led me to the nearby mall/shopping centre called SOGO - a Hong Kong landmark. During the short 5-minute walk she told me the history of the store - how it was once the HK branch of a famous Japanese chain, being run according to Japanese principles of store-keeping and business, and how after chain collapsed, the people of HK petitioned for the HK branch to be bought out and continued being run rather than closed down. Sogo was your normal department store with lots of small shops hawking luxury-brand clothes, cosmetics and the like. Shopping - especially branded shopping - not being my game, we did a quick browse-through and headed out.
As we set off from Sogo, K declared that, to "do" Hong Kong, we HAD TO experience all the modes of public transport that HK has to offer - tram (yes, there are quaint old trams in ultra-modern sky-high HK!), bus, ferry and subway. I was all for this suggestion (the point of the day being seeing the city from the eyes of a local) so off we went to the nearest tram stop. As waited for the tram to trundle up, K whipped out her diary. On a page was a neatly-jotted bulleted list of "things to do in HK". On the page overleaf was a hand-drawn map of one of the neighbourhoods on K's agenda.
As she explained her hand-written itinerary, culled from numerous Google searches done the night before, all I could do was look on, astounded by the time, energy and effort she had put into planning this day trip. Truly, K - your generosity is truly remarkable and not oft-seen.
The tram came up, we squeezed (OK, I squeezed, K sailed through!) past the turnstile at the door of the tram and climbed up the steps to the upper deck. The tram took us through the crowded downtown area (crowded with skyscrapers and people walking by on the streets) to Central (or Central district) which is the central business district of HK. We got off the tram at Queensway, took an escalator up into a building which led to a kind of covered walkway between buildings. As we walked through, K pointed out a rising social phenomenon in HK - groups and groups of Filipino women and children out for a day picnic, occupying public spaces like corridors and walkways and parking lots (vacant since it was a Sunday) - complete with picnic blankets, baskets of food and the like. Apparently a lot of Filipinos are hired in HK as maids and domestics. The laws dictate that the employer provides accommodation to such workers, so on days off, these folks who lived with their employers and consequently had no place of their own congregated in public spaces for picnics and get-togethers.
We emerged from the walkway at the Central Mid-Level Escalators, which constitute the longest outdoor covered escalator system in the world.
The entire escalator system covers over 800 metres in distance and elevates over 135 metres from bottom to top. It consists of twenty escalators and three moving side-walks. Hong Kong is dominated by steep, hilly terrain, so a system like the Central Mid-Level Escalators are required to pedestrianise certain hilly districts (straight, like the bird flies) which otherwise would have meant miles of zig-zag road travel up and down the slopes.
The escalator daily runs downhill from 6:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m. and uphill from 10:30am to midnight, since up the slope are the prime residential areas and at the base is the commercial downtown area. So in the morning, people take the escalators downhill to their work and take them back up in the evening. (Kind of like the uni-directional North-South rail/road travel Mumbaikars do every day). For the errant going-against-the-current person, there are normal non-mechanical steps too. :)
The escalators are unlike anything I have ever seen, and remain my most enduring memory of Hong Kong, surpassing even the cinematic HK skyline. Steep and almost unending, they are cut across regularly by narrow roads which traverse East-West (if you assume the escalators go South-North).
These roads are tiny and sloping too and house the most eclectic collection of pubs and ethnic restaurants (Staunton Street in particular, which is the Pub District) and shops and apartment buildings.
K pointed out her sky-high apartment building just off the escalator - just like how some Mumbaikars live conveniently right next door to the railway station! We even passed a mosque - the Jamia Mosque- and hopped off the escalator for a quick look. As we stepped inside the wrought-iron gates of the mosque, the hubbub and hustle-bustle of the escalators fell off us like a garment. The mosque was cool, silent and verdant - almost impossibly juxtaposed with the energy and vibe of the escalators!
As we got off the escalator to explore the lanes and byways, I counted an Irish Pub, a French cafe, several Asian-themed restaurants, a couple of Latina/Spanish/Mexican bistros....the list was long and varied!
And all these eateries/drinking holes had tiny frontage and I am assuming pretty small seating spaces too. All in all, the whole area, with its pokiness and diversity had tons of charm and I loved every bit of it.
After walking through the network of narrow roads off the Escalators, we came to the first pit stop of our day - the Tai Cheung Bakery at Lyndhurst Terrace. "Ta da!" said K with a flourish. Tai Cheung was a more-than-50-years-old famous bakery- which non-locals would never know, since the signboard above the door was written in Chinese (Cantonese, to be precise).
Thanks to her Googling, K had found out that Chris Pattern, former Governor of Hong Kong (when it was under British rule) loved the egg tarts from this bakery. Tai Cheung was completely nondescript - from its plain signboard to its no-frills decor. Trays upon non-fancy aluminium trays chock-full of baked goodies were stacked in the plain glass display counter - no wrought-iron shelves with delicate wicker baskets here!
Even the names of the baked bounty showed the say-it-as-it-is-without-any-window-dressing approach of the bakery. "Coconut Tart" (a glorious golden yellow tart crowned by a red cherry), "Whole Egg Cake" , "Soft Cake with Paper Wrap" (self explanatory, ain't it?), "Pineapple Red Bean Bun", "Beef Curry Bun", "Chicken Pie", "BBQ Pork pie", the intriguingly named "Piglet Pie" - and most prosaic of all - "Eggtart" . Plain and simple. No fuss, no fancy monikers! And all these delights for under HKD 5 each.
We picked up a moon cake and an egg tart each.
K insisted on the Moon Cake because the Mid-Autumn Festival (or Moon Festival) was on and the mooncake was a traditional snack to be partaken during the festival. The mooncake was a thing of wonder - a whole egg yolk baked in concentric layers of lotus seed paste and flaky pastry. The yolk (squidgy) and the lotus seed paste (sticky and very rich) made finishing the cake a struggle.
It was so so rich - AND an alien taste! To wash this down, we bought a bottle of Minute Maid (Coca Cola's everywhere!) - in the White Grape and Aloe Vera flavour, from a tiny corner store under the escalators opposite the bakery.
The store was a hallmark of HK where real estate is worth much more than its weight in gold - tiny place, packed chock-a-block with groceries, making the most of the limited shelf space. I was defeated by the mooncake and could barely finish it. The Minute Maid went down a treat, though. :)After this snack (poor K had foregone breakfast in order to meet me on time, so she desperately needed to refuel), we walked to the Man Mo temple on Hollywood Road. Hollywood Road runs parallel to Lyndhurst Terrace and is one of the oldest roads in HK. It was built (and named) at least 40 years before the more-famous Hollywood in California came into being. Its known as the art district of HK, and has several art galleries, antique shops and shops selling curios/trinkets.
It also houses the Man Mo temple, dedicated to two Chinese deities -Man Tai (god of literature) and Mo Tai ( martial god).
The two gods were popularly patronized by scholars and students seeking progress in their study, and as a result there are several Man Mo temples in Hong Kong. The largest one is the one on Hollywood Road, which we visited. Inside, it was pretty similar to the A-Ma temple at Macau - splendid silk tapestries on the walls, giant incense sticks burning in enormous brass pots, spiral incense sticks suspended from the ceiling and an abundance of red everywhere.
Right next to the temple is "Ladder Street" - which is made up entirely of stone steps leading up the hill. The whole area is along the slopes of a hill, so its riddled with steep sloping roads, staircases, ramps and the like - giving it a unique identity and a charm of its own.
From the Man Mo temple, we traipsed across the grid of lanes to our lunch-time destination - the Tsui Wah restaurant on Wellington Road.
There are several branches of Tsui Wah across the city, and this one's famous as being open 24 hours and as a refuelling stop to late-night/early-morning club-goers. Inside, Tsui Wah was all crowds and chaos and the waitstaff hardly speak English.
K and I shared a table with 2 others and ordered off the picture menu, thankfully written in both English and Cantonese. With K being off pork, and both of us being off beef, we selected the "Prawn Balls with Stirred(did they mean Stir-Fried?) Noodles in XO sauce". Our lunch came in a large bowl, along with a huge bowl of clear soup - complimentary.
The noodles were thin and deliciously chewy, the sauce was tasty and four fat prawns sat regally atop the nest of noodles, hob-nobbing with a baton of wilted bak choy.
The noise levels and hectic rush around us made lunch a quick eat-and-run affair and soon we set off for one of Hong Kong's premium malls-cum-office-complexes - the International Finance Centre, or IFC as its better known. IFC is a multi-level upscale shopping centre with commercial office spaces above the shopping area.
Its full of designer label shops and yummy mummies wheeling trendy prams with trendier tots. K and I stopped at the Godiva store in IFC for our Golden Moment - the Chocolixir (in Dark Chocolate Decadence flavour) milkshake.
Calling it a plain old milkshake is like calling the Burj Al Arab "just another luxury hotel" or calling the Taj Mahal "just another mausoleum". You get the point don't you? :)
After IFC, it was time for something I'd been looking forward to all day - the ferry ride across Victoria Harbour! I took my extremely-affordable ticket from a ticket vending machine - K didn't need one since she had her Octopus Card. An aside - the Octopus Card is the ultimate in convergence for Hong Kong-ites. Originally created as a single smart card to pay for ferry, metro, bus AND tram tickets (by swiping on an Octopus Card Reader), it is now accepted at supermarkets, petrol pumps, restaurants, vending machines, parking meters - what have you.
Whats more, it can be used to recharge your mobile phone's talktime, and can be recharged (refilled) by cash/ funds transfer from your Bank Account at machines located at the MRT (metro/subway) stations. You can recharge the card at several retail chains as well as by Credit Card. Conversely, you can make your Credit Card payments using the balance on your Octopus Card too! You need not actually carry cash to get by comfortably in HK if you have an Octopus
Card and it is one of the first things you need to get when you move there.
Coming back to the ferry, we climbed aboard the mostly-empty old-fashioned ferry with wooden decks and rows of metal benches. We'd chosen to travel on the cheaper lower deck - but it was no big loss! As the ferry surged over the waves, we got amazing views of the awe-inspiring Hong Kong skyline.
Gleaming under the afternoon sun, the towers of glass and steel filled the gap between blue sky and bluer water, and stretched from left to right without a break in their ranks. I couldn't stop clicking away, much to the exasperated amusement of K.
Hopping off at the opposite shore in the neighbourhood called TST (Tsim Sha Tsui), we spent a goodly hour walking along the Avenue of the Stars. This is a promenade along the harbour which serves as an outdoor museum chronicling the history of Hong Kong cinema, decade by decade. On the footpath are embedded metal stars with cinematic star's names beside each - kind of like Hollywood's Walk of Fame, only featuring stars from HK cinema.
We snuck a quick look into the afternoon tea ceremony on at the Peninsular Hotel (HK's parallel to NYC's Plaza) - a grande dame of a hotel with sumptuous interiors and even more sumptuous afternoon tea (the British styled one - complete with multi-tiered stands holding sandwiches, scones, cakes etc) - whose slots are booked months in advance.
TST is also home to a lot of museums - from science to art - but it was getting towards evening and our energy reserves (though recharged by the fragile egg tarts left over from breakfast during our walk along the Avenue of the Stars) were rapidly waning, so we bid them adieu and dragged our feet towards the nearest MTR station for the last bit of sightseeing for the day - a ride on HK's MTR, i.e subway/metro. Needless to say, while the MTR station was crowded, it was well organised and the journey back to Causeway Bay was quick and relatively comfortable. K, who had to take a different train home, bid me farewell at the station.
As we parted, all I could do was give K a hug and hope that she understood that I was truly grateful for the incredible amount of herself - her time, her energy, her knowledge, her affection - she had given me. To see the real Hong Kong - to walk along the road trodden by its residents, to eat at cafes where the locals ate, to jostle among the crowds at the station - was what I wanted, its what I want from every big city that I travel. And thanks to K, I was able to live Hong Kong despite being part of a "If its Tuesday, this must be Belgium" kind of package tour. May I see every city I visit the way I saw Hong Kong!
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