Honeymoon: Not Rigmarole

Heather and I have been on two guided group tours during our escapades from the Land of the Early Morning Alarm Clock. One of those was in Beijing and the other was just recently in Hong Kong. Guided tours are good in the fact that they take you around to places in a convenient manner. The downside is that they conveniently take you to some places that you'd rather not go.

The Beijing tour was fairly good, but at one point they dropped us off at a ceramics factory in the middle of the countryside. After a good twenty minutes of seeing how ceramics are made, we were led to a large shop which was empty of customers, but with around ten staff who were there to entice us to part with our holiday cash.
The same thing happened on the Hong Kong tour. At one point it was the fabulous Victoria Peak, and then we found ourselves watching someone polish jewellery at the back of a warehouse. Then we ended up in a large jewellery shop and were offered a 'considerable 30% off jewellery" for guided tour customers only.

At least they gave us free coffee.

Our friendly Sikh friend agreed to let us have a photo together. It's a little hard to see, but his moustache sits horizontally in a very well-styled manner. Click the photo to enlarge. One of the ladies on the tour asked him if he 'uses anything to make it stand up like that'. He said yes, he uses hair gel.

The response I really wanted to hear was "No, actually it does that by itself."

The tour ended at a location on the far side of Hong Kong Island. There was a small market district for us to browse around and a nice beach.

I like Hong Kong taxis. They're all an identical model of a red 1980's Toyota, and there must be literally thousands of them in the city.
One of the old travelling phobias that many people have is related to having untrustworthy taxi drivers. We've probably been taken along the more scenic route to a destination a couple of times, but overall have been fairly lucky.

This area of Hong Kong is called Aberdeen, and it's a relaxing contrast to the busy streets of the Kowloon markets.

Heather and I had a beer and some of these curried fish balls by the beach.

The owner of the fish ball shop was a nice old lady who took this photo of us. Her fish balls were home made and quite good.

Thank you, fish ball lady.

One of my latest hobbies is to get my camera when Heather is busy looking through something, like her handbag or wallet. Then I say "Hey, hunni", and when she looks up, I take a photo of her. Then I have a good giggle at her inquisitive facial expressions.

Fortunately, she's well accustomed to my childish antics. I plan to start behaving more maturely next year.

That night we ate at a small restaurant around the corner from our hotel. The fried noodles in Hong Kong are done well, but they do have a noticeably oily cooking style.

This dish is called char kway teow. There are as many recipe variations as there are ways to spell it, but the basics are a brown sauce and flat white noodles. If the pan is hot enough, a pleasantly subtle smokey flavour should permeate the dish. It was one of our most popular menu items back at Casuarina, and I've wok-fried this particular dish probably more than one thousand times.

We also ordered an eggplant hot-pot and some garlic-fried gai lan. Gai lan is one of the staple greens in Chinese cooking and tastes best fried with garlic, or steamed with oyster sauce. These dishes cost us around $4 each.

Even if you don't want to buy anything, it's fun just to walk around the market districts of Hong Kong at night. The atmosphere is busy and vibrant, and the nights are warm.

This pugnacious little pup was sitting quietly on a chair, observing street life pass by with such comical indifference that I had to take a picture. Or three.

An interesting local peculiarity of walking the streets of Hong Kong is that you'll often feel a drop of water hit you from time to time. Large, intermittent drops, that are too infrequent to be rain.
They come from people's laundry that are hung up outside their apartments. Real estate is expensive and many apartments are too small to have an area for drying clothes. So the locals just hang them outside their windows. I wonder how many shirts have been lost in the wind to the trampling crowds below.

And here is the most brilliantly-titled namesake of this blogpost. 'Not Rigmarole' is the name of a private English academy in Hong Kong.

Speaking of funny names, check out the second-to-last choice on this menu.

That menu was from this lounge bar, which was similar to the disappearing 'board game cafes' of Korea. The idea is that you play a selection of board games while you enjoy some drinks and food. Heather and I played Chinese Checkers. It had been a good decade since I last played this game, and it was her first time ever.

Heather is one of those people who take five minutes to make a move. It's a cunning strategy to bore the opponent into submission.

During our stay in Hong Kong, we were at the Stanford Hotel in Kowloon. It was around US$100 per night and overall quite good. The service was fast and friendly, and in particular the concierge was very helpful to us. The room was a little small, but it's in a good location and we'd stay here again.

For breakfast we often ventured out into the streets to see what we could find. Those two dishes (egg and bacon, and beef noodle soup) actually come together as part of a set with coffee for $3.

And to cap off this post are the subway escalators of Hong Kong, which are the fastest ones I've seen. They're not irresponsibly fast, but you do get on them and think "Woah, these are a little different". One day I'll post a video of the Seoul National University subway escalators, which are probably the slowest in the world. You can receive a phone call at the bottom and be finished by the time you've reached the top. And it only moves you from B1 to ground floor.

Anyway, wifey is getting a little bored waiting for me to finish this Sunday blogpost, so that's all from me. See you in a couple of days.

Honeymoon: Victoria Peak

The funny thing about travelling is that you often end up making short-lived acquaintances with local people. Then when you look back on your photos after returning home, you remember some of them and think "Hey yeah, that person was pretty friendly."

If I ever return to Hong Kong, I'll track down this juice-lady again. Although she only met us briefly, she recognised us when we came on the second day and gave us a broad smile.

When I really think about it, I probably wouldn't mind quitting my Ph.D, opening a small juice shop and earning an honest living while giving nice smiles to strangers.

Why does life need to be more complicated?

Heather and I found a 'Sports Restaurant' in busy Kowloon, which looked a little out of place and inquisition got the better of us. Turns out there were hardly any customers and it had a theme of 'Sports and Food'. Apparently the owner thought that eating in a place with lots of pictures of sweaty basketballers might catch on.

I'm a big fan on Hainanese Chicken Rice, which you can get in Adelaide Chinatown for $5. It's basically a steamed chicken served on flavoured rice with a side dish of excellently balanced ginger and garlic sauce. The sauce goes together with the mild chicken flavour in a heavenly way.
Having not found it in Korea after 3 years of searching, I quickly ordered something that looked similar on the menu. Heather can speak Chinese quite fluently, but when reading a Chinese menu, she often ends up saying something like "Umm... this one is some kind of chicken. And this one is beef."

What ended up coming out was instead Hainanese Chicken Soup. Not quite the same, but we were still distracted by the confusing mixed sports theme anyway.

We pointed at some other enticing hieroglyphs on the menu, and out came these little fellows. They were crispy fried and had a sweet filling.

Not too bad.

It's always nice to do your own thing when sightseeing, but the downside is that you might miss some of the major attractions. We decided to go on a guided tour for a day and it turned out to be pretty good.
This lady stood in the aisle of the tour bus and commented continuously on Hong Kong customs and culture while we drove around the city. She told us that Hong Kong gets 28 million tourists per year. That's a lot of photos.

You could probably collect them all and photosynth them together.

And then there's Victoria Peak. It's the highest point on Hong Kong Island and you can get to the top by tram, bus or the longest covered escalator system in the world. Out of all the views I've seen in my life, viewing from Victoria Peak on a clear day would have to be one of the most stunning.

It's virtually impossible to come here and not take a photo of yourselves.

The Hong Kong government decided that the view of the harbour was too picturesque to disturb with bridges, so they didn't build any. The only cross-harbour traffic is via ferries and three large tunnels that go under the water. Now there's some inspirational city-planning.

The hills of Hong Kong Island contain some of the most expensive real estate in the world, and therefore attract some of the richest people in Asia. One of these includes Stanley Ho, a billionaire who had a virtual monopoly over gambling in Macau for a good 40 years. Later we found out from our Wikipedia-like tour guide that Mr Ho has a number of estates in the area.

I'm guessing he only bought them so that he can casually say to his friends over drinks "Oh, Victoria Peak... that old place? Yeah I think I've got a few mansions up there."

At the top of the peak are a few shops and restaurants. But they are really small, because the altitude up here makes the people grow shorter. Look how big Heather is in comparison.

Seeing so many matchbox houses and fleeing masses below me, I couldn't help but release the carnal Godzilla monster within me.

The photography on the walls was actually put there to cover the ventilation system of an underground building.

Even though I don't drink Coke, there's something comforting about seeing familiar brands for sale overseas. It's that same old feeling everytime: "Hey, they sell that here too!"

Next up on the tour was a boat ride on the other side of the island. They often have small printing on tourism brochures saying things like "Optional boat ride will cost an additional HK$55, which is not included in the tour fee."
Finding out about these things later doesn't disturb me too much, but it is rather difficult to skip out. And then you end up spending more on a tour which at first seemed such good value for money.

The boats were comfortable enough, and I've always liked the idea of reusing car tyres as bumpers. Makes them look friendly.

I wonder who the first person was that thought of it. And I bet you his drinking buddies never believe him.

That white yacht on the left is none other than Jackie Chan's. My claim to fame now is that I've seen it.

So I guess that gives you the ability to say that you've read the blog of a guy who's seen Jackie Chan's yacht.

This is the Jumbo Floating Restaurant, a renowned fine-dining destination on the island. Tom Cruise once ate here.

More intriguing to me than the fact that I had just seen the Floating Restaurant That Tom Cruise Once Ate At - was this friendly Sikh. We never found out his name, but he spent the day smiling at us and generally contributing to a friendly atmosphere amongst foreigners.

We chugged along the canals for a good 30 minutes. High rise apartments are often aesthetically displeasing creatures, but I still find something oddly compelling about them.

Monuments to the monotony of the middle class.

Some of the fishermen in the canals live on their boats in moored groups. Wi-Fi access is sweeping the population.

Here's us, smiling for the blog readers.

This was our boat operator, who could speak very basic English. As we were passing fishing boats along the way, he would point and say things like "Look. See. Fishing."
Short, sweet and effective.

Oh and also, I hope you're enjoying the Wikipedia-style links I'm including this time around. Not sure if I'll keep it up though.

Anyway, see you soon!