Macau in "not crap" shocker!

For our last full day in China, we took a daytrip to Macau, which, as it turns out, is pretty much divided between lovely Portuguese architecture and seriously bling-bling casinos.

After buying our tickets, we had to wait about four hours for our ferry, so we explored Honkers a little more. We rode the giant Central Escalator all the way to… nowhere in particular. Then we checked out yet another market – Graham Street, the best food market in Honk Kong, according to Lonely Planet. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were right. I love all these food markets, especially the rather exotic seafood shops. Seriously, anything in the sea that can be fit into a box can be sold; we saw absolutely everything swimming about, waiting for the inevitable; the highlights were rainbow parrotfish, cuttlefish, and… horseshoe crabs! They’re so weird and cool.

Four hours later, we had our first-class ferry tickets and a one-hour ride to Macau. Some advice: don’t just go to Macau for the ride and the passport stamps. Getting off at the ferry terminal, you could quickly decide that it was crap and head straight back. That would be silly, because a little walking shows how lovely it is. Indeed, we did a little walking trying to find the historic centre of Macau, and find it we did. The older parts of Macau are seriously lovely; the squares, churches, fountains, grand buildings painted green, yellow, pink, and who knows what else – it’s fabulous. Macau is also the second most densely-populated territory in the world (17,699 people per square km; Australia – 2.6), so there are lots of tiny little alleyways winding among rather packed apartment blocks; and every single alley, staircase and driveway has a street name in Portuguese, nicely labeled with a ceramic sign. We wandered for a couple of hours and managed to cover about a third of Macau, I think. On the way back to the ferry at the end of the day, we took a different route past some of Macau’s rather ridiculous casinos. One had a very fancy show out front of fountains and flamethrowers choreographed with that tacky “Hero” song – “I need a hero!” something something – which was certainly very bling. And not to be a miserable wet blanket or anything, but upon seeing such insane extravagance, I can’t but think, “Rachel’s going to Cambodia to build rainwater tanks so that people can drink without dying of cholera. And then there’s this.” It’s all a bit silly, really.

And that, pretty much, is that. We ferried back to Hong Kong, the next day we flew back Japan. And to top it all off, I made it from Kansai Airport and onto the last train of the night to Takebe with about 5 minutes to spare. Phew.

This is what Macau looks like, provided you ignore the casinos:

In China-but-sort-of-not-quite: Hong Kong!

This is what Hong Kongers live in: miniscule, colourful, and covered in laundry.

This is what passes for suburbia in Hong Kong.

Fun with night-mode: the Star Ferry terminal, and a view across the harbour to Kowloon.

Hong Kong is a special place; a little bastion of Britishness in Asia; a city of ground floors, lifts and primary schools; a forest of skyscrapers without any suburbs; a city that spoils you with transportation options – bus, subway, ferry, tram, or giant escalator? It’s a fantastic place.

On our first day, we strolled uphill to the small Hong Kong Zoo, which, quite fabulously, is free to enter. Hong Kongers tend to lead busy, cramped lives, so the local government has put quite a lot of effort into providing leisure facilities such as the zoo and botanic gardens. I mostly wanted to go to the zoo to see the Bali starlings and mouse-deer. I’m a big fan of the mouse-deer: take an ordinary deer, give it tiny little tusks instead of antlers, and shrink it down to the size of a fox terrier. They’re adorable. From the zoo we moved on to Hong Kong Park’s enormous walk-through aviary. The aviary is fabulous, of course, particularly with the views through the trees back to the skyscrapers below.

The aviary.

A Bali starling for my dad.

Yuen Po Bird Market.

As if we hadn’t seen enough birds already, we took the Star Ferry across to Kowloon and made our way north to the Yuen Po bird market, strolling past a nice little flower market on the way. Whilst there’s always something inherently sad about seeing birds in small cages, it was still a great place for a wander, and the birdie in me was excited to see so much variety; lories, waxwings, laughing-thrushes, sunbirds, mynahs, robins, cockatoos and a sole toucan, among lots of others I didn’t know. After the bird market, we wandered past a sort of random-crap market, and stumbled across the Goldfish Market; a couple of blocks of pet shops mostly dealing with aquaria and fish floating about in plastic bags. The rain then briefly changed from drizzly to torrential, so we took shelter in a nearby indoor food market, full of all the wonderful sights and smells one expects from an Asian food market. Hygiene was conspicuous by its absence. I’m sure all the restaurant food we ate came from markets like this so there’s no point in getting all snooty and “oh, it’s so dirty!” about it. Finally, we returned to North Point (the neighbourhood of our hotel) and wandered through yet another market, bringing our market count for the day up to six. Six markets and no money spent makes for a happy Bob.

An indoor market. Fishy.

On Tuesday we went to… Disneyland! Hong Kong Disneyland has the exact same stuff as every other Disneyland, only in a smaller park, so I won’t bore you with details of this ride or that ride. Instead, here are some neat features unique to Hong Kong Disney:

- Alice speaks Cantonese, and possibly also Mandarin.

- At the Jungle River Cruise, you form three queues depending on whether you want a commentary in English, Cantonese or Mandarin.

- Cantonese people don’t smile much, so the fake smiles on the staff are even more fake than usual.

Because it was a cool, rainy, midweek day, it wasn’t at all crowded, and we were able to jump on any ride we wanted without any queues at all, which was pretty great. All in all, Hong Kong Disneyland: thumbs up.

The train to Disneyland. More cheese, anyone?

On Wednesday… we shopped, pretty much. We started with one of the Malls of Fabulousness in Causeway Bay - where I couldn’t afford a single damn thing, pretty much – before moving on to a much more decent (by my ghetto inaka standards) mall in the upper reaches of Kowloon. There we found an excellent bookstore, where I managed to spend $600 on books (about A$100, but it sounds cooler in HK$).

Later, back on Hong Kong Island, we finally hit Hong Kong’s best-known tourist attraction (probably), Victoria Peak and the Peak Tram. As you probably know, the charming old tram ride is very, very steep, and the views over the city from the peak are spectacular. What you may not know, however, is that perched on top of the peak is a massive, multi-level shopping mall monstrosity. There was a lot of souvenir-y crap – one of the restaurants even had its own souvenir shop – but we did find one decent one, run by a Singaporean woman (judging by the “lah” on every sentence), which had some really cool Tintin prints on lacquer. The Monstrosity Mall also held the Hong Kong branch of Madame Tussaud’s, which we meandered through whilst waiting for sunset. Some of the models were fabulous; some were scary (exhibit A: Macauly Culkin); some were modeled in unfortunate eras (Madonna in the cone bra, Cher from that “Turn Back Time” video, Michael Jackson in creepy bondage gear); and some were just dreamed up somewhere (I do not believe that Mick Jagger ever wore a spandex jumpsuit with a hearts/diamonds/clubs/spades design). Best of all, we got the opportunity to kancho John Howard, which alone was worth the entry fee.

Our Johnny gets a friendly greeting, Japanese-child-style.

From Victoria Peak. Mental note: buy a tripod.

Another market. For all things squishy and unidentifiable.

Welcome to Communist China

Shanghai

At the Shangri-la, even the teaspoons are well dressed.

Shanghai, along the Bund.

The craptacular "Bund Sightseeing Tunnel."

An oversized needle thing, Shanghai.

A public fitness space in Hangzhou - the perfect clothes line.

A causeway across the West Lake, Hangzhou.

A bridge, a garden, Hangzhou.

A view across the West Lake to downtown Hangzhou.

That heading is what I thought, sarcastically, upon visiting the gleaming, mall-tastic Pudong New Area in Shanghai. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

My China was as follows:

For starters, don’t fly with China Eastern. They’re shonky. On our flight from Hong Kong to Hangzhou, the top of my left armrest broke off. The one on my right was held together with duct tape. They’re shonky.

Something that wasn’t shonky was our hotel in Hangzhou, the one and only Shangri-La. It was classic fabulousness incarnate, and my first 5-star experience. By way of example, we gave them our dirty undies to wash, and they came back neatly folded in a silk-lined basket. That’s something I could get used to.

Our first day was spent exploring Hangzhou. Hangzhou is regarded as one of the three most beautiful cities in China, and was declared by Marco Polo to be “the finest and the noblest [city] in the world“. Its centerpiece is the West Lake, a massive man-made lake surrounded by gardens, dotted with islands and pavilions, and crossed by many bridges and causeways. It certainly is beautiful. But before hitting the lake, we made a pilgrimage to the university Richard studied and lived at a couple of years ago. We saw his apartment building, the Educational Supermarket (it really is called that) and the big Mao statue. Next we went to Trustmart, a big supermarket selling live frogs and turtles, if that tickles your fancy. A short break from walking later, we explored the lake, talking a walk on a causeway with lovely gardens, and thus crossing the entire lake. It was a gorgeous walk, though the throngs of tour groups made it a little squishy sometimes. That evening we enjoyed a dinner of Hangzhouese cuisine at the hotel’s restaurant, followed by cocktails at the bar, thus furthering the fabulous expensiveness of the trip.

The next day, we went for a daytrip to Shanghai, two hours away by train. After much confusion in Hangzhou station, we found ourselves on a decent train that looked like a bargain-basement shinkansen. The only thing of note on the train was the guy sitting behind us who thought that scrolling through every ringtone on his phone would be a polite way to pass the time. Tool.

And then… Shanghai! After a food court lunch, we found our way to The Bund, thanks to Richard’s mad phat navigation skillz. The Bund makes for a lovely stroll, with the grand European buildings (now banks, mostly) on the left and the hyper-modern Pudong New Area across the river on the right. We crossed the river on the fancy new Bund Sightseeing Tunnel, which may be the most impressive waste of funds I’ve ever seen (except, perhaps, the South Australian Wine Centre). Basically, you take a little tram/monorail thing through a tunnel and enjoy a gloriously over-the-top sound and light show, all lasers and seizure-inducing flashes. It’s craptacular. Emerging on the other side of the river, we wandered around a huge mall and discovered that Dairy Queen is not as good as its many pop-culture references would suggest. Finally, we wandered back through the craptacular tunnel, through the crowded streets to a subway station, and endured the most ridiculously overcrowded train ride of my life back to South Shanghai train station. We bought our tickets back to Hangzhou and realized that we had “standing class” tickets. So we stood up for the two-hour trip back to Hangzhou, whilst people pushed around us to get hot water for their pot noodles. Fun! Or not.

Richard may not like to hear this, but I didn’t really like Shanghai much. I don’t enjoy cities for the sake of being cities, in the sense that crowds, traffic and noise don’t impress me. And from the few hours we had to see it, Shanghai felt like just a Big City (Bund and big European buildings notwithstanding). I wouldn’t rank it among the few Great Cities I’ve been to; New York, Montreal, Bangkok, Tokyo, and (as I was to discover) Hong Kong. Nevertheless, it was worth the trip to see it.

Hangzhou, on the other hand, is much lovelier, and on our last day there, we had a relaxing wander about town. We explored some gorgeous gardens around the West Lake, returned to Trustmart for supplies of Western (read: not Japanese) toothpaste, and found a really cool night market. The market was a little more classy than the usual, as in, not trashy, as in, we couldn’t afford anything much. Still, Richard got a hanko of his name in kanji, and there was a shop selling jars of dried frogs (for all your dessicated amphibian needs, I suppose).

The next day, it was off to Honkers.

A List

Yes, I have a lot of China stories and photos to share, and I'll get to that later this evening, but for now, I thought I'd share a list. I was looking around at my rather cluttered little house, and got to thinking that in a few months I'll have to fit all of this stuff into a suitcase, a backpack, and a couple of boxes for posting. Then I got to thinking that despite all the stuff lying around, I have very few mementoes of Japan that I feel the need to keep. Then, as is my wont, I made a list.

Japan-Stuff I Need To Keep
1. Keitai
2. Hanko
3. Yukata
4. Plastic tonkatsu and taiyaki lantern
5. Beer mug nicked from karaoke with karaoking-cat
6. Purikura stickers
7. Towel from the international sports festival, featuring Momichi in all his different sporting guises

That's all I can think of! I may also have to stop hoarding the mass of postcards and pictures cut out of magazines and diaries that I keep dragging around. Of course, one could say that the best mementoes are photos, of which I now have 4,892. Shashintastic, no?
This is packing business is gonna be fun. Or not.