Perigord and pinxtos: 5/4/08

My first attempt at blogging. We'll have to see how it all goes.

Our Brisbane to Hong Kong flight was one of those rare effortless, super-smooth Qantas flights made even more comfortable when our neighbours changed seats leaving Pete and I with two apiece. We bought Octopus travel cards on arrival in Hong Kong (these cover practically all transactions) and headed off on the A21 to our hotel. Only a little blip of an underground subway crossing Nathan Road where we had to negotiate steps with the three duffle bags caused even the slightest hiccup. Our hotel room in colourful Jordon is minute, functional, incredibly well placed for transport, and comes complete with hairdryer, loaded bar fridge, free internet cable and laundry--along with excellent desk service.

Breakfast was an adventure for Miss Bec. On her Chinese-Aussie doctor’s trip advice she tried the Chinese breakfast option, congee, with all the trimmings and not only liked it, but had it again this morning with all its spicy accompaniments. Congee is bland to my taste--and its only real interest is in the garnish. But it suited Becka.

Sunday’s outing was all about a scam, a sting, and a slow fascinating jaunt to the Po Lin Monastery on Lantau Island. After breakfast we wandered down Nathan Road via the fascinating, colourful, down-at-heel, Chung King Mansions (the most multi-cultural tower in Hong Kong) then introduced Rebecca to the contrast and glamour that is the Peninsula Hotel which is full of heavily polished glitz and folk in showy jewelry who need to eat their frozen slices of hand cut watermelon breakfast in the very public lounge.

As we were thinking where next to go I ‘won’ (off a street seller) one of those rare dream holidays in Phuket that every tourist who stops to answer questions seems to win. This we did not take up once we realised what we had accepted. Nor did we waste time on the spiel that goes with the scam, but what we did take advantage of was the free taxi ride across Hong Kong to a new and different area, the Gold Coast, that we’d never visited in previous trips.

Once there we grabbed a quick coffee granita among the expatriats we’d been trying to avoid, then decided to head out of their orbit, without even a map or directions, to find our impulsive way to Lantau Island and the Po Lin Monastery by light transport buses, big buses and the MTR, anything that would get us there.

This trek to the Po took the better part of a couple of hours and was itself quite an adventure. One of our brave little buses enroute had to chug up narrow winding mountain roads on Lantau Island that made the Amalfi Coast road look like a speedway track. Two vehicles could not drive side by side on many parts of these roads, and to make things even more exciting parts of most of them were undergoing construction and there were large roomy concrete dump trucks needing to be accommodated. So it was all quite hairy.

I am not much into Buddhas but the Po Lin buddha is immense: the largest in the world, and beautiful in almost a feminine pretty way, which makes it doubly fascinating as to how that air of softness could have been attained given its grandeur in scale.

And after visiting the Buddhist sutra-engraved bell in the exhibition hall I am now supposed to be rid of 108 different kinds of vexations. Vexless. Me.

The bus down from Po Lin to the tiny hamlet of Mui Po, was another amazing pretzel ride through a lush green tropical island that was layer upon layer of soft green Chinese peaks dotted with tiny pagodas that turned out to be shady resting places for walkers who dared to venture up to Po on foot. There are walking paths everywhere.

The island is really like an Oriental painting with its high angled mountains, sharp edged rocks, pointy-topped red-tiled pagodas softened with hazy white clouds which makes all things familiar look slightly mysterious, even alien. Out on the water, boat hulls appear slightly more curved, slightly more tilted than Aussie boat hulls: there is this little tilt and twist to everything on Lantau. Skewed.

Dinner at the Taj Mahal Club in Chungking Mansions that evening was a recommendation by our friend, Frances. Chungking Mansion is a massive ramshackle many-storied building in Tsim Sha Tsui (Jeem-za-choy), virtually a city within a city, that has, at various times in its short history, been the centre of the drug market, prostitution, cheap accomodation, seriously good food, and any possible thing that might be bought or sold by any possible trader to any buyer. We accepted a discount coupon from one of the touts out front, and a hundred others descended in a heap offering their restaurants and deriding the one we chose, literally causing a riot! But out of the chaos came the good guys, a blocky bellowing riot cop and his mates who cleaned every single tout from the entire foyer. Sad night for the other restaurants in the Mansions that night, thanks to us. We ate too much in the end, and thought the Goa fish and potato curry one of the best we’ve tasted.

Today was all noise and throngs and traffic and trams and new experiences tucked in amongst some old. We found the mid-level escalators on Hong Kong Island and followed them up. And up. And up, until I nearly felt that old panic button start up, a twinge of long-forgotten vertigo, at the sheer height we must have been without actually sitting in an airplane. These escalators start just above sea level and head ever upward until they nearly reach the peak. In engineering terms they are probably a simple repetitive little feat, but the sheer number of them, one after another, after another, gaining such height, makes them seem extraordinary.

Coming down after that to barter at the Ladies Market on street level for our usual cache of copy watches to take home was actually a relief. And, and the flavour of the lightly-fried gow gees on the way home was a tugging reminder of our long ago stay in Shanghai. Off soon to dinner, then an evening wandering through the Temple Street markets, perhaps, before we head off, after midnight, to London.