One Country, Two Systems

Our flight from Hanoi to Hong Kong brought us through Bangkok again, thanks to the great prices of (Ryan)Air Asia. For some reason, Kadi needed to get a Visa on arrival in Thailand (Conor didn’t) but it just seemed to be an exercise in stamping passports because the Visa stamp itself was free and she was automatically entitled to it – so basically, Kadi needed to get a visa stamp before getting a normal entry stamp, whereas Conor just needed an entry stamp. The mysteries of international travel permissions will never cease to amaze us! It was great to be back in Thailand (even briefly) just for the food :) Anyway, onward into Hong Kong without any problems.

So what is the deal with Hong Kong? Well, as it says on the title above, it’s basically part of China once again (since 1997, after about 100 years under the reign of Britain), but under the terms of the handover, it is continuing with the free market system that existed prior to 1997, rather than switching to communism like the rest of China. This “one country, two systems” approach will remain in place for 50 years and we don’t know what’s going to happen after that.

The city itself is fantastically modern, clean and efficient. That’s quite an achievement in this part of the globe we can tell you - and it was a very welcome change! Geographically, the city doesn’t actually take up much space so it’s fairly easy to get around and see it all, but does house 8.5 million people, so this means that it’s fairly densely populated and full of high-rise buildings and skyscrapers. With so many people living in such a small space, you can imagine that property gets fairly expensive and there are reportedly tens of thousands of people living in little make-shift huts on the roofs of buildings across the city. The high property prices also had an impact on our accommodation and we ended up staying in a Getto called “Chungking Mansions”. Despite its plush name, this was the only dilapidated building we saw amongst all the glitz, glamour and neon. On the outside, it looked pretty dodgy but our room was fine and served us well during our 5 nights in Hong Kong (although it was very very small)!

Although it’s a very safe city, we did narrowly avoid a bit of excitement! After strolling a shopping area one day, we went home and noticed on the local tv news that there had been an incident of someone throwing acid on people, right in the area that we were in and at the time that we were leaving. Luckily, we didn’t see any of it.

We basically spent our time checking out the sights, doing some shopping and just enjoying being in civilisation again! During our time there, we had the opportunity to ride what is allegedly the longest escalator in the world. It is an outdoor escalator which takes 20 minutes to get from the bottom to the top - but it's kinda cheating since it's actually a series of separate escalators. One of the more interesting spectacles was the nightly lightshow: Every night at 8pm, the skyscrapers light up with moving neon lights and lasers, all coordinated to music. The show lasts 15 minutes and it was so good, we watched it nearly every night. It really has to be seen to be believed.

And what do Hong Kongians do on Sunday afternoons? Well, we were very surprised to find them having picnics all over the city in the most unusual urban places – in car parks, on pedestrian walkways over main roads, even on the common area under skyscrapers. They simply throw a sheet down on the concrete (yes concrete), sit down, and have a bowl of noodles and tea while playing cards, knitting, or surfing the internet on their notebooks using the public wifi. Very strange sight!

Thankfully (as hoped) we had no problems getting our China visa from Hong Kong. So after our time there, we got our train ticket to Beijing (a 24 hour journey) and off we went!