China

 by Red

Hong Kong: Living Large In Small Spaces

Date: 14 Mar 2011

Arriving into Kowloon at in the evening, we took the train to catch the daily impressive symphony of lights in Hong Kong harbour. Apparently, foreigners and mainland Chinese tourists view this spectacle at least once during their stay here. After the show, (sadly the commentary that day was in the Cantonese dialect), we proceeded next to find our quarters for the night. On another day, and travelling with another person, KW would probably be staying in a fancy posh HK hotel. Unfortunately for him, he’s with me, and add to that the exorbitant hotel room prices here in HK, we will slum it out in Kowloon.

Living Large In Small Spaces


Back in Kowloon, we walked along Nathan Road, wherein lies our destination. Chungking Manor, the setting for Wong Kar Wai’s 1994 masterpiece, Chungking Express. Chungking Manor is actually an old apartment building located in the Tsim Tsa Shui area of Kowloon district. It lies smack along the busy Nathan Road, overlooking a sea of traffic. Within Chungking Manor lies dozens of little establishments offering cheap lodging. And further down the road, a similar building offers the same. This one, Mirador Mansion, was the one we ended up in.

The ground floor of the building is made up of many different little shops, and a cluster of money-changers. The maze-like corridors of shops could certainly do with better lighting. At the staircase landing, someone will undoubtedly come up to anyone who looks like a non-local, and offer cheap lodging, at fairly reasonable prices (they have to, if you think of it, just because of the intense competition for customers). So unless you know specifically where you want to go, or have plenty of time to shop around for a place you like, it makes sense to follow the person and check out his place.

In our case, it was a lady that offered to show us her guesthouse, which is actually a cluster of rooms on one of the floors inside the building. The “office” where they work out from is one of the apartments. The lift is dingy, slow, yet there was constant traffic of people going up and down. Similarly, the corridor is grimy, with dried stains which looked as though a trigger-happy betel-nut chewing auntie had passed through. “Well, I’ve been in worse”, I comforted myself. The lady passed us the room key. “I mean, how bad can it be right?”


Surprisingly, once we turned the key, the interior was a clean, bright room, with twin beds, nice white sheets and a tiny bathroom. Not what I expected, considering the outside corridor. It was very tight quarters though, with the door opening narrowly missing the corner of one of the beds. No matter, the room was sufficient, air-conditioned even.

Out we go for dinner. Again, as elsewhere in Hong Kong, space is a premium. The pizza joint where we had dinner was yet another example of making full use of limited space. A short flight of steps wound up to the 2nd floor (1st floor was a storefront), and led to the 5x3m waiting area. Indeed, the eatery seemed like it was set within the confines of a 5 room Singaporean HDB flat.

Savouring Bits of Hong Kong

Recall the story of the 5 blind men feeling various parts of an elephant, with each concluding with different ideas of what an elephant is. Hong Kong here is the elephant, and with so many things to do, different visitors would have different experiences. Some think of HK as a big financial center, some know it as a cacophony of noise within the side streets, offering cheap eats and street charms. Yet others consider it an outdoor heaven, outside of the city lies expanses of hills and trekking opportunities. Me? I’m the blind man who sees it as a shopping mecca. Mongkok, Kowloon was where we headed for. Stores and stores of electronic gadgets line the streets. Step into one, look around. Two shops down, another gadget shop. And then another. It was hard not to get into the groove. I ended up purchasing a new Asus notebook, a pair of cargo pants off Esprit (buttoned pockets are great for travelling) and more fancy gadgets.

One final thing. The HK metro system has a direct line that goes to the HK International airport. Known as the Airport Express, it goes from Hong Kong station down to the airport station. The brilliant thing about this Airport Express is that it conveniently allows tourists to check-in and deposit their luggage at the Hong Kong and Kowloon stations. How’s that when you want to continue shopping without lugging your gear about!

 HK definitely deserves repeat visits. All you regulars who go there frequently, will surely agree.

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 by Red

Macau = Tasty Pastéis de Nata

Most people go to Macau to gamble. I go to Macau to eat Portuguese egg tarts.

The former Portuguese colony officially became part of China in 1999, as one of two Special Administrative Region (SAR) of China. It still maintains a high degree of autonomy and runs its own currency, education and legislative systems. The official languages are Portuguese and Cantonese, even though almost all the citizens are Chinese, with only 2% or so being Macanese, a mix of Chinese and Portugese ancestry.

 

Besides the casinos, of which there are many, including those along the new Cotai strip touted as the Las Vegas of the east, the other main draw is the mix of Portugese architecture and culture here, the result of more than 400 years of Portuguese interaction with the Chinese.

So in the morning of 13th Mar 2011, we took the bus back from Kaiping, China to the Border Gate in Zhuhai and crossed back into Macau. That was about noon, and we had a few hours in the Macau Peninsula before taking the 530pm fast ferry to Hong Kong, the third leg of this trip.

We headed out by public bus towards the ruins of St. Paul’s Cathedral, which was the main highlight of this UNESCO heritage area. It was crowded. You get all sorts of tourists, Westerners, Asians (mainland Chinese, Indonesians, Filipinos) all posing in front of the impressive façade, the only remains of the cathedral. Around the area, within walking distance, lies the Outer Walls of the old Fortress, whose interior has now been transformed into the ultra-modern Macau Museum.

That done, we walked down the narrow streets leading out from the cathedral towards the Largo do Senado, a pedestrian square where neo-classical buildings give the area a charming feel. And the mild weather adds to the general atmosphere. Interestingly enough, there was a protest by what appeared to be marginalized old wives (or something, neither of us spoke or read Cantonese).

The walk from the cathedral to the square was interesting enough, through the throng of human traffic, mostly camera toting tourists and souvenir hunters. The souvenirs here are the almond cookies and wife cakes and Portuguese egg tarts, of which I bought plenty. Almost every other shop on the stretch is a bakery selling these sweets.

Evening. An easy ride to the harbour, and we are on the fast ferry to Kowloon, Hong Kong. Next up: Hong Kong skyline by night and the symphony of lights in Hong Kong Harbour.

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 by Red

The Watchtowers of Kaiping

The Kaiping Diaolou are a cluster of stone watchtowers located in Kaiping, in the Guangdong province of China, built in the 1920s and earlier. These watchtowers are fascinating because they are a mix of eastern and western architectural influences. You can see how pillars and domes are built atop the towers instead of traditional Chinese style roofs found during the time. Because of this, the entire area around Kaiping has been designated a UNESCO heritage site in 2007.

How do these towers come about? Apparently, in the early part of the 20th century, emigrants from China worked elsewhere in the world: in North America, Canada, around South east Asia (Malaysia), and when they returned home, they build these towers with features from buildings found from those places. So you get influences from baroque architecture, with inlets, domes, and plenty of lines and curves running around the towers. Actually I half expected to see one of those stone gargoyles perched atop these towers.

What are these towers for? Banditry was a problem back then, even way before the 1920s when most of the towers were built. So villagers, in an effort to combat the banditry, built these defense towers out of solid concrete, with grills on windows and big iron doors. In the event of a bandit attack, they would leave their homes and gather inside these towers. With some as high as seven storeys, the lower floors are for defense and the upper floors are living quarters. On the open roofs, turrets jut out from the four corners, where snipers can take aim at the bandits below.

Interestingly, the name Diaolou itself originated from two words, Lou which is tower, and Diao which means to toss. The story was that a wife tossed herself off one of these towers instead of giving away the location of her husband and child.

There are a few clusters of diaolou in the surrounding area of around Kaiping city. The tourism brochure I had lists five convenient clusters for tourists to visit. Li Yuan Garden has two diaolou within its premises. The garden, built by a returning Chinese American, Xie Wei Li combines Chinese traditional gardening, Southern China water-town style landscaping and Western architecture.

The second cluster is the Zili village cluster, totaling 9 diaolou, built in the 1920s by prosperous emigrants returning from Chicago and Malaysia. They are located overlooking paddy fields and several western style villas. The third cluster is the MaJianlong villages, five villages where emigrants returned from places such as the U.S., Mexico, Canada and Australia. The fourth cluster is Chikan town, which evolved from an ancient town established during the Qing dynasty to a bustling area when the local wealthy Chinese returned and set up their businesses and raised  buildings with the Western architectural styles they saw. Lastly, there’s also the JinJiang village cluster, whose family members returned home from US and Canada.

KW and I visited the first 3 sites, our tight schedule not allowing us to do more before dusk. OK. Getting there. Here’s how we did it. This is Day 1 of 3. We took the midnight flight on Jetstar Asia out of Singapore and landed in Macau International Airport at 2am. Since the border crossing into China opened only at 7am, we had 5 hours to try and catch some sleep at the airport. The public buses in Macau were easy enough to tackle, signs were informative and we were at the border control building soon enough. It was a bit of a sightseeing bus ride, since we passed by the centre, and the ubiquitous casinos found all around Macau.

Border Control. Macau borders Zhuhai, China. The border crossing is painless, but the amount of human traffic that goes through is tremendous. My first step into China proper, the immediate area is Zhuhai city, full of commuters who cross the border daily to work. We look for the long distance bus station, fail badly and ended up taking one of the tourist coaches to Kaiping.   Zhuhai, the city, is one of the Special Economic Zones (SEZ) where the primary business is trade. And it shows, tall condominiums sprout everywhere on the outskirts of the city, and more are in construction.

We reached Kaiping city around noon, and had some Iranian la mian, or at least that’s what the signage says. The roadside joint was run by a Muslim Chinese family. Mummy cooks in the back, while daddy clears table and maintains order. Son makes the hand-made noodles while daughter serves. The place is pretty popular too, with a constant stream of customers. Me, I’m just happy to get warm food into my insides. The weather here is too cold, plus I never learn my lesson. I keep bringing too few warm clothing.

 

So we parked ourselves at a hotel before flagging one of the local tuktuks type of taxis to bring us around. I was expecting to be quoted stupid prices, so it was a pleasant surprise that the entire trip, including waiting time amounted to only 120 RMB for the two of us. So we headed towards the Diaolou clusters, a 150 RMB ticket per person covers all five clusters.

Local tourists are aplenty around the Diaolou clusters. Foreigners? Yes, but not many. Asians non-China tourists? Just the two of us. I seriously need to brush up on my vocab if I’m going to be traveling around China alone next time. The Diaolou themselves are fascinating structures, some of the interior are well preserved, and climbing up to the top, you can see a great view of the countryside.

At night, we were back in Kaiping city for dinner and a rest. It’s Day 1 of a three day blitz and the lack of sleep at the airport this morning was taking its toll. Check out this next post for Day 2, in which we get out of China, explored Macau, and hit Hong Kong, all in a day. http://www.thefuriouspanda.com/2011/03/27/macau-tasty-pasteis-de-nata/

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