Summer journey - Week 0: Whirlwind through Hong Kong

Back to blogging at last :)

A few hours after exams ended, I was on a flight to Bombay, expecting to spend a couple of hours at the airport with my family before leaving for Hong Kong. I was seated comfortably and expecting a nice meal in the Jet flight (though I had finished dinner under an hour before). The plane was about to take-off, when the pilot abruptly braked and brought it to a rough stop. Burst tyre - what a start to the internship! Thereafter, Jolly and I had to run around to catch the only remaining flight leaving for Bombay that night - a Spicejet service with no food :( Luckily we made it just in time - something that was to get repeated for me over the next 8 1/2 weeks.

I spent less than 72 hours in Hong Kong. Focussed on seeing as much of the city as possible. Within 6 hours of reaching the city, I had tried almost all modes of public transport available in the city - train, bus, tram and taxi. Two days later, I was able to ride on a ferry as well.

I like Hong Kong. It's a slightly chaotic city. The people looked rather odd with their strange hairdoes - but were quite helpful most of the time. The city is quite shiny, to the extent of being gaudy even. We were put up in Island Pacific Hotel near the western end of the island. Two of my walls were basically glass windows, and I had a brilliant view from my room of the strait separating HK island from Kowloon Peninsula, as well as of a network of criss-crossing highways below. Mindblowing view!



On the first day, Thursday, I went with Jolly to the eastern part of HK island to an area called Causeway Bay. Causeway Bay is a nice shopping area with bright lights and impressive malls. We were both interested in shopping for electronics - he wanted a camera, I a laptop. He got his, and I was within minutes of paying for a Sony Vaio that I quite liked, but something stopped working in my head, and I decided to wait for a day - and began a saga that only ended 9 nine weeks later in Bombay with the purchase of the exact same model! But I like the FJ68 on which I am typing this entry, and all's well that ends well.

On Friday night, Jolly, Asit, InCi and I went with office people to HK's famous party district called Lan Kwai Fong. The bar we went to was called Insomnia and they had a live band playing. It was a little too crowded for me, but I nonetheless enjoyed the music and the atmosphere. We also walked around the area and I liked seeing the vibrancy and international composition of the party-goers.

On Saturday evening, we went to Kowloon on a ferry across the strait. Watching HK's skyline from the ferry was amazing. I really like cities and their tall buildings - that's why NY is high on my list of dream places to visit. Kowloon has a very large Indian-origin population apparently - the place did not feel much different from an old-fashioned shopping district in Bombay (like Linking Road). While returning there was meant to be a sky show that would be visible during the ferry ride. That was a disappointment - we could not see anything spectacular at all, only mystifying narrow beams of light. Maybe the projection is better seen from one of the coasts.

My best trip of all was on Sunday morning. Asit and I went to Victoria Peak in the south of the island. It's a wooded area with spectacular views of the city below. The bus ride to the place is awesome, with frightening twists and turns on a narrow road. We could not complete the walk to the peak itself, since I had a flight to Tokyo to catch.


Jolly and I had more adventures on our way to the airport. We were to catch a train to the airport. Tickets cost HK$130 each. Neither of us had too much HK currency on us and we scrambled to come up with the 260 bucks. Unfortunately we were short by some 10 dollars (maybe 15). We struggled for 15-20 minutes, running here and there looking for a money changer who would convert our US dollars into HK money, even offering our US dollars to random people in the vicinity. Meanwhile our flight departure time was getting ever nearer. Finally, I found some coins in my bag which helped us past the 260 mark.

Next problem - the vending machine would only accept 500 dollar notes :( We decided to try our luck at the counter. Jolly went and tried to get the tickets. He came back with a bittersweet smile - one ticket cost 130 bucks, but two cost just 160 in all! We ran to the Cathay check-in hoping to make it in time. The attendant there told us that we were not in time to send our luggage directly to the plane and that carrying it with us on the train to the airport would be impossible. Luckily, there was another flight leaving for Tokyo in an hour and she allocated us to that flight!

At 4:30 pm HK time, we left the beautiful HK airport and began the next stage of our journey - to Tokyo!