"hong kong" in Weblog

Missed travel connections seems to be becomming a theme for my holiday. Emma and I were supposed to be flying to Shanghai last Sunday but we were told at check-in that her visa wasn’t valid. Hong Kong airport has check-in facilities in Central, which is an absolutely brilliant service, making the process almost entirely painless. Normally. It also meant that we were near the China Travel Service office, that issues visas. Emma headed over there to try and get her passport sorted, intending to catch a later flight while I continued on to the airport because my tickets weren’t changeable. After some frantic phone calls from the boarding gate we finally decided that the visa just wasn’t going to get sorted out in time so I had to walk away from the flight, get my bag offloaded and go sit in customs while they cancelled the exit stamp in my passport. They actually put a big stamp saying ‘cancelled’ over the exit visa, which is going to make immigration interesting for the rest of my passport’s natural life. Ah well.

It all worked out okay in the end though. We were able to go on the Pro-democracy march instead and spent a couple of lazy days in Hong Kong shopping. Word to the wise: apparently Granville Road is absolutely amazing for women’s clothes… I’ve been going there for years and had never been particularly impressed but Emma loved it - loads of little boutique-type places selling indie designer items. We were there for hours!

Emma flew home on the Tuesday and I hooked up with my mate George for a quick trip into China. On Wednesday we were up early and on the high speed ferry from Kowloon to Shenzhen, which was very efficient and, as far as I can tell, is the easiest way to get to the airport from Hong Kong. From there we jumped an internal flight to Xian with Hainan Airlines. I was expecting a hamster powered flying box with wings made out of egg cartons and sticky-back plastic but we got a brand spanking new Airbus that delivered us to central China exactly on time.

Xian was a bit of a surprise. I was expecting the city to be quite big but with a small town feel, since the city center is cut off from the rest of the sprawl by restored city walls, but it is SO much bigger than that. The taxi from the airport took perhaps an hour and a quarter, with most of that time spent driving through sprawling suburbs. The rest of the time passed sitting in horrendous traffic and dodging other cars, pedestrians and donkey carts as everyone competed for road space, changing lanes at will, cutting through gaps and occasionally dashing against the traffic to gain position. I’ve never seen anything quite like it!

The most surprising thing has been the pollution. Visibility is perhaps half a mile, muting all light and destroying the famous views from the Great Goose Pagoda and the city walls. It’s a city of 7 million people so I should have expected all this really. While I’m on the subject, the horrendous air quality in Hong Kong and macao also shocked me, although this is apparently the fault of their ugly, unregulated cousin Shenzhen (who lives just up the Pearl River delta). I’ve not seen a sunset in weeks - the sun just disappears into a yellow haze about 15 degrees above the horizon. We woke up this morning to a beautiful orange sky silhouetting a monster coal-burning power station somewhere South of Datong belching heavy smoke from its stacks. I guess air pollution is a problem common to many of China’s cities…

That’s it for first impressions. I’ll get cracking on what I’ve actually been doing now. Back in a bit!

After an last minute abort of our Shanghai ticket (I made it all the way to boarding before bailing after Emma’s visa was found to be expired) we found ourselves with an extra few days in Hong Kong. What was going on yesterday? The pro-democracy march. We couldn’t sit around and let that happen without us so we headed down to Wan Chai and joined in. I’m not exactly a protesting veteran so I only have the London anti war marches for comparison but I wanted to write down my impressions (for a visual account I have a Hong Kong Pro-democracy March photo group on Flickr).

From reading the local paper, the self-censoring South China Morning Post, I got the impression that the march was going to be a meager affair. This was compounded by the tiny turnout for the buildup to the march outside the Legco building last weekend. I know that 500,000 people turned out to the last one but I was really worried that this one was going to be a failure, signalling the slow decline of the democratic aspirations of the Hong Kong people.

We had to ask police for directions to the march since we couldn’t find a route on the web and I have to say that I’ve never met more helpful coppers. We talked to 3 or 4 and all of them were incredibly polite and helpful, pointing us in the right direction and telling us where the best place was to intercept the march. Following these directions we hit the procession just outside Pacific Place… And the mass of people stretched back for as far as I could see.

The official count from the government today is set at 63,000 people but I am absolutely certain that this figure is FAR, FAR short of the real turnout. The organisers estimate 250,000 and I think this closer to the truth. The scale of the protest was definitely comparable to the London ones from a few years ago. The crowd was a facinating mix of ages and backgrounds, with whole families turning out. The crowd was remarkably passive, although I did see one woman being carried off by police, with photographers in hot pursuit.

I was quite disappointed to find that the march ended up outside an obscure government building behind Queens Road Central, instead of the Legco building. The government had organised a children’s play day outside their seat of power, which just happened to co-incide with the march and prevent the protesters from coming anywhere near their legislature. I can’t believe that this wasn’t engineered… Instead the marchers were forced to wend their way up Battery Path, behind the HSBC building, taking them away from the center of town.

At the end of the march people tied their ribbons and stuck their stickers onto the railings outside the building to register their presence. We were there early but already they were covered… Will the Chinese government ever agree to free elections in one of their SARs?

I’m currently in Hong Kong! I’ll be here for a couple of weeks before heading over to Shanghai for a few days and Xian after that to take a look around.

Things could have started more smoothly… While I was walking to the train station on Monday morning, bag on my back, I got a call from my mate George in Hong Kong to say that the place I was staying had accidentally cancelled my room booking. They wouldn’t have another available until Friday. Great. Then I arrived at the airport to find that Cathay had misplaced my seat booking as well. Again, great. I was travelling standby and the flight was overbooked so even after they found my listing I still had to wait until 10mins before the gates closed to be given my ticket. A sprint through customs ensued, finishing in record time: 7mins from check-in to boarding, 3mins to spare!

The flight was awesome, once I got on. I had a jump seat, which was up in front of first class and incredibly comfy. A couple of movies and a decent kip later, we landed in Hong Kong. Because I was one of the last people on the plane, my bag was one of the first off so I was out of HK customs and on a train into town in about 15mins, to be met by George and a fried breakfast.

We spent the day sorting out an alternative hotel (Garden View, facing out over Central and Admiralty, giving me a grandstand view of the city lights) and checking out my old camera kit and electronics shopping haunts. Geeky? Yep. Oh, and I narrowly escaped being sharked by an old chap playing some kind of card game. He saw Gerorge and I watching and offered us a game for money. It seemed to be something a little like snap, where the players take it in turns to throw down a stick-like card and then try to pair it up with one of the ones already on the table. My pathetic Cantonese vocab includes ‘No, thank you’ so I walked away with my cash intact.

Hong Kong hasn’t changed at all since I was last here. I can still remember my way around and it’s still as entertaining as ever just to wander around. I don’t have anything planned until Saturday so I intend to take it easy, steal lots of photos and book my flight to Xi an for early December…