One last Hong Kong post

I think it is worth telling you all about our second day in Hong Kong in regular, chronological narrative form. It kind of demonstrates the kind of experience we had in a way that showing you a bunch of photos at once doesn't do.

We started by walking over to Whampoa, and catching the ferry to North Point.

We walked around that neighbourhood for a few minutes, just taking it all in, before catching the train to Causeway Bay to visit the library.

Because, you see, my iPod wasn't the most convenient in Hong Kong.  Our hotel had free internet.  That's internet, not wifi.  Doh.  But there was plenty of free wireless around Hong Kong - public parks, for example, all offered free government wifi.  But the other thing we didn't bring was an adaptor, so I could only charge my iPod through a USB.  So to the library we went, to charge iPods, email parents, and check up on students.

We got a teensy bit lost finding the train station to head further in towards Central.  But, when we got off the train, we had no trouble finding Hong Kong Park.  We saw a vegetarian tea house, and I got a little excited, but it wasn't yet open.  Instead, we went straight to our intended destination - the Flagstaff Teaware Museum.  This is an old colonial building that now houses exhibitions dedicated to all things tea.

When we finished looking at interesting tea pots (and I began longing for an elephant-shaped tea pot for our kitchen), we went back to the tea house.  But, it was booked out - and a good thing, because I think we would have been underdressed.  It looked like a popular destination for Ladies Who Lunch.  Instead, we ordered a turnip cake and fried mushroom dumplings and ate them next to a pond in the park.

We caught the Peak Tram up Victoria Peak, the big mountain that Hong Kong city crowds around.  The tram was steep and messed with our perceptions of the buildings.

At the top, we walked around a little, but were a bit overwhelmed.  At this point we were hot, and tired, and had been deposited by the tram into a massive shopping mall (as we came to realise is the case at basically every train stop). 

The view was stunning, but our legs and feet were tired so we kind of didn't appreciate it as much as we should have. 

But we did pose for some self-timer photos.

We got the tram back down the hill.

And then tried to locate a few of the veggie restaurants I had identified using my fail-proof google maps strategy.  The strategy was this -- I printed off a google map of each section of the city we were likely to visit.  On these maps were marked all the vegetarian restaurants (that are listed on google, I guess) in that neighbourhood, with the little marker on the map, and the list with the name of the restaurant and the address.  This seemed to me like a good idea before we left.  But in practice, the maps weren't zoomed in far enough to navigate very successfully.  And the addresses on the list were often written in Chinese characters.  Der.  So my failproof method resulted in lots of walking around, completely clueless as to where we needed to be.  So on this day, it was probably 1 or 1.30 when we started looking for lunch.  We were heading to the nearest restaurant on the little google map first.  But we got to the end of that street and hadn't passed it.  So we headed towards The Centre, an impressive building which, according to our google map, had a veggie place really close by.

At this point, it was probably 2.00 or so, and we were tired and hungry.  We weren't even taking in the sights as we walked around, because we were cranky and a bit miserable.  We retraced our steps, we scrutinised the maps, we figured out that it had to be down this little alley-way... but when we got there, we saw only one tiny hole-in-the-wall with no English language anywhere.  It may have been the one, but we weren't brave enough to try it out.  But, we had been walking for at least an hour, probably closer to two.  So we were tiiiiired.  So when we saw a sign for foot massage upstairs, and made a beeline straight for it.  Let me tell you, that was the best decision we made on the whole trip.  An hour of watching Shanghai Knights and drinking cold water in an air conditioned room while people rubbed our tired, sore legs and feet was exactly what we needed.  Even though it delayed our meal even further, comfort beat out hunger on that afternoon.

Feeling a bit refreshed, we realised we were close enough to a third restaurant to try and locate it.  At this point we were all the way up in Sheung Wan, which is a fair walk (or maybe it's not and my memory is deceiving me!).  We located the corner it had to be near, and we walked back and forth a few times and then... Andy spotted a green "Vegetarian Food" sign! Success!  I have never been so relieved to sit down and have a menu placed in front of me.  The restaurant we had found was Po Lin Yuen Restaurant in Shueng Wan.  It was 4pm, and there was almost no one else there, so service was prompt.  It wasn't gourmet, or particularly healthy, but like the foot massage, it was exactly what we needed.

We had salt and pepper tofu, deep fried with a silky-smooth inside.

We got some sweet and sour veggie pork, which was crunchy mock meat nuggets coated in a sticky, sweet sauce, with yummy fresh pineapple chunks.

And we healthified it slightly with Buddha's Delight, a dizzying array of mushrooms with veggies and crunchy noodles.

After that, we realised how close we were to the Macau ferry terminal, and walked along the harbourside back to Central Pier, where we watched the sun set. 

Then we caught the ferry back to Tsim Sha Tsui to watch the light show, which was less impressive than the number of people who gathered to see it.

We didn't get back to our hotel until after 9pm, and we were stuffed.  It was a big day, with lots of walking, sweating, getting lost, being hungry, and grouching at each other.  Luckily the rest of our days weren't like this, otherwise my overall opinion of Hong Kong would be very different!

This is the last of my Hong Kong-specific posts, up next is Switzerland...

Hong Kong: The things we ate

Eating was good in Hong Kong.  We had a tendency to eat a big, late lunch every day, and to supplement that main meal with breakfast in our hotel room and a snack-sized dinner.

For breakfasts, we had lots of gorgeous ripe dragon fruits.

Bananas, which was a nice change after coming from Australia where they were, at that point, still $12 a kilo.

And we ate a lot of bread and (no frills) peanut butter.

And all of this was made possible thanks to the awesome spoons we bought.

Lunches were nothing short of amazing.  On our first day, we (eventually) managed to find M Garden, in Mongkok, which had a huge menu.  We were pretty hungry, so we ordered lots.

Smoked goose rolls, which were veggies rolled up in yuba skin.

Vegan sashimi - Andy thought this might be interesting, and it was, but not in a way that either of us would order again.  It was basically a salty agar jelly, which tasted ever so slightly of the sea.

Salt and pepper vegan pork, crunchy and greasy and salty and oh my.

And BBQ 'suckling pig' with steamed buns.  Yeah, it's totally weird to think about eating suckling pig, even if it doesn't contain any animal products.  But, I'm a sucker for steamed buns, and Andy is a sucker for BBQ.  So we ordered this, and I'm glad we did.  It was really delicious, with crunchy mock meat, tangy five spice BBQ sauce, and fluffy buns.

We also visited Kung Tak Lam in One Peking Tower, a fancier-feeling place in Kowloon with beautiful views over the Harbour towards Hong Kong Island as we ate.  I didn't take any photos at this meal (because I forgot, I think).  But, we had two main meals and some yum cha.  The mains were Veggie Chicken with cashews & spicy sauce, and Mushrooms on a sizzling plate.  This was very impressive - they poured the sauce over the mushrooms at the table, so it was all sizzly and the sauce got sticky.  We also ordered spring rolls, vegetarian steamed buns, and a silverthread bun, which was kind of sweet.  All of this costed us AU$31.  So, whoo!


Another lunch was at the Chi Lin Vegetarian Tea House, within the grounds of the Nan Lian Garden.  I didn't take photos there, because there was a sign saying 'no photos'.  Boo.  We ordered the five dish set menu, and I'm not sure we got everything we paid for, but we were full at the end of the meal.  There was battered & deep fried eggplant (which proved difficult for two novice chop stickers to pick up), enoki mushrooms with greens, bean curd in spicy sauce, yuba wraps filled with Chinese amaranth, and shredded potatoes with seasonal veggies.  The meal was really good, but in a very different way to most of the food we ate.  It felt healthy, and was more about natural flavours rather than sticky sauces.

Our final big meal in Hong Kong was at the Po Lin Monastery, at the base of the Big Buddha.  There were two set menu options - we opted for the Deluxe, for HK$120, or AU$15.  As an added bonus, if you pre-buy a meal ticket you get to go up to the highest pedestal and get views like this:

That meal started with a very interesting soup, which had shreds of mushrooms and yuba, and instead of being brothy was kind of gooey.  This makes it sound not good, but it was amazing.  I willfully ignored the 'no photos' sign and snapped the soup, but Andy guilted me into putting my camera away after the first course.

The rest of the meal was braised lettuce with shiitake mushrooms; mixed veggies with cashews; spring rolls; and lemon bean curd, which was food from the gods.  The lemon sauce was so sweet, tart, and morish.  I really couldn't get enough.  All up, this may have been the best meal we had, except that we were so close to the air conditioner which was on full blast, so the food all went cold before we got to taste it all.

Our dinners were much less exciting.  We found some vegan kimchi flavoured instant noodles, which we cooked in the hotel microwave.

We frequented a street stall selling yummy fried tofu.

And on the last night, we made an exciting discovery.  About 10 metres from our hotel was a small, hole-in-the-wall vegetarian restaurant.  If only we had found it earlier.  We went for dinner before our flight, but we were still a bit full from our massive meal at the Big Buddha.  So instead of ordering from the menu, we picked some tasty-looking morsels from the window at the front.  Andy ordered, while I sat with our stuff and felt tired - hot chose spring rolls, BBQ pork steam buns, spinach dumplings, and a plate with tofu, eggplant and capsicum.  We assumed that the food from the window would be freshened up, or cooked somehow, and this was the case for the dumplings and the buns which had to be steamed.  And the tofu & veggie plate was heated in the microwave... but the spring rolls came out cold.  And they weren't very good.  After starting to eat, Andy felt hungry for a proper-sized dinner, so he ordered a second round: steamed spinach bunns, broccoli dumplings, and a plate with four kinds of veggie meat made of yuba and gluten with different flavours.  And, for dessert, some sweet steamed buns.  This was so much food, and we were way too full.  And I ended up feeling sick for the whole 13 hour flight out of Hong Kong, which I put down to the spring rolls.

Aside from that veggie place next door, the other great find of our trip was mochi.  I know this isn't a new thing to a lot of people, but neither Andy nor I had tried it before.  But we fell in love.  We started with peanut, and liked it so much that we bought sesame and red bean as well, and then fresh mochi whenever we found it on the street.  So. good.

I don't think I've ever eaten so well (and so cheaply!) as I had in Hong Kong...

Hong Kong: Temples and Gardens

There are lots of things to say about Hong Kong.  Like, all the free wifi all over the city.  Lots of public parks had free wireless access, but since we didn't have a converter for my iPod charger I couldn't make very much use of it.  But it's nice that it's there!  And shopping! Hong Kong has more shopping than anyone could want, from the cheap stuff at markets to the high end shopping centres.  In fact, pretty much every train station is also a shopping mall.  We were more keen on the markets, though we were a little surprised to find a sex toy section in the Temple Street Night Markets.  But we didn't buy much, sex toys or other souvenirs, because we were at the start of our trip and were smugly travelling lightly, with nothing but backpacks. 

From sex toys to religion... I don't have a transition for this, because (as you can see) Hong Kong is a giant mix-up of everything you could want to do, see, experience, and as a result my stories about it are also a mix-up.

Hong Kong had loads of temples, and the thing I found interesting was that while they were centred on one of the three main religions (Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism), most had space for all three religions within their walls.

Tin Hau temple in Kowloon - the reason the photo looks hazy is because of all the incense smoke.

 

Temple of 10,000 Buddhas.  This place... we had read really good things about it on the internet before we left Australia.  The directions to get there seemed pretty straight forward.  We got the train, and got off at the right station, and looked for signs, but managed, somehow, to go out the wrong exit.  We found ourselves walking around Sha Tin, which is in Hong Kong's New Territories, for about an hour.  The New Territories is the mainland China part of Hong Kong, and it felt very Chinese -- in contrast to most of the city, which just felt like a city.  It was an interesting walk, but when we eventually found where we needed to go, it turned out to be about 3 minutes from the train station.  Der.

And, in the end, the temple didn't really live up to the hype.  Most of the temple was storage for cremated remains, so it felt a bit funny to be touristing while people were visiting dead relatives.  But the Buddhas were pretty.

Outside the temple were these friendly cats.

Nan Lian Garden, outside the Chi Lin Nunnery.  This was a gorgeous gem in the city - a traditional Tang Dynasty garden that was all about meditation and contemplation.  There were rules forbidding "frolicking" and posing for photos in "costumes" like graduation gowns or wedding dresses.

Behind that waterfall was the Chi Lin Vegetarian Tea House, where we ate lunch.  It was really lovely looking out the window and seeing water falling over the glass.

The view from the steps of the Chi Lin Nunnery over its internal gardens, with the city-scape in the background.

At the Man Mo Temple, in SoHo, these massive coils of incense provided a smoky atmosphere but left tourists at risk of ashy heads.

Hong Kong doesn't seem to discriminate, though - we also found this mosque.

And this Christian Church.  We just happened to pass on a Sunday, so we stopped to watch the complex car parking situation that was going on.  Most cars got to the bottom of the hill, at the red and white road block that you can just see in the bottom centre of the photo, and were diverted into a parking garage.  But the flash, very expensive cars, were allowed up the hill, where they attempted 37-point turns (give or take) to squeeze into a very crowded parking lot.  All so they didn't have to walk up the hill before church.

On our last day we went to Lantau Island and spent a few hours marvelling at the Big Buddha.  This 34m tall bronze Buddha was a popular tourist destination, for good reason.

Just as interesting as walking up to the statue was poking through the Po Lin Monastery at the base of the giant Buddha.

 Waiting for the bus to go back down the hill, we made friends with this Temple Cow.

These temples were much needed pockets of serenity in the midst of a crazy-big city, so we spent lots of time in them.  Not to mention that almost all had veggie restaurants attached to them...

Walk On, Hong Kong

Towards the end of our trip, and since we've returned, people have asked which stop was our favourite, and the answer is the same for both Andy and I: Hong Kong.  It was interesting, cheap, and easy to get around.  The public transport system made sense. The food was good (so good, in fact, that I will feature it in a post or two of its own).  The people were friendly enough, with people approaching us to ask if we needed help on the more than regular occasions that we looked lost.  The city was beautiful, the harbour was a great feature, and everything was cheap!

Only, when I think back to the specifics, it was crowded, and hot, and we got lost many times each day.  As great as the public transit system is, it took us a while to fully sort it out.  That, and we were touristing, so we wanted to see as much as we could.  So we walked.  A lot. More than was probably smart to do.  We did see a lot, but we had tired, sore legs.

We first got lost the moment we got off the bus from the airport.  We knew our hotel was only a minute or two from the stop, but we didn't know in which direction.  So we walked, at about 9pm, through what we later discovered is Hong Kong's funeral district.  When we found our hotel, the Bridal Tea House Wuhu Street, we were a little trepidatious.  After the 8 hour flight, and a half hour of walking around, we were hoping for some comfort, but all the guidebooks and internet reviews kept our hopes for any Hong Kong accommodation low.  But, we found that our room was clean, comfortable, and absolutely what we needed.  The shower was good, the bed was too short for Andy but at least had space for his feet to hang over the edge.  And the air conditioning proved a life saver, even for two Townsvillains who smugly refuse to use aircon at home.

We did loads of things in Hong Kong.  I'll start with Kowloon, the second-citiest part of the city, across the harbour from Hong Kong Island.  This is where our accommodation was, and where loads of backpacker rooms can be found.  It's also home to the Gold Fish markets, a strip of two blocks or so of non-stop pet shops.  Most were centred around fish tanks, and they tended to specialise - in aquarium equipment, or plants, or, most strikingly, fish.  The freshwater fish were often pre-bagged, ready for quick sale.

The tiny turtles (and also tortoises) clambered over one another in tanks open on the street.

And the marine fish were abundant, and cheap - clownfish selling for the equivalent of AU$4.

Something we learned the hard way: the Gold Fish markets (and the Jade Markets, for that matter) don't start early.  On our first morning, we woke up early due to time zone changes.  Andy seemed to remember that these markets were best early in the day, so off we trekked (taking goodness knows how many wrong turns on the way).  But they were totally empty.  When we came back at 3pm, it was a totally different scene.  In fact, we learned that Hong Kong in general sleeps in quite late.  Most shops open at 10, 11 or 12, but they stay open until midnight.

As a vegan and a crowd-hater, though, I was much more comfortable in the little produce market we found (oddly, flanked by gun shops).

We also made a habit, throughout our trip, of visiting grocery stores in every place.  This was for practicality (buying food) as much as for sight-seeing.

 

We weren't brave enough to try the wolfberry & white fungus flavoured instant oatmeal.

But we were taken with the "No Frills Brand" peanut butter - we ate this whole jar in 4 days.

Mainly, though, it was about the skyline, especially from Tsim Sha Tsui.

And sitting at Central Pier on Hong Kong Island at sunset was pretty stunning, too.

Now, I have plenty more to share, but I will save the rest for another post.