Alex’s Blog

Friday 9th October

We got up for breakfast at the Rio hotel, which was an extensive buffet of the usual hotel breakfast fare. All perfectly fine, but we could have done without the panpipe instrumental cover versions of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Bryan Adams being piped into the restaurant – although perhaps, for those who had lost large amounts in the casino the night before, it was the perfect soundtrack for them to weep into their morning coffees.

We got the ferry back from Macau into Hong Kong, and then returned to the hostel and spent the entire afternoon catching up on sleep. At about 6pm we went out and met up for the final time with Will’s friends Syliva and Winnie, and we grabbed a quick snack of some more takoyaki octopus balls, before getting some sushi. We had sea urchin (smooth and buttery); various sashimis – salmon, red snapper (a quite strong but pleasant fishy taste), geoduck (a species of saltwater clam, which didn’t taste of much); and sushi covered in brightly coloured crab roe.

Then we went to a different place for dessert, which was a massive tower of ice crystals like a solid slush puppy, with various flavourings – strawberry, sesame and green tea. The green tea flavour didn’t really taste of anything. There was also a pot of syrup you could pour over the ice, which just made it melt away leaving you with a sweet slush.

We picked up some sweets for our various offices. I would have loved to have picked up the sweetened duck kidneys, but Will reminded me that you probably can’t bring back meat products into the UK (and he was right – there was an announcement when we arrived back at Heathrow about the huge fines and imprisonment you risk by attempting to do so).

We got a bus back down to the harbour to go to the Sheraton again for cocktails with a view, as Syliva and Winnie hadn’t been before – the usual story of not doing the touristy things in your own city unless you’re with visitors. The “Key of Soul” cocktail was nice and fruity, and the non-alcoholic ones were really nice too, but the highlight had to be one called “Elements” which was made from Bailey’s and strawberries. It was like a strawberry milkshake with a kick – delicious.

Perhaps unwisely it was a pretty late night. We didn’t get to bed until about 2am, and we were going to have to check in for our flight at about 6.30…

Saturday 10th October

After about two hours’ sleep, Will’s aunt’s driver Jackie picked us up to take us to the airport. Hong Kong airport is at number ten on the list of biggest buildings in the world by floor space, so that was two ticked off on one holiday (along with The Venetian). It’s nice and modern, but apart from that it’s just another airport. One of the duty-free shops had a bottle of blended cognac on display worth HK$38,000 (about £3000), at what seemed an easily-smashable height. The cognacs in the ingredients all dated from between 1800 and 1930. I don’t know who would ever buy such a thing at an airport – I can only conclude that it was on such prominent display in the hope that someone would break it and have to pay for it. Another shop was called “Caviar & Prunier”. It’s strange how duty-free areas at airports still have this aspirational quality, even though air travel is such a cheap and normal thing to do these days. You wouldn’t get this kind of thing in a bus station.

The plane was half an hour late for boarding, but that was pretty insignificant for a 13-hour flight. It was another pleasant flight with Air New Zealand – I’d happily use them again. Three meals this time – sausage and omelette for breakfast, a ham and cheese sandwich half-way through the flight, and a lunch of chicken curry. On the in-flight entertainment system I watched Frost/Nixon, which I’ve been wanting to watch for a while – an excellent film, and for my non-film-buff, tired self it was nice and easy to follow.

We landed just after 3pm and were home by 5. I felt tired but my body clock seemed correct – it didn’t “feel” like the midnight that it was in Hong Kong. I’d had a bit of a nap on the plane but not for very long.

London smells clean. That’s not something I would ever have expected to say, but there was a notable freshness in the air compared to Hong Kong. The skies are clearer and it’s far less hazy. And the buildings are a lot smaller. It was strange sitting on the train back to Forest Hill and looking out over what seemed like a small town compared to the towering city we’d grown used to.

I think I’ll give myself a break from Chinese food for a while – at home we treated ourselves to a dinner of burger and chips. Not that we couldn’t easily have had that in Hong Kong – there are plenty of branches of McDonald’s, but a large part of this holiday was about trying out the local food. The Chinese takeaway menu waiting on the doormat was actually rather unfamiliar – there’s so much more variety to Chinese food than crispy duck pancakes, sweet and sour and chow mein – in fact these were all things that we hardly saw out there. It just shows how we get a very Westernised version of foreign food, but then maybe that’s because we don’t have much of an appetite for the boney gristle and pigeon’s heads.

Not that we would have tried of half of these things if it weren’t for Will – although there is quite a lot of English around, a lot of people don’t speak it and plenty of menus don’t have any English on them either, so having a Cantonese speaker in the group made it a lot easier, more interesting and fun. In fact we wouldn’t even have gone in the first place without him, so cheers Will!

I’m pretty tired now and wish I had a few more days off before going back to work.

Thursday 8th October, part 2

A taxi took us from the bar across the bridge to Taipa, where several colossal casinos are being built. Recently completed is The Venetian – bigger than its counterpart in Las Vegas, this is the biggest casino in the world, and the fourth largest building by floor space.

Surely there can be no more profound a symbol of the irrationality and stupidity of human beings than these enormous, opulent buildings, funded entirely by the vast amounts of money people lose when they gamble. These monuments are physical oxymorons – telling people that this is a place where they can get rich, while the very existence of such grand buildings is testament to the reality that the only thing they’re good for is extracting large amounts of money from people.

The Venetian is a literally amazing building. We were expecting Disneyland-style tackiness, but clearly absolutely no expense has been spared in making the interior lavish and yet still somehow tasteful. Entering the lobby, you are greeted by the sight of a huge palace of marble and painted ceilings stretching far into the distance.

Walking down the corridor with its huge columns, you reach the casino itself which occupies an area of the ground floor which looked to me about the size of two to three football pitches, about half slot machines and roulette machines and so on, and the other half blackjack, craps tables etc.

In the centre of all this is a bar which although not cheap was fairly reasonably priced. We drank whisky in the hope that things would start to make some kind of sense.

Next to the bar are two curved escalators. They lead up to level 3 which is a huge shopping mall designed to look like Venice. It has canals and gondolas and bridges. It was pretty quiet up here as it was late, and the shops were shut. During the day visitors can take a trip along the canals with a singing gondolier, and marvel at the in-character street entertainers. I’m kind of glad we missed those – the place was surreal enough as it was.

Returning downstairs to the casino, we put a HK$20 note (about £2) into a slot machine and tried to work out what was going on. It didn’t make any sense to us. Lights flashed and things span. It printed out a token for HK$5 and that was it. We put that into a different machine which turned out to make exactly as much sense.

Having failed to see the attraction of the slot machines, we looked at the tables. Bored croupiers sat silently as they shifted cards and chips, and most of the punters were just as silent, looking at the green surface in front of them through cold dead eyes.

What a depressing sight. For all the variety of machines and games involved, there’s no skill involved here, so whatever you’re playing you’re just continually forking over cash and, presumably, occasionally getting some of it back. Maybe we were in fact lucky that our toe-dip with the slot machines didn’t give us any reward. I expect all the gamblers here had some initial luck once upon a time, and now they’re trapped, like drug addicts, forever hoping for the same rush as that first hit.

At the back of the casino, in a bar called the Bellini Lounge, games of a different nature were taking place, and far more interesting. On one side, men taking a break from the roulette tables, and on the other, women looking to take them for everything they had, or at least everything they had left. Each side manipulating the other, each side believing they’re the winner, but once again the house is the only winner in this hall of losers.

The gold diggers sat in a group around a table at the back, drunkenly dancing, waiting for victims. To my fairly sober eyes they were completely terrifying, some of them rather masculine, others made-up and surgically enhanced as if to remove all trace of humanity.

Pop music played too loud, too fast and badly mixed provided an uneasy soundtrack to the human zoo. At the bar, a drunk, 30-something buck-toothed man chatted to two women. Further along the bar, sitting with a man who was probably his father, was a chap in a T-shirt with something of a Noel Fielding look about him. He couldn’t take his eyes off the drunk and his two unwilling female companions. Jealousy, perhaps? Or was he, like us, merely a spectator?

The band returned to the stage to play some more cover songs. Was this a good or a bad gig for them? Is this what they aspired to be, musical wallpaper, passionlessly regurgitating Brick in the Wall and Stairway to Heaven?

Noel Fielding had disappeared, and the drunk’s lady companions had somehow resisted his charms, so the drunk was now sat alone at the bar. He waved at the gold-digger in the low cut black top and tight white shorts, and she immediately descended upon him as if he were a delicious field mouse.

The barman served up a cocktail and a shot each, and the drunken man then fumbled for a while as he struggled to find enough money to pay his bill. The vulture could see that a few drinks was all she could extract from this one, and so she rejoined her fellow fem-bots. Perhaps in an effort to convince her that what he lacked in money he made up for in charm, he ran to the front as the band started Smells Like Teen Spirit.

He appeared to be trying to get on stage, but made do with jumping around and making rockin’ hand gestures at the singer. Returning to his temporary friend at the witches’ table, neither she nor they were interested any more, and he disappeared behind the curtain back into the casino, to try his luck with some different machines.

With his disappearance, the cycle began anew. The Noel Fielding lookalike had returned, and was speaking to the airship Hindenbra, at a safe distance from her gravity-defying bust. His father hung around awkwardly in the background. Nearby stood the drunk’s first two companions, so maybe tonight could still be Noel’s lucky night after all. Meanwhile, a bald man was chatting up the vulture, just one more loser trying his luck against the odds.

Thursday 8th October, part 1

A trip across the sea today to Macau, a former Portuguese colony returned to China in 1999 and now run as a SAR (Special Administrative Region) in a similar way to Hong Kong.

The ferry took about an hour and was very smooth, apart from a rather bumpy boarding. I got the impression that the harbour in Hong Kong wasn’t particularly well designed as it seemed to magnify the waves, making getting on the ferry difficult. It wasn’t long until we reached our destination and could see the massive casinos through the haze. This part of the world always seems to be hazy – the views in London are much clearer in comparison. Apparently it’s because of the pollution pumped out by the mainland Chinese factories.

Will’s aunt treated us to a stay in the 4-star Rio Hotel. It could not be more different to our cheap hostel – it was huge. The bathroom was bigger than our entire hostel room and had a lovely walk-in shower, as well as a bath. The only complaint I might make was that the bath was a little small, but hey, at least there was a bath. Also available in the hotel were a swimming pool, gym and a dodgy-looking 24-hour sauna. And with Macau being China’s up-and-coming answer to Las Vegas, there were casinos on three floors.

Casinos are huge business in Macau, and they’re set to become bigger. As the only part of China with legal gambling, this small SAR now gets more annual visitors than Hong Kong – most of them from the mainland. All around, the dirty residential blocks of old are interspersed with new casinos with increasingly impressive and somewhat ridiculous architecture. Not far from our hotel was the Grand Lisboa, a huge pineapple-shaped tower that stood in marked contrast to the delapidated block of flats on just the other side of the road.

The old town though maintains much of its historical character – much more so than Hong Kong. There is a ruined cathedral and a fortress, and an impressive mosaic pavement featuring designs of sea creatures.

We stopped off for lunch at a restaurant and had a huge meal of sea bass, chicken curry, clams, baked fish and a kind of cheesey porky rice. It was a nice contrast to the kinds of meals we’ve had on the rest of the holiday. It was a treat to have a tomato and some non-briochey bread, as these seem to be rare in Hong Kong.

We explored the old town and wandered around a park which was a Protestant cemetry. Old Chinese men were sitting around, chatting and playing card games. They eyed us with some suspicion and made us feel quite out of place.

We tried in vain to find a bar. There simply aren’t many around in Macau for some reason, so we returned to the hotel for a bit of a swim in the 25th-floor pool before going to the bar there.

For dinner we went to Restaurant Litoral, recommended in one of our guide books. It was a fabulous meal and extremely good value for money. We had curry beef cakes, garlic prawns and African chicken. The only slight disappointments for me were the charcoal black pork (which wasn’t just burnt pork as I feared from the name, but it was a bit chewy), and the Macanese stew, which was really just a pot of stock. Although the stock was delicious, it was entirely comprised of inedible bits of chicken bone, skin and gristle. The only solid part you could eat was the cabbage, although to be fair the stock made the cabbage deliciously meaty.

We took a taxi to seemingly the only street in Macau that had any bars. The red half-moon hung in the sky behind the distant smog. We had a few drinks in preparation for the madness to follow – none of us had even been in a casino before, and we were about to go to the largest casino in the world.

Wednesday 7th October

We left the hostel in the early afternoon for a fast food breakfast/lunch of Takoyaki – fried balls of various seafood served with toppings of your choice. Mine was similar to soy sauce which had something of a Marmite taste to it. Good job I like Marmite.

A lot of museums are free on Wednesdays so we opted for the Museum of Art near the harbour. Plenty of ancient pottery and paintings, a pleasant enough way to spend half an hour or so before we started to get bored.

At a restaurant for dinner we had authentic versions of the type of Chinese food we’re used to back in the UK. Sweet and sour tasted no different to usual, but crispy duck pancakes were made using just the skin – the duck meat went into a separate dish which you then wrapped in a lettuce leaf.

Then a trip to the races. Betting on horses with the Hong Kong Jockey Club is the only legal form of gambling in Hong Kong, and the crowds were massive and mixed – plenty of serious-looking locals here studying the racing pages of their newspapers, plenty of noisy tourists drinking beer, plenty of slick-haired besuited twats.

Nick won about 70p on a bet on the favourite to place (i.e. come in the top 3), and me & Rachel bet on the silliest-named horse “Megabucks” to place at about 5 to 1, and he came quite near the back.

It was interesting to experience but we didn’t fancy staying around for long, so we went back to the hostel and picked up some snacks along the way. I’ve grown quite fond of the waffle ball things that are available on many a street corner. Nick was rather less fond of the pig’s ear that he tried – all gristle. Glad I gave that one a miss.

Tuesday 6th October

An enormous cockroach appeared in the bathroom as I was getting out of the shower. It was about four inches long and I dispatched it with my shoe. It could be worse I suppose – at least it’s the only one we’ve seen all week. We’ve seen quite a lot of dragonflies out and about but there don’t seem to be any scary insects or spiders lurking around Hong Kong.

It was lunchtime when we left the hostel and it felt like the hottest day yet, quite a dry heat instead of the humid warmth we’ve begun to get used to. The cafes were packed but we found a table in one very basic establishment, and I had yet another ramen, with random bits of chicken in it this time. It wasn’t particularly exciting.

We then headed to Lantau, one of the outlying islands, to see the 34-metre Big Buddha at Po Lin Monastery at Ngong Ping. It’s apparently the largest bronze outdoor seated Buddha in the world, which seems quite a specific claim to fame. There must therefore be quite a few bigger Buddhas out there, although this one is impressively huge.

You can reach Ngong Ping either by rickety, unreliable cable car, or by bus, as we did. You’ll probably feel sick either way – the bus travels along winding roads for about 50 minutes, struggling up the steep hills.

At the monastery itself, you can buy a combined ticket that gets you a vegetarian meal and entry to the museum under the Buddha. It was 3.30pm when we arrived and they were only doing food until 4.30, so we went straight for the meal even though we weren’t that hungry. I was even less hungry when the food came -bland and unappetising. I felt that it needed quite a lot of salt or soy sauce. Or, to make it more like the other meals we’ve had out here, perhaps the internal organs of an obscure animal would have given it that little extra something.

There is plenty of building work taking place and plenty of tourists at the monastery, so it’s not very peaceful. Incense smoke is everywhere. A big hill with a long stairway takes you up to the Buddha, and you have to zigzag your way up past all the people posing for photos. The museum is full of Buddhist artworks and one tiny, well-guarded crystal, which they reckon is some kind of relic.

Back down at ground level, leaving the monastery itself we entered Ngong Ping village, which is straight out of Disneyland by the looks of it. It is truly hideous and features a “Chopstick Gallery”, a “Walking with Buddha” exhibition and a Starbucks.

We retreated back to the bus stop and the metro to return to the hostel for a nap. Will went out to get some shopping done, and me, Rachel and Nick went out for cocktails. But first we picked up some Japanese fast food from a place called Yoshinoya. It seems silly to me that in the UK the fast food concept is only ever applied to burgers and fried chicken – this food was both very quick and very tasty.

For our cocktails we went to three different hotel bars. First was the Holiday Inn, which seemed rather posh for such an establishment – there was a Lamborghini in the car park. The cocktails were nice and strong. Then we went to the Sheraton which is near the harbour, to its Sky Lounge bar on the 18th floor, which has an excellent view of the skyscrapers on Hong Kong Island. I had a mojito which was pretty good, though not quite as strong as I’d have liked. Finally we went to the Peninsula hotel, to its Felix Bar on the 28th floor. The view isn’t as good as the Sheraton’s, because for some reason they have Venitian blinds over the windows. The bar was pretty small and our drinks were on a strange sloping table. Very much style over substance. Surprisingly it was the toilets that made the trip worthwhile – the urinals have a great view, and the central sink is a weird table contraption where water appears from twisted metal when the attendant pushes a button. Mad.