Having Fun All The Time

I just returned from 10 days in Hong Kong. I initially went there because my tourist visa ran out and it wasn’t possible for me to remain in China without going to Hong Kong (“HK”) to switch to a working visa. But, my employer (a university in Fujian Province) hadn’t finished securing a proper working license for me. So off I went to Hong Kong, to wait for an indeterminate amount of time for the school to finish securing the working license and then mail it to me. I left mainland China on Feb. 3 and returned to my home on the 17th, so in all the trip was about two weeks long.

One of the first sights I saw was this one. The Bank of China building lets you go to the 43rd floor viewing deck for free, which is not spectacular but I would say worth it, especially if it’s foggy and you’re not sure there will be much of a view from Victoria Peak (which was the case for me), which is the mountain next to HK that you can take a fairly expensive tram up to see the whole city.

And onto the next thing…

And then…

And then…

To have a beer and some tobacco…

And to the hookah bar…

Hanging out, drinking beers and smoking hookah was one of the big highlights of the trip. That is something I could never do in Fujian Province. The tobacco was 150 HKD, which is roughly 140 RMB (Chinese money) or about $22 US, which, if you’re on a mainland China budget, is a lot of money (especially with $50HKD beers added in). In all, including travel expenses, visa costs, eating and hotel, I spent about 8000 RMB on my two-week foray to Hong Kong, or a bit over $1000 U.S. dollars. Considering that I make 4000 RMB per month in the mainland, somewhere around $500, every time I opened my wallet in Hong Kong, I cringed.

Another reason to do CouchSurfing: the natives can tell you what to do in the area. My first host suggested this light show, which was a fun free thing to do that I checked out the next day after we hung out.

The hostel I stayed in for my 9 nights in Hong Kong, in Kowloon (in the ChungKing mansions) was definitely, without doubt, the cheapest in HK (I had a private single room for 180 HKD, or about $25 USD, per night), but food in the area was no good, it was loud and Kowloon is generally not a fun place to hang out. So I spent a lot of time on Hong Kong Island around the “SoHo” area, which has a lot more charm and more eating options.

Another…

And then…

Incense…

And then…

Note the cool red Hong Kong taxis in the previous photo…

And then…

The ferry was easy and cheap and took about 40 minutes to Lamma Island. And as soon as I arrived there I realized I should have gone much earlier in my Hong Kong trip (considering how long I was there and how I spent a lot of time just relaxing and trying to minimize expenses)…

After getting off the ferry I met a guy from Switzerland who had just got his bachelor’s degree in medicine and was taking a year off to travel before going to medical school. He had been to Japan, Korea and Thailand, and was spending a few more days in HK before going to mainland China. He helped me find the beach and then we parted ways, I think both feeling a little awkward because we were both traveling solo and not totally accustomed to talking a lot. I kept meeting people like that in Hong Kong, travelers anyway, many of whom had been all over Asia or were starting out to go all over Asia.

After sitting on the beach and reading the latest New Yorker (another commodity I’m not afforded in the mainland) I decided I had enough time to walk the mile or so across Lamma Island to the small mainland-style town on the other end of the island (the town was Sok Kwu Wan, and was nowhere near as cool as the town I landed in, to the north, Yung Shue Wan)…

And that was my trip to Hong Kong. There were other things I saw that I photographed with my disposable film camera, such as the Big Buddha (cool, but if you go, take the tram; the rattly, nauseating bus ride is rough) and the tram to the top of Victoria Peak (it was too foggy to see anything). And there was the night on the town I spent with some Italian friends I met on CouchSurfing.com; that night and meeting up with the other person from CouchSurfing were the best parts of the whole trip. There’s nothing like meeting people from a foreign land. But after my day in Lamma, I picked up my visa from the travel agency and was good to go back to the mainland. So I said so-long to ample Starbucks everywhere, Western food choices and ubiquitous English speakers, and took the Hong Kong MTA back up to Lo Wu, where you can simply walk through Chinese customs within the Shenzhen train terminal (which is attached to the Lu Wo MTA station).

Of course, the day I returned to mainland China to travel back to Fujian was the eve of the Chinese New Year, which is the most hellacious time possible to be traveling in China. So all train tickets for days were totally sold out. Instead, I had to settled for a late-night sleeper bus back to a major city in Fujian, from where I would have to figure out another way to get the rest of the way to my home city, Sanming (this ultimately involved lots of waiting in the rain, waiting in the 24-hour McDonald’s, waiting in the hotel, riding another bus to another city that was not Sanming, and then getting picked up by a very gracious colleage from the college).

To get to the sleeper bus, I had to endure a very sketchy 15-minute ride in the back of a van, scrunched up in the trunk area with the luggage, not sure where we were heading because I had only understood a little of the Chinese the driver said to me. But we made it to the bus, and there was indeed a sleeper bed there for me.

And, last, the grainy shot of me in my sleeper bunk. The bus was definitely tolerable and fine for the 10-hour trip back to Fujian…I think I slept for a few hours.