I’m in Hong Kong for the week before Easter at an investment conference, and had such an interesting first day I felt the need to share.
We left Friday night, or rather Saturday morning at 2:30 am. After several glasses of wine, a cognac and a couple melatonin pills, I slept for 9 of the 13 hour flight from Vancouver to Hong Kong. When we arrived, the Four Seasons hotel had arranged for someone to pick us up and usher us through customs to a waiting car. The picker-upper and the driver were effusively polite & helpful.
Driving through Hong Kong at 7 am on a Sunday morning was a remarkable sight. Because of the smog that comes over mainland China, only several kilometres away, the sun rose like a big orange in the sky.
We crosed a huge six lane bridge, with sloping guidewires going from 45 degrees to almost vertical as we neared each mammoth pillar.
Looking over each side of the bridge you saw the harbour piers, one after another after another after another. It looks like more business gets done in 2 km of HK harbour than all of Vancouver.
We arrived at the Four Seasons in 30 minutes, and now the sun was la ight colour of orange, and the first bits of yellow hue were starting to be visible in it. In 5-10 minutes you wouldn’t be able to look at it directly anymore.
Check in was quick, and we had paid for our rooms for Saturday night, so we went straight up and changed into our workout clothes and hit the gym. The Four Seasons did their HK hotel right. The rooms are stylish and modern, with a definite but not overpowering Asian look. Very elegant. Black and gold everything. The elevator glides up like it’s taking you to heaven – so smooth you hardly notice it moving.
The gym had everything you would expect from a high end hotel, including a high end view of the HK harbour and Kowloon peninsula, only 1 km away.
After working up a sweat I went up one floor to the huge outdoor pool. One inch square blue tiles with inlaid white designs made it almost too nice to disturb. But I jumped in and started swimming across, and about halfway dunked under, only to hear classical music at just the right volume to be pleasurable, and not annoying. I came back to surface and listened – yes it was just barely discernable – and dunked back under because hearing the music was sssoooo cool.
I confess; I’m from the country and that stuff still impresses me.
There was also an outdoor hot tub, and right beside a cool tub. Then beside that there was a deep but narrow cylinder pool. I stuck my toe in to see how hot it was – it was frigid! My companion guessed it was for the Swedes and Germans; he says they do that kind of stuff to improve circulation. I’m from the farm. Whatever.
Except – I am a coffee snob now, spoiled in Vancouver. Coffee was great at the Four Seasons, and their house tea brand, Vanilla and Lavender, was incredible. We decided to eat breakfast at a local market, so we jumped on a double decker bus and headed to Stanley Market, on the far, south side of the island.
Good thing we didn’t eat at the hotel, because I’m sure I would have brought it back up on the bus. Every bump and sway on the windy narrow roads up and down the mountainsides are 4-5x as rough on the second level of a double decker. How the guy on the other side of the aisle fell asleep I’ll never know.
It was an amazing ride, as we were able to see multiple vistas of the main commercial centre in HK, and then there was bountiful views of several bays and the hillsides on the other side of them.
HK is a series of steep mountains, and almost everywhere other than the financial district is built onto the side of a steep mountain. And they’re all very tall apartment buildings – 20 – 30 stories each. How this island has not been devastated by an earthquake, sitting in the middle of what geologists call the Ring Of Fire around the Pacific, is beyond me.
The public market at Stanley Point is a typical Asian tourist trap market full of trinkets for tourists. We found a restaurant deep inside the market, full of the locals, so we went in there for lunch. I showed them my sign in Chinese letters that said (I think) “I am allergic to shellfish and will die at this table in anaphylactic shock if you allow me to eat anything that has touched shellfish.” The sign could have said Kiss Me I Love You from the puzzled grin I got.
The Satay chicken with peanut sauce was amazing. Rice with egg and peas and processed ham was a staple and it was great. We couldn’t eat it all and it was $16 total.
After a quick walkabout, we then found the beachfront restaurant row where all the Wonder Bread crowd was hanging out under umbrellas. The eateries were mostly English style pubs, which is kind of local as HK was run by the Brits for 100 years up to 1999, but there was also a German and Spanish restaurant there.
I grew up German in Ontario, Canada, near Kitchener – which was called Berlin until just after WW1 – and it was just very odd for me to see folk urging me to come in and have a stein and pork tail.
Because we had full stomachs we decided to take a cab home. My companion’s knee was bothering him bad, so here we are back at the hotel – a full day’s adventure done and it was only 2 pm.
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