Thank God For Civilisation!
Hong Kong - 9 September 2004
Having arrived in civilisation - aka Hong Kong - my first port of call was the dentist. Despite having had a check up and a couple of fillings before I left, I’d had pain since Shanghai and couldn’t put it off any longer. Thankfully the dentist was not one of the ‘extractions in the street’ chaps we’d seen in mainland China but a nice English speaking gentleman with a practice in the ex-pat haven where I am residing at the moment. He gave me the obligatory X-ray, which they always do to get more cash out of you, and pronounced that there was no cavity and no filling missing so the pain was probably a temporary thing – something that afflicts people from time to time. Either that or there was a miniscule crack in the filling which was causing the pain when drinking cold beverages, although he couldn’t see one. He said he could remove the filling and put in a new one but he didn’t seem to think it that much of an emergency and frankly, I was happy to go with this diagnosis. “Try not to drink cold things on that side of your mouth Miss Kennedy,” was his advice for which I had to pay him HK$515 (or £36.78 to you and me). I have now perfected the art of drinking cold beer, gin & tonic, white wine etc without encountering shooting pains on that side of my mouth – I just swallow quickly!
Hong Kong has been a godsend after a month of hard slog on the mainland. I am staying with Jane, an ex-Daily Mail reporter who lives out here. Her apartment overlooks a beach, is air-conditioned and plush. There is a gleaming 5-star-western and a shower which has huge jets of hot water no matter what time of the day or night you stand under it. It is an extremely clean city, compared to China and the transport is cheap and efficient – 50p for a 20 minute ride into Central. I might call Ken Livingstone and get him out here prove it is possible to have a well-run transport system.
Hong Kong is Utopia for shopaholics although most of them are out of bounds to me and my budget. I did find Marks and Spencer though and couldn’t resist popping in to buy some knickers. I resisted the urge to buy anything else on account of a) I can’t afford to shop now and b) I’m losing so much weight that any purchase would be resigned to the bin before long. Yes, as my old friend Bridget Jones would say, “Hurrah!!!! Weight loss good!” I took the plunge on the electronic scales in the gleaming bathroom in the plush apartment and found that I’d lost a stone since leaving Big Bad Blighty, although the weight seems to have been transferred to my backpack, Hamish, (yes, it has a name – it is almost as big as a person so the people I was travelling with for the last month made me name him) who continues to grow at an alarming rate. The only bonus is that I seem to be slightly stronger than when I left 12 weeks ago so now I don’t fall over when I put him on. The memory of that traumatic incident in the Beijing Youth Hostel still haunts me - walking up the stairs, falling backwards and lying there, trapped on the landing unable to get up because of the weight …….I was doing a sterling impression of an upside-down turtle, arms and legs flailing wildly, until some kind soul came and got Hamish off me so I could get back up. Anyway, those days are gone (touch wood!) along with one pair of trousers which I had to ditch because they were so baggy I could get them off without untying them. Pair number two are now in the same state and pair number three, which I couldn’t even tie when I left, are now loose. Forget Atkins, if you want to lose weight get a rucksack, fill it until it weights 25k and then traipse round Asia for a month!
The other night Jane and I went to the Felix bar on top of the Peninsula hotel in Kowloon, one of HK’s oldest hotels. The bar on the top floor had an amazing view of Kowloon and Hong Kong island and was designed by Philip Starke, who the Londoners amongst you will recognise from the Sanderson and St Martin’s Lane. You know you are in a Philip Starke designed establishment when a) you can’t find your way to the loo b) when you eventually figure out where they are, you can’t find the cubicle doors and c) when you’ve finished you can’t find the sink. Minimalist design is one thing but minimalism and camouflage combined are a bit too much to handle. I was looking around for somewhere to wash my hands but could see nothing save a marble topped island in the middle of the room. The toilet attendant then pointed out the taps at the edge of the island from where the water ran into a barely discernable, very gentle dip in the middle of the island, which, if it was any less gentle would have seen the water running over the edge of the marble top and onto the expensively tiled floor.
The gents facilities are even more spectacular (not that I witnessed them myself of course) with urinals positioned in front of a glass window so you can pee over Kowloon! I wondered whether I could sneak in and take a photograph but then thought better of it – I didn’t want to be done for gross indecency.
The next day we went to Cheung Chau island, an hour’s ferry ride from HK harbour. It was quiet and quaint and slightly resembled a small English seaside town. Sadly the weather wasn’t great and anyway, the water is so polluted we’d probably have caught E-coli or something of that ilk. The beach out of bounds, we decided to visit the local temple. As we lit our incense sticks in front of the statues of the various Gods, we saw one of them being removed and placed on a little trolley and then wheeled off somewhere. We thought he might be going for a mini-break himself but saw him later that day, in a makeshift shrine, along with a bun tree. Cheung Chau has a famous bun festival every year in April where the locals make huge wigwam like structures, line them with newspaper and then hang strings of buns, rather like a string of onions, all over them. People then clamber up the tree to try and grab a bun – the belief being that the higher the bun you pluck from the tree, the greater your luck will be. A few years ago so many people were trying to get the higher buns that some of them were badly injured (the people obviously, not the buns!) so now the buns are handed out and it’s pot luck which one you get. We were mystified as to why there appeared to be a mini-bun fest, perhaps they were welcoming us vistors to the island!
After eating lunch at a seafront establishment we had a quick look in the shops where I had a rather insulting experience. I was looking at a T-shirt when the assistant - who was by no means Claudia Schieffer herself – stood there with folded arms and a frown on her face before announcing loudly, “Mmmm, ah don theenk tha is sootaba fo yoo” otherwise translated as ‘We don’t do large sizes’. I was sorely tempted to ask her where she bought her outsize clothes from but restrained myself and instead remembered that all Asian women under 30 are as thin as whippets and have no chest so obviously their clothes would not fit me – or at least that’s what I told myself while Jane roared with laugher for the next five minutes.
Yesterday I visited a fortune teller. He asked me to sit down, concentrate, pick one stick from a bunch in a pot and then pass it to him. After reading the message on the stick and establishing when I was born (year of the dog – I wonder if that is why I am a noisy yapper) he told me to ask him a question. I thought long and hard for about 5 seconds.
“Will I ever be a writer?”
“Not until 2006/07”, came his reply.
Worried that he had misheard me and thought I’d said “Will I ever be lighter?” I repeated the question and told him I was thinking of writing a book.
“In 2006/07 you will have a book,” he responded, “Now you only have 20 pages.”
(In actual fact I have no pages because whilst in Shanghai, having spent some considerable time writing the first half of Chapter One, the internet man had chucked me out at 1.30am and I didn’t have time to email it to myself. I saved it to the hard drive and went back the next day to send it to my Inbox only to discover it had disappeared from the PC. And all because he had wanted to knock off half an hour early to go out with his girlfriend.)
Deflated, I left the prophet of doom after crossing his palm with a HK$20 note, and considered a second opinion from around the corner, but then decided I couldn’t bear to hear bad news twice so I found a nice bar in the SoHo district and whiled away the afternoon drinking Chilean chardonnay and writing my journal (on the shelves in 3 years by the way, so get your advance orders in now!)
Talking of Chile, I met a chap from there in Shanghai and we travelled down to HK together on the train, which, incidentally, was a cut above the normal Chinese hard sleeper trains – much more clean and comfortable and less packed. We were the sole occupants of our compartment so it was quiet and we were able to bag the lower bunks. Our preparations had not been very successful though as we’d decided to buy some food for the journey at the station so we could have extra time in bed that morning (NOT together, I hasten to add), but on arrival at the station we were ushered through a separate entrance as we were technically leaving China and had to go through customs. There was not a stall to be seen so we boarded for a 24 hour journey with a bag of sweeties and a couple of two-day old bread rolls between us and had to resort to train cuisine for dinner. We met a couple of Canadian chaps, a girl from Shrewsbury and a bloke called Tom who was one of the cameramen on Big Brother, and had a ‘Western’ soiree in the Canadians’ compartment (even staying up later than ‘lights out’ at 10.00 pm – what rebels!). I tried my best to get some off-screen BB gossip from Tom, however, he was far too discreet about the real goings-on in the house and even when I force-fed him copious amounts of revolting-but-the-only-booze-available Baijo, he still wouldn’t tell me anything juicy. Honestly! What is the point of having a job like that if you are not going to live off the stories for a while?
Shanghai was a nice city - a bit like a mini London or NY. The Bund, a famous street lined with banks and very old, very posh hotels, is beautifully lit up in the evenings and opposite the Bund is Pudong, the new part of town which has lots of glittery skyscrapers and more posh hotels. If it wasn’t so far away from the UK, Shanghai would be a great place for a long weekend. Our digs were probably the worst so far though. Laura, Dave and I had booked beds in a dormitory in one of the hotels (which was very old and trying hard to be very posh) well-known as a backpacker haven with dorms on the upper floors. However, on arriving at our room we discovered a cross between a war hospital and a Chinese laundry. There were rows and rows of camp beds – not even proper beds – and lines of washing hanging up. The floor of the loo was not cleaned in the whole time we were there and the showers were pretty grim at times. After Laura and Dave left, I was moved to the sixth floor which had proper beds but even less salubrious toilets and I had to go back to the 3rd floor to use the showers. My bed was at the far end of an annex which was linked to the main room via a second door. On returning to bed that night the lights were out so I stumbled across the main room only to find that the adjoining door had been closed from the other side and there was no handle on my side. I didn’t want to wake up the occupants of both rooms for fear of a riot so I had to lie on an empty bed until 6am when one of girls in my room got up. Obviously I was a bit miffed about it all, so off I trotted later that day, after getting lost in a torrential downpour on the way back from the post office which didn’t help my mood, to see the manager. I explained politely, but with a hint of ‘tut tut’, to him about the events of the previous evening. He, however, clearly did not graduate from ‘The Customer Is Always Right’ school of customer services.
“Ah, ees naw hote fot. Ees fot of customa who close the daw.”
My response, which I think you’ll agree was perfectly reasonable was “Erm, excuse me, but if you have a door, you should have a handle on BOTH sides of it!”
“Ah naw. Ees naw hote fot”. My protests about not having been able to access my property or sleep in my bed were in vain, as was my demand for a rebate for that night. I was getting nowhere and thus becoming more annoyed so I promptly told him that his rooms were the worst I’d experienced in China, his facilities were never cleaned (to which he said there were cleaned every day – aye, maybe in a parallel universe!) and that I was going to write to Lonely Planet and tell them to inform all backpackers in Shanghai to go to the Captain’s Youth Hostel (which is where we would have been if it hadn’t been full), before stomping off, my exit being marred by the squeaking and squelching emanating from my sodden sandals.
I later found out that they are soon to close the backpacking dorms to make room for some deluxe suits, which explains why they didn’t really care about travellers who are lacking a gold Amex card. However, I later discovered my remonstrations had not been totally in vain. On returning to my room later that night I discovered a handle had been put on the door! I did consider leaving without paying for my last night, just to get one over on them for their appalling service, but thought better of it when I realised they had my passport number and would probably put out an APB and catch up with me when I returned to the mainland.
So, I leave HK early next week for the tropical island where I am going to attempt to learn to dive. Assuming I don’t drown, or am not swallowed by a shark, I shall report back soon with a scintillating update from South West China before I head off in the footsteps of Marco Polo on the Old Silk Road.
