Hong Kong
Macau
The following morning I caught a bus to
I walked into the infamous Chungking Mansions, a series of dilapidated concrete high-rise buildings containing the city’s only real budget accommodations, and immediately felt totally out of place. Though the elevator lobby was packed with people, I was the only white guy around, and everyone was speaking languages I didn’t understand. But the people weren’t Chinese, and the languages they were speaking weren’t Mandarin and Cantonese—the people were West African, and the languages were French, Wolof, and other West African tongues. How Chungking Mansions became the African capital of Hong Kong I do not know. But soon enough I had found a Senegalese man who spoke English, and we struck up a conversation about my recent trip to Senegal and The Gambia. He wanted to know what I had done there, so I explained that I had spent most of my time repairing a Mitsubishi 4x4. He seemed confused.
I checked into Payless Guest House, which was supposedly the cleanest of the bunch. My room was a prison cell, but I didn’t mind—the floor and the bed were spotless, and I even had my own shower, though I couldn’t extend my arms without opening a window. The owner of the guest house’s name was Jackey Chan. When he introduced himself, I chuckled, but he didn’t seem the catch the humor.
I spent the afternoon getting a feel for the city by wandering around Hong Kong Island and then going up to the 43rd floor of the Bank of China Tower for a panoramic view of the city. The skyline was impressive, with the exception of the smog that hung over the island and the surrounding harbor. That evening, I watched a light show from the Kowloon side of the harbor—all the skyscrapers on Hong Kong were lit up, and colored lights were flashing all over the sky. And this light show happens every evening in Hong Kong. This place is more outrageous than New York.
The ever-informative Facebook.com told me that a friend of mine from New York, Yuzhen Zheng, was in the city for a visit, and I met up with her and two of her friends that night to go up to Victoria Peak, the highest point on Hong Kong Island. Her friends, Kamal and Daphne, were a young married couple who had lived in Hong Kong for a few years and were quite friendly. Kamal drove us up to the peak in his grey BMW, which was the nicest vehicle I’d been in I quite some time.
We climbed up to the viewing platform on top of Victoria Peak for a nice nighttime view of the city. I’m convinced the night view is far superior to the day for one reason: no smog. We went for drinks and dessert at a restaurant on the Peak, and it was there that I explained to Kamal and Daphne (and Yuzhen) what I’d been doing for the past few months.
“So wait, you could have worked in Hong Kong and you said no?” Kamal asked incredulously.
“Yeah. I decided I wasn’t sure if this was really somewhere I would want to live,” I replied.
“Are you crazy? You’re white! Do you know how many girls you could get in Hong Kong? This place is a white man’s paradise!”
“Yeah, but I don’t know if I’m after those kind of girls.”
“What do you mean? Trust me man, they’d be all over you.”
“Yeah, but I bet I know why. And it wouldn’t be for my good looks and charm, or for my modesty, right?”
“Dude, whatever, they’d love you.”
“Yes, but why would they love me? There must be some reason that Chinese girls in Hong Kong like white guys, right?”
“Yeah—they have money!”
I decided to drop the subject.
The next morning Yuzhen and I took the metro out to Lantau Island, which is twice the size of Hong Kong Island but which has a population of only 50,000 and is almost entirely still covered in forest. Our destination was the Tian Tan Buddha, a huge bronze statue that sits atop a hill in Lantau’s interior, but to get there we had to spend over an hour on one of the curviest, most nausea-inducing bus rides I’d ever taken. By the time we arrived at the base of the hill, we were more than happy to climb the 300 steps up to the Buddha if it meant not sitting on that bus anymore.
We checked out the Buddha and a monastery next door called Po Lin, but then it started raining so we headed back to Kowloon for dim sum with Kamal, Daphne, and some of their friends. I’d had dim sum once in New York, but this was far better. Probably because we let Kamal and Daphne do all the ordering.
Kamal and Daphne wanted to take us to Kamal’s parents’ country club that night to watch the horse races, but by this time Macau’s casinos were calling my name, so I excused myself and walked down to the ferry terminal to see how I could get to Macau. It turned out that the ferry ran all night, so I decided to postpone to trip until later that evening and meet a friend of mine from Morgan Stanley for dinner.
Dinner was a lot of fun, and I didn’t end up making it back to the ferry terminal until nearly midnight, which meant I didn’t make it to Macau until 1am. But the walk from the ferry terminal to the casinos was a breeze, because the casino’s neon lights managed to light up the whole city.
I won’t bore you with the details of my gambling, but I will tell you that I spent most of my time in the Wynn and the Grand Lisboa, and that I was down in a major way until I managed to battle back and finish a few hundred dollars in the black. But the highlight of the night was my visit to The Venetian, which is currently the largest casino in the world. The colossal building sits in the middle of a lake, and the interior is even more impressive than Vegas’ version of Venice.
Just before sunrise I checked out some of colonial Macau’s cathedrals, and then I headed back to Hong Kong, exhausted, on the 7am ferry. I slept most of the morning, and squeezed in a ride on the Peak Tram before catching the ferry back to Shenzhen for my flight to Zhang Jia Jie. My afternoon trip to Victoria Peak confirmed my earlier suspicion about the daytime view of Hong Kong—with all the smog, I couldn’t see a thing. The good news is, I think the Chinese may have come up with a solution to their population problem: it’s called Black Lung.
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