Hong Kong – Saved By Ronald McDonald

March 20-21, 2014

Fellow Misadventurists,

As we busy ourselves editing the hours and hours of footage we captured during our first project in Phnom Penh, we will be posting a series of updates from the first several weeks of our trip throughout Southeast Asia.

The two weeks after our arrival in Lantau involved one flight, three long bus rides, tons of hiking, and a whirlwind of Asian hotspots – Hong Kong, of course, then Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), then Da Lat, Vietnam, then back to Saigon again…

But finally it was time to tear ourselves away from Vietnam, take the sleeper bus overland across the Cambodian border to Phnom Penh, and begin the first leg of our project.

First, though, here is the next highlights of the first two weeks:

1. HONG KONG: SAVED BY RONALD MCDONALD 

SAVED BY RONALD MCDONALD

The slow ferry from Lantau to Hong Kong Island isn’t so slow; in little over a half hour our boat has picked its way through a dense bank of fog and chugged into Victoria Harbour.

Banks of slender skyscrapers materialize suddenly 500 feet high on either side of us, clinging to a crescent of massive green jungle-clad hills whose peaks are lost in the early afternoon mist.

Before we know it we’re stepping off the boat on a pier three stories high. We lug our bags through some glass skybridges and exit an elevator at street level, plunging into the manic energy of the waterfront.

Hong Kong starts at the water level and never looks down from there. The nerve center of the city is Central which surrounds the waterfront and then abruptly ascends the hills, followed by the mainly residential skyscrapers of Midlevels hafway up, with Victoria Peak (“The Peak”, to locals) looming over it all at the top.

The hills are numerous and are among the steepest I’ve ever seen a city situated upon, scattered with clusters of steel and glass skyscrapers and crisscrossed with switchbacking freeways that twist bizarrely upward like masses of vines up a tree.

As modern as Central Hong Kong feels in places, there is a strong architectural nod to the city’s prior heydays as well, especially the 1960s and 1970s, when the city was blowing up globally as a center of finance, industry and entertainment. We run across this mostly Filipino Catholic Church that looks like something straight out of a classic James Bond flick.

 

Unfortunately there’s no time to explore right now. We have to get on the metro train and meet our AirBnB hosts by 3 pm in the Kowloon district across the harbour, and it doesn’t look like we’ll make it in time.

Worse, we can’t find any wi-fi network that will allow us to log on without a paid subscription – there’s a monopoly by one company, it seems, and this also extends to wifi calls and texting, which won’t work on our T-Mobile phones without a Chinese SIM card – all which leaves us with no way to warn them we’ll be late to the rendezvous point.

The superfast metro trains get us there in no time, but still we exit the Prince Edward station in Kowloon over half an hour late and circle the block several times, trying to spot a person or couple who looks like they’re waiting for someone.

After 45 minutes of fruitless wandering, we resort to simply approaching the address our hosts listed, lurking as as unobtrusively at the entrance as it is possible for two foreigners with giant bags festooning their bodies, and occasionally accosting random old ladies who are going into the building to ask if they know the couple. No luck. Nobody seems to know who they are.

Another half an hour inches by this way, and I am about to just give up and find a guesthouse, thereby giving up the deposit and three days paid in advance on the apartment.

Then Stax has a revelation. She remembers we had passed a McCafe, Hong Kong’s substitute for full McDonalds restaurants, on the street across from the station.

The bags, which have begun to feel like just another part of my body, fly behind us as we run to the McCafe and run down the stairs of the underground restaurant.

And then there it is. Faint, feeble, so slow it’s practically non-existent, but undeniably there – a wi-fi signal! I stand by the bathroom door, the only way to avoid getting in the way of the afternoon crowds who fill every available table, and quickly fire out a text to Eve, who is the host we had been scheduled to meet.

She must have been in the area, because less then three minutes later, as I’m heading to the stairs to wait outside, I run into a tiny girl who looks at me curiously. “Are you Ben??” she inquires.

“Eve?” I respond, and just like that our AirBnB reservation is saved. And to abandon it would have been a shame. The apartment is a block from the station in a quiet building, it’s close to great food and markets, it’s a sixth floor walkup with tremendous views of the street and buildings of Kowloon, and it’s dirt cheap.

God Bless You, McCafe.

Watch for the next exciting Misadventure soon: “The Central Midlevels”!