Hong Kong
Hong Kong was a fantastic place to finish the trip and to come to terms with our imminent re-entry to the UK. We were hosted by the lovely Mark and Laura and were treated to British pub style banter, home cooked food, Ribena and Marmite. It was great to have those familiar tastes – we got quite giddy about marmalade on one occasion. But make no mistake Hong Kong is still China and in some ways has more exotic features to it than the mainland: on the streets 32 stories below Mark and Laura’s flat there were plenty of places to buy local Cantonese delicacies such as dried sea cucumbers, bird’s nests and shark’s fin for your soup. Go round the corner of a 50 storey mirrored skyscraper and you encounter billowing incense smoke and see people queuing to throw paper money, cardboard cut out mobile phones and jewellery into furnaces in front of an ancient Buddhist temple. You feel a million miles away from the UK, and then a double-decker bus goes past.
My brother Dan came out to meet us in Hong Kong and to begin his own trip to China. You can see how he’s getting on his (regularly updated) blog: www.blogabond.com/deeferdan We stayed together in Chungking Mansions – a bizarre half shopping centre, half curry house, half death trap apartment block in the heart of Kowloon. We helped Dan out with his jet lag by cramming our days full of going up and down Hong Kong. It’s a vibrant city but there aren’t many big sites, consequently we spent most of our time going up and down tall buildings or hills or shopping streets and markets or going forwards and backwards on ferries.
The time then came for us to pack our bags for the last time. As we were sadly sorting through all the things we had journeyed with way with us we realised that there was one thing that Dan had to have. The Beaker. It was an orange flask that had been bought when we arrived in China. It had been through thick and thin with us: it had warmed our hands on snowy Huang Shan and quenched our thirst in steamy Jinghong. It even spent a week on it’s own in a Kunming hostel, and was there to greet us when we came back for it. Not only it is a traveller’s best friend, but no self-respective Chinese person goes on a journey without a flask for his or her tea. Dan would have no hope of integrating without it. It was a solemn moment, Dan didn’t quite understand the gravity of the situation, but we let it go with a tear in our eyes. It was our very own Hong Kong handover.
H
10-12 Feb 2008