Central Plaza at sunset
When they built Hong Kong, they put the sun in the wrong place. It’s always either behind a building, hidden by a cloud or on the wrong side of the island to see a decent sunset.
Having said that, I did arrive during the monsoon season, which didn’t help!
I was there for six weeks from April to June 2014, teaching four families various subjects including English, Maths, Science and tennis.
All the families were very hospitable, lending me iPhones, chauffeuring me around and inviting me regularly for lunch and dinner.
They also had a few diary issues, so I ended up teaching twice as many students as I was supposed to…
The tuition agent who had arranged the job had given me a handy introductory guide to Hong Kong, but it took a while to get used to the place.
I felt like Alice in Wonderland in my bathroom, where everything was six inches lower than I was used to, and the bottle labelled ‘Drink me’ was replaced by a dispenser of ‘horse oil!
The water also left me feeling queasy, but the worst part was finding my way around. The apartment block was right next to the Grand Hyatt and Renaissance hotels, and there were two different entrances, north and south.
The client who was putting me up in her flat had kindly sorted out a SIM card, wi-fi dongle and an Octopus card for the MTR, but I felt like Captain Oates whenever I left the building. Would I ever find my way home again…?!
I had two objectives in Hong Kong. First of all, I was obviously there to keep my clients happy. After that, I saw it as a great opportunity to take photographs. I deliberately limited my lessons to around four or five hours a day in an effort to maximise my chances of picture-taking.
The only problem was the weather.
I had one sunny day on my first day off, which I used to go up to the Peak, which has spectacular views of Victoria Harbour, but I didn’t see blue skies again until my last week.
As a result, my daily routine revolved around anything I could do within the confines of my apartment block.
Fortunately, one of my clients had lent me the use of a very nice one-bed flat in Wan Chai, complete with golf driving range, two tennis courts and three outdoor and indoor swimming pools, but none of that was very appealing when my iPhone predicted thunderstorms every day of the week!
Instead, I generally stayed at home during the morning and early afternoon.
I read the papers online (using a very handy 4G dongle a client lent me), watched British sport when I could (thank Goodness for www.vipboxasia.co!) and spent a lot of time taking and processing my photographs before taking one of the cheap and cheerful taxis in the early evening to take me to my first lesson.
These were the main ideas I’d gleaned from the travel guide and a quick trawl on the web:
climbing up to Victoria Peak to see the panoramic views of the harbour;
going on an open-top bus ride;
catching the Star Ferry to Kowloon to watch the Symphony of Lights (a regular son et lumière show put on by most of the office blocks around the harbour);
going to Happy Valley to see the regular Wednesday night horse races;
wandering around one of the ‘wet markets’ that sell fish, meat and other goods on the street;
visiting one or two of the outlying islands;
going over to the Chinese mainland (perhaps).
I never made it to China proper, as a meeting with another agency was cancelled, but I did do all the rest.
My first photographic excursion was a trip to the Peak. I was very lucky to have sunshine on my first day off, and I ended up spending all day up there. There are two buildings at the top, which both look a bit like alien space ships:
the Peak Galleria
the Peak Tower.
Victoria Harbour from the Peak
The views from both during the day were spectacular, but it got better and better as night fell. My only mistake was in leaving 20 minutes before the Symphony of Lights was due to start!
The open-top bus ride was a great way to see all the extraordinary architecture in Hong Kong.
The island is a strange mixture of Gibraltar, New York and Monaco – very hilly, full of skyscrapers and offering several switchbacks akin to Loew’s Corner for the wannabe Formula 1 driver.
As I drove around with an audio guide pointing out all the landmarks in my ear, I was constantly taking pictures left, right and centre. It took hours to transfer them to my laptop and edit them all, but I was happy with one or two of the more abstract shots.
Grey skyscraper on a grey day
The Symphony of Lights happens every evening at around eight o’clock on both sides of Victoria Harbour.
Dozens of skyscrapers switch on their lights in time to a musical soundtrack that gets piped through speakers on the shoreline, and there are even lasers fired from some of the rooftops.
I caught the Star Ferry to Kowloon and watched it from the Avenue of Stars, which is just a posh name for the concrete waterfront.
I chose that side of the harbour deliberately, as most of the iconic buildings are on the other side of the water on Hong Kong island, including the distinctive M Pei-designed China Bank Tower.
Hong Kong Symphony of Lights from Kowloon
I thought getting a night off to go to Happy Valley was going to be a problem, but one of my clients helpfully cancelled a lesson one Wednesday, which allowed me to spend the whole evening there.
Happy Valley must be one of the few racecourses in the world that’s located slap bang in the middle of a city, but it certainly makes for a unique backdrop.
There were thousands of people in the floodlit arena, most of them dressed up in their glad rags as if they were about to quaff a bottle of champagne in the Royal Enclosure at Ascot, but the fare on offer wasn’t always so classy.
I took a few shots of one very attractive woman in a red dress having an Ed Miliband moment with a cheeseburger and a packet of ketchup!
The racing itself was as you’d imagine, but it was still rather strange to see Chinese jockeys wearing the traditional silks.
Jockey in purple and white riding racehorse
A ‘wet market’ in Hong Kong is just a food market on the street that ends up having to be hosed down to get rid of all the detritus at the end of the day.
I went to the one on Bowrington Road and benefited from the delightful insouciance of the locals when it comes to having their picture taken.
There are so many cameras and iPhones being used over there that the last thing people worry about is some random bloke taking yet another picture!
Some of the items on sale were certainly interesting, and the live fish flapping about on the slabs were a magnetic draw.
Once food becomes waste at the end of the day, though, it undergoes an ugly transformation, and I was reminded of a Jonathan Swift poem, A Description of a City Shower, that compares the cleansing effect of the rain to the Old Testament flood:
“Sweepings from butchers’ stalls, dung, guts, and blood,
Drown’d puppies, stinking sprats, all drench’d in mud,
Dead cats, and turnip-tops, come tumbling down the flood.”
Smiling Chinese fishmonger
I was keen to get to some of the outlying islands in Hong Kong, but the weather rather limited my options. However, I had a friend over there who lived with his family on Lantau, and we arranged to have lunch with a few of his friends.
We went for dim sum, which is rather a local tradition on a Sunday, and then spent the rest of the day together.
A few weeks later, his wife organised a 40th birthday party at a beach bar at Pui O, so I decided to use that as an excuse to explore the island properly. I’d cancelled all my lessons to go to the party, and I decided to make a day of it.
The big attraction – literally! – on Lantau is the Tian Tan or Big Buddha, and I reached it by taking the cable car from the MTR stop in Tung Chung.
The ride up wasn’t that spectacular, but I had a personal reason for going. A girlfriend once sent me a postcard of the Big Buddha when she was in Hong Kong, and she said it reminded her of me because I close my eyes when I laugh!
I wasn’t convinced when I saw it with my own eyes, but I took plenty of pictures just in case.
Big Buddha in profile
Lantau has changed a lot in the last few years, and it’s very difficult to find any indigenous peasant culture – everyone seems far too well off!
However, I’d heard about the stilted houses in Tai O, and I wanted to see them for myself, so I took a taxi there from the Big Buddha.
Tai O used to be a busy fishing village, but it’s turned into a bit of a tourist trap. When I went, it was just gearing up for a dragon boat race, and there were dozens of little stalls by the river selling seaside delicacies such as ‘super fish balls’, ‘fresh cuttlefish’ and ‘crisp fried fish skin’!
Pleasure boat passing moorings of stilted houses
After wandering round the village and stopping off for a quick ‘lime and salt’ drink (when in Rome…!), I took the bus to Pui O for the party.
At the bus stop, I met an American art student and had a good chat with her while we were waiting for the bus and then on the bus itself.
It was nice to have a ‘normal’ conversation with someone for a change, but I had to jump off pretty quickly when I realised I was close to the resort.
I had plenty of time on my hands, but it was quite a stroke of luck that I went down there early, as there were three or four kite surfers out in the bay.
They were all very good, and I was happy to spend an hour and a half just taking pictures of their jumps and tricks as the sun went down over the headland.
Close-up of female kite surfer getting air
Mavericks was a pretty good venue, and the party went off well enough, but that marked the end of my stay in Hong Kong.
All in all, I enjoyed my six weeks over there. It was not too long and not too short. My clients were very kind and friendly, and I got along very well with them and their families.
Hong Kong is to China as Goa is to India: if you can’t face the real thing, it will ease you gently into the local culture while providing all the trappings of Western civilisation to keep you sane.
You may see the occasional amusing sign, such as ‘Please wrap spittle’, or see the odd Ferrari burst into flames when you’re on the bus, but it’s definitely worth a visit.
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