Hong Kong and Macau

We just had the Dragon Boat holiday here in Taiwan. To take advantage, we spent four nights in Hong Kong, just to explore the city in more depth than we'd ever been able to before. It was Jenna's fourth trip to HK, my second, and for the first time we had good weather and plenty of time.

On Thursday, we disembarked at the airport having already filled out our health questionnaires to make sure we did not have H1N1 and hadn't come into contact with it. These questionnaires were collected by personnel at the airport who gave them more scrutiny than our arrival cards got.

We stayed at the Wesley Hotel in Wan Chai. The staff at the hotel reception desk measured our temperatures with little electronic devices. We passed.

Central and inexpensive but with very few facilities, virtually nonexistent service and bare, stuffy rooms.

-- Lonely Planet

Now, I suppose that's true, but what we cared about mostly was the "central and inexpensive" part. Granted, our hotel room was tiny, but that's what you get when you stay in the densest part of Hong Kong Island and you don't want to pay extravagantly for your room. What amused me most was, while practically every other cable TV-equipped hotel room I've stayed at in Asia has provided either CNN International or BBC News (or both), our choices for English-language TV news were CCTV (the Chinese government mouthpiece) or FOX News. The same FOX News that you get in the States.

Once settled in at the hotel, our first priority was to get the heck off Hong Kong Island and over onto the Kowloon side. We took the MTR to Central, where we spent a decent amount of time wandering around like clueless tourists looking for the Star Ferry terminal. (This was particularly pathetic considering that we'd both been to the terminal on previous Hong Kong visits.)

At ground level, Central resembles a hideously overgrown Rosslyn, Virginia, and has about as much charm. It's got some of the best-known skyscrapers in East Asia, but these are best appreciated at a distance.

We finally found the Star Ferry terminal and traveled across the harbor to Kowloon. We wandered along the promenade for a while, and took in the views of the Hong Kong Island skyline.

(My camera is not all that great at nighttime pictures, as you can see.)

Then we headed to the Temple St. market for food. We filled up on some excellent seafood and looked through the oddities of the night market before taking the MTR back to Wan Chai.

On Day 2, we'd originally planned to go hiking on either Lantau or Lamma Island. Cool, drizzly weather scuttled that idea, so instead we explored some of the neighborhoods on the north side of HK Island. We ate dim sum for lunch in a shopping center in Causeway Bay - I'd never eaten dim sum in HK before, and since it's the style of food most associated with the city I figured I'd better try eating it in its hometown.

Once we had our fill of Causeway Bay, we took the MTR all the way to the northwest part of the island and Sheung Wan.

I'm not sure exactly what it means, but: many streets in Sheung Wan made me feel like I was in Chinatown in a Western city. I think it was all the Chinese medicinal goods out and on sale, like giant mushrooms and dried lizards.

A lovely little park off of Hollywood Rd. in Sheung Wan. Note the apartment blocks rising in the background.

Stone statues outside the Man Mo temple in Sheung Wan.

Eventually we met up with some friends who live in HK for dinner in Central, followed by relaxation at a bar where THE MUSIC IS SO LOUD YOU CAN'T HEAR THE PERSON NEXT TO YOU. I'm sure that appeals to some people, but I'm not one of them. Fortunately we were able to leave for a more relatively quiet alternative soon after.

On Saturday, we went to Lantau Island. We'd planned to take the ferry to Tung Chung to maximize our sightseeing enjoyment, but when we determined that would require a horribly circuitous route, we took the MTR there instead.

From the ultramodern densely populated new town of Tung Chung, you can catch a cable car up the mountain to Ngong Ping.

The cable car was lots of fun. Every bit the equal of the currently-nonfunctioning Maokong Gondola in Taipei, the views from the cable car are quite impressive (except when it's the smog-shrouded airport you're looking at).

At the top, you can walk through a touristy strip of stops and then you reach the stairs to the Tian Tan Buddha.

The Tian Tan Buddha is relatively new as Buddhas go - completed in 1993 - but it's quite well-known and a major tourist attraction.

We descended by cable car and took a bus to Mui Wo, a port town on Lantau, and boarded a ferry for Cheung Chau, a small island off of Lantau's coast.

The town on Cheung Chau, more than any other place in Hong Kong, reminded me of Taiwan. I can be more specific. It reminded me of the back streets of cities in southern Taiwan. I felt like I was wandering through an old section of Tainan or Kaohsiung. Except the language was different. And there were more Westeners about than I would expect. And there were people in little village greens playing croquet.

A sign in a little store in the Cheung Chau back alleys.

We ate dinner - seafood, of course - at a harborfront restuarant (despite an intriguing name and a mention in Lonely Planet, we gave Morocco Indian Food a pass) and took the ferry directly back to Central, giving us some stunning glimpses of the nighttime skyline along the way.

On Sunday: Macau.

Neither of us had been there, and a ferry from HK is relatively cheap and gets you there in under 90 minutes. For the purpose of traveling it's like crossing a national border, so we each collected a total of 4 new passport stamps in one day (and had to fill out 2 H1N1 flu questionnaires each).

Macau is best known for gambling, which neither of us is particularly interested in. I probably don't have enough self-control for gambling, and wouldn't know when to stop. With disastrous results. So we steered clear of the casinos and headed for historical touristy Macau.

You can still see some Portuguese, although I think maybe I heard people speaking it only once.

The most important old tourist sight is, of course, the ruins of St. Paul's. There is a nonstop crowd of tourists with cameras in the plaza in front.

The old town is beautiful. It feels like how I imagine an old city in southern Europe probably feels to wander through (not that I'd know). Of course, there's plenty of new development along roads that get a lot of tourists, and depending on where you point your camera, you might get this gigantic monstrosity towering above the old-timey cityscape.

But the food is wonderful, including the ubiquitous little almond cookies sold in a thousand little shops. Also, the egg tarts are the best in the world. And I'm comparing them to the ones in Hong Kong.

Macau may be small (however big you think Macau is, it's smaller) but I think I could probably enjoy another visit there. We never left the old city to explore the regions further south. Lonely Planet implies the best food in all of Macau is to be found there.

India 7: Mumbai

We finished our stay in Kerala and boarded a train for our 26-hour ride to Mumbai. The Indian trains we rode were pleasant enough, despite the presence of bugs and rats, and we had enough reading material on us that the time passed pretty quickly.



These are pictures I took of train platforms in Kerala.

It was my last night on an Indian train. I went to bed in northern Kerala and slept through Karnataka and Goa. I woke up in Maharashtra. The language written on signs outside the train was different, and the landscape had changed from Kerala's wet tropics to arid scenery with distant plateaus and rock formations.

As our train approached the city of Mumbai, I saw something out the train window that I hadn't seen yet in my two and a half weeks in India: slums.

Oh, I'd never lost sight of the fact that India was a developing country. In my time traveling in Karnataka and Kerala, infrastructure had not been that great and Internet connections were spotty. Run-down, decaying buildings had been numerous. And despite inflation, price levels in India are still quite low - which is a sign that most Indians, by global standards, still make little money.

But I'd never felt like I was surrounded by dire poverty, certainly not the sort of poverty that I'd read about and had prepared myself mentally for. I never felt like a rich man tresspassing in the land of the poor. There were plenty of signs of affluence - satellite dishes, ubiquitous cell phones. In large cities there had been beggars - but they had been individual cases. I hadn't been asked for money nonstop.

Approaching Mumbai, I saw my first real poverty. I saw residents picking through the garbage lying by the railroad tracks, in front of the shantytown where they lived. And Mumbai is the financial and business center of India, home to the country's richest and trendiest people.

It reminded me of the first time I flew into Manila, and from the airplane I could see a neighborhood full of huge, opulent homes located literally right next to a depressing slum.

We arrived at the train station, hired a taxi to take us to our hotel (surprisingly, he charged less than Rough Guide had predicted), and got settled. For Jenna's description of check-in at the Hotel New Bengal, see here (the "city hotel").



Mumbai is huge and confusing. Even if you stay in the city center and you have a map. It's full of interesting stuff to see, do, and eat. But - particularly if you look like a foreigner with money to burn and you hang out downtown - you have to adopt an attitude of not trusting anybody. It's not just a matter of being approached by touts who want to set you up at their brother's restaurant or offer you a guided tour of Colaba. That sort of thing is common enough in South Asia and can be easily brushed aside if you've adopted the right mindset.

But in Mumbai, for the first time, I was approached by people who mimic the way Indians strike up conversations with foreigners when they're being genuinely friendly. And then these people ask for money. We had two girls come up to us in Colaba who did a good job imitating the way Indians will start talking to foreigners when they want to be friendly or practice speaking English. And they said, when we seemed on guard, that "We don't want to ask for money". And then they asked that we buy them lunch in a nearby restaurant.

Aggressive selling is nothing new in India, and both Hampi and Cochin have many, many people who make good livelihoods seperating tourists from their money. And frankly, I figure that's OK. But those tourist-centric businesspeople and touts in Hampi and Cochin seemed to be following a code of honor that was routinely being broken in Mumbai. They might be enticing foreign tourists into their art shop to try to sell them Chinese imports at ten times their actual value, but they weren't fundamentally pretending the transaction was something other than what it was. In Mumbai, I felt like I was being trained to be automatically distrustful of every stranger on the street. (As it turned out, it was good training for Egypt.)

We only had one day in Mumbai, so after seeing the Colaba sights (generally meaning the buildings that terrorists targeted last November) we took a ferry to Elephanta Island, where Hindu temples were carved into caves hundreds of years ago.



The island is very touristy and full of various India kitsch vendors, but still seems a friendlier place than the Colaba streets.

Elephanta Island is full of dogs and monkeys. I saw one monkey steal an orange soda right out of one tourist's hand, then drink its contents on the spot in front of the tourist.

Here's a dog begging for food from a monkey. I was highly amused. I just don't see a monkey having the same interspecies compassion as a human.

After a few minutes the dog gave up and wandered off. So a different dog started begging.

(Here's a thought: What if dogs see humans and monkeys as merely two different varieties of the same basic type of creature?)

After returning from the island, we settled down in a restaurant for something I hadn't eaten yet in India: north Indian food.

Most generic Indian restaurants outside of India serve north Indian food. Tandoori and naan and rich creamy curries are, to me, what epitomizes north Indian restaurant food. That sort of cooking is available in restaurants throughout the South, but it's not the greatest examples of the cuisine you'll ever find. Why eat subpar Northern food when excellent Southern food is available for far less money?

But we were in Mumbai, and Mumbai is in South India in much the same sense Baltimore is in the southern United States: it sorta is, but not really. So we went to a place in Colaba that had a comprehensive menu, and I got my first and so far only north Indian food in India.

It was a mutton curry and a vegetable curry with naan, and... it tasted pretty much like Indian curries taste in restaurants in other countries. Except the mutton was still on the bone. (I've heard that most mutton in India is actually goat meat, but I can't tell the difference when it's cooked in a spicy curry.)

The iconic view of Mumbai. You may remember seeing this scene
on the news last November under far less peaceful circumstances.

And that was it for downtown Mumbai. We traveled by taxi to the edge of Mumbai to meet and chat with a friend of Jenna's; then it was off to the airport for our flight to Egypt. At one point we drove through an affluent suburb of Mumbai that seemingly was in a whole different universe from the slums I'd seen from the train window the previous day.

India 6: Cochin

From Calicut, we took yet another too-early-morning train down the Malabar coast to Cochin, tourist capital of Kerala.


Fort Cochin is the old city It's a very walkable area full of old European buildings. The chaos of urban India is minimized . The whole place is extremely touristy and packed with Westerners; most businesses here cater to foreign tourists.


Across the harbor lies Ernakulam, the true modern heart of the city. Ernakulam is far more Indian than Fort Cochin (which at times seems almost a foreigners' sanctuary).


Beautiful old church in Fort Cochin. A visit inside reveals the diversity of European influences Cochin has received; the church was built by the Portuguese, but the inscriptions on many graves are in Dutch, and of course control of Cochin eventually passed to the British.


The Jain temple, and scenes from the daily pigeon feeding. Jains believe it's sinful to harm any living thing (this is why their religion does not permit them to become farmers) and helping animals is a way to accumulate merit. In Mumbai there's a Jain animal sanctuary that we didn't get to, but our guide book makes it sound almost like a petting zoo, with very well-cared-for animals.

I'm almost ashamed to say that barely a week later, in Cairo, I tried pigeon meat for the first time. The Jains would not have approved. (But they also would have disapproved of the fish I ate in Cochin, and of the mutton I ate in Mumbai.)

Cochin is near the geographical heart of Kathakali dance, and it is extremely easy for tourists to find local performances. A proper Kathakali performance is an all-night affair; most newbies perfer to see abridged performances that tend to run about 90 minutes. I saw one such performance at Northern Virginia Community College in the States a few years ago, and I saw my second in Fort Cochin.


Before the performance, the actors spend an hour applying their intricate makeup in full view of the audience. Then we had a local expert give us a short talk on the ways and customs of kathakali, and had one of the actors demonstrate the subtle facial expressions and sign language used. The actors do not speak out loud - they communicate through sign language while guys off to the side sing their lines.

I didn't take any still pictures of the performance because of the ban on flash photography (which many of my fellow audience members brazenly ignored), but I made a minute-long video:, which I would upload but apparently uploading a 100-megabyte video on blogger takes approximately forever.

Another attraction of the Cochin area is the substantial backwaters. Peaceful yet touristy, motorboats and rowboats ply the lakes and canals.




We signed up for a two-part tour. In the morning, we took a motorboat around a vast lake, at one point stopping to visit a factory where toddy is made from palm coconuts. (Although we had the option of buying some juice, there was no aggressive selling - this was a legit and on-the-level tour.)


We got a decent thali lunch on the motorboat, then switched to hand-rowed boats for the afternoon, when we traveled through rural canals and saw rope-making and coconut harvesting.


On our last evening in Cochin we went to the Shiva temple in Ernakulam to witness some temple festivities.




There were crowds, music, and elephant processionals. If we'd wanted to stay into the evening we could have seen a full performance of kathakali, but neither of us really felt up to it.

The next day we departed on our 26-hour train ride to Mumbai...