Hong Kong Holiday

So here is the reason that there have been no new postings to this blog for the past three weeks.  I have been away, spending the holidays in Hong Kong.  My wife and I were last there six years ago, and there have been astonishing changes to the city in the interim. And this Christmas we decided to take our granddaughters along with our son and his fiancée for a Christmas visit.

Hong Kong literally sparkles during the holiday season, and the tall buildings fronting the harbor are ablaze with elaborate Christmas illuminations the likes of which one seldom sees anywhere else.  Imagine the power usage in a metropolis where at all hours of the night there are enough neon signs and other lighting to read a newspaper by.  At Christmastime, multiply this by a factor of five or six.  You can take hand-held pictures at night with a digital camera, sans flash, and they'll turn out okay.

Our hotel was some distance away from the city center on Hong Kong Island, and our room overlooked the Happy Valley racecourse, where on race days there may be tens if not hundreds of thousands of gamblers in the stands.  Horse racing is the only legal form of gambling in Hong Kong, unlike neighboring Macau with its many Las Vegas style casinos.

We have good friends who are longtime residents of Hong Kong, and their presence and their hospitality made our visit all the more enjoyable. There were more luncheons and dinners (whether at their homes or in the myriad fine restaurants and clubs in different parts of the city and on the adjoining mainland of Kowloon) than any respectable gourmand could wish for.

And then there was shopping.  Yes, indeed.  It being Christmas, the stores were well and truly stocked.  All the designer houses bearing names familiar to those who keep track of such things were represented, and since our last visit there, shopping malls of great size and extravagance have sprouted in places where none had existed before.  Hong Kong in the old days (by which I mean the Fifties and Sixties) was a true shoppers' paradise, and there were many bargains to be found, in Swiss watches, fine hand-tailored Italian silk suits and brand name Japanese cameras, for example.  Today it is still a shoppers' paradise, but the bargains are no longer there, unless one takes into account the knock-off Swiss watches, Montblanc fountain pens, and designer goods that come across from China (and are illegal to bring back into the U.S.).

When the rest of the family came some days after us, we did the usual tourist things — went up to Victoria Peak on the Peak Tram for the spectacular panoramas of the city, the mainland and the harbor; rode the famous "Star" Ferry several times; traveled the very modern and efficient bus and Mass Transit Railway systems, and the Kowloon-Canton Railway line to the New Territories.

And then we took a one-day trip to neighboring Macau, the former Portuguese-administered territory on the opposite (western) side of the Pearl River estuary from Hong Kong.  The jetfoil took 45 minutes to cover the 40 or so miles, compared to the old ferries we remembered from the 1950s, which took 3 hours for the crossing. We hired a van on arrival to take us around the city, which in reality is only a few square miles in area.  The tour included the main sights of the newly-refurbished city, especially the parts that represented its four-hundred-plus years of colonial history as the first settlement by Europeans on the China coast.  We noted the plethora of new casinos, some now American-owned, the many new high-rise buildings, the land reclamations (not as extensive as Hong Kong's but still tending to overwhelm the once-charming Praia Grande), and as with Hong Kong, the exuberant Christmas decorations and illuminations around the main square.

Macau is known for its fine restaurants, serving cuisines from China as well as from Portugal, and all points in between.  Indeed, Macanese cuisine is considered by many culinary experts to be among the best fusion cuisine to be found anywhere in the world, encompassing as it does the spices of South East Asia with the freshness and delicacy of Chinese cooking and the wholesome Mediterranean fare of Portugal.

Our return to Hong Kong in late evening was an experience in waiting that might have been forestalled had we bought two-way jetfoil tickets at the outset.  Instead we had to contend with long lines of returning gamblers anxious to get back to Hong Kong as soon as possible.

After our granddaughters left for home, we went to stay with our good friends for a few days at their comfortable home in a bucolic part of the countryside of Kowloon known as the New Territories. The term 'New' derives from the fact that the Territories were ceded to the British for 99 years in 1898, some 56 years after they first acquired the island of Hong Kong.  In 1997, as we know, the former British Crown Colony was returned to China and became a Special Administrative Region, as was Portuguese-administered Macau two and a half years later.

As we neared the end of our visit, our hosts took us in their cabin cruiser for a leisurely afternoon cruise around the lovely bays and beaches of a serene and unspoiled part of Hong Kong.  The excursion showed us a face of the territory that few tourists ever have a chance to visit, and we were most grateful for this fresh experience.

It was quite warm in Hong Kong for the better part of our stay, with temperatures in the 70oF range, and only turned colder the day we left.

Our flight back to San Francisco took about eleven hours, a shade under the time it took for us to get to Hong Kong.  The jetstream must have helped speed us home.