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.