Nowhere To Go But Up

Hong Kong is downright crazy: one of the most insane juxtapositions I’ve ever experienced.

The region, encompassing a mountainous maze of islands and a bit of the southern mainland coast connected to China itself, actually contains quite a large percentage of protected natural land where humid, jungled granite peaks rise above twisting roads. In designated urban areas, where there’s literally no more space to expand laterally, buildings already crammed close simply rise higher and higher and higher…and because high rises stand on ridges and in valleys and extraordinarily undulating terrain, they tower overhead in a chaotic, compact, endless twisting illuminated glass maze. As the city’s arms reach outward, shining glass turns to dense concrete lattices patterned to the multi-thousand by metal window bars.

I’ve arrived in a place with an utterly baffling network of color-coded taxis, ferries, trains, double-decker busses and trams and bridges and tunnels and webs of elevated pedestrian walkways that belong in some futuristic sci-fi.

I’ve arrived in a place with the most expensive education in the world, where kindergarten entrance exams often determine the course of a child’s schooling through university: where they study, what languages they speak, and the opportunities available to them.

I’ve arrived in a place where motivation is driven by objective success and family honor; where an entire culture centers on quantitative success rather than happiness.

I’ve arrived in a place where the government measures and forecasts air quality by the hour, where the recommendation to stay inside proves unsurprising.

I’ve arrived in a place where rainstorms arrive in intensities forecasted by color, reaching extremes at which the government mandates all public transport be shut down.

I also happen to have arrived to typhoon season. It is stupid hot. And stupid humid. You literally never feel clean; it’s that heavy, smothering heat that hangs in the air before a thunderstorm, but the thunderstorms and rain almost never come, so you walk around  soaked in humidity and sweat in 95 degree heat. (When you’re on the outer islands, feel free to add hoards of vicious mosquitoes to the mix.)

__________

I live in Mui Wo, a rather small village on the rather large island of Lantau. My flat nestles in a small cluster of buildings 20 minutes’ walk from the piers, past a lattice of concrete walkways crossing a broad, flat wetland filled with violet and white blossoms, and murky canals where the water buffalo wallow in bliss.

Happy feral cows and buffalo wander the streets, leaving monster brown bombs for the unsuspecting Chaco-wearing foreigner. Although roads connect towns across the island, villages are built on an infrastructure of bicycle paths.

There are bicycles everywhere. Chirping bells provide the village’s soundtrack. Racks of rusty fixies fill by the thousand at the ferry pier.

More often than not I look out my window in the morning to hills rising above my flat in a murky, dusty brown haze. The kind I tend to associate with nearby forest fires too close for comfort, but more muddy, and without the fires.

There’s a starbucks. There are two proper supermarkets. There’s a baller bakery. There are 7-11s everywhere. Never has the option to spend a couple dollars more to eat western food I appreciate and stay sane been so welcome.

Local characters include the woman who wipes her monster slobbering bulldog’s butt with a tissue every time he poops, the man who rides his bicycle in circles through town wearing a crimson, head-to-toe Power Ranger uniform as he blasts the theme song forward (GoPro attached to his handlebars), and the old dude who walks his pet giant tortoises by the waterfront.

Depending on the ferry, I’m thirty minutes’ or an hour’s commute from the Center’s urban chaos.

Anything is available in Hong Kong, they tell me. You just have to know where to go.

The problem being, in order to find anything at all in this city you have to know exactly where it is. As in, the name of which slip of a shop has what you’re after, in which twisted maze of a floor in which building, which most likely doesn’t look like it contains a twenty-floor mall in the first place. Also, where on some hectic side alley the tiny slip of an entrance to the building’s elevators is located. If you’re really lucky, Google Maps won’t have changed the place’s name in the last week.

It’s all a sort of semi-controlled chaos that somehow seems to sort of work out, although more often than not I’ve probably passed within a half block of what I needed, searching for hours, before simply giving up. (Every so very occasionally, I board the ferry back to Mui Wo clutching some random trophy in blissful triumph.) Seriously, how anyone found their way around here before the internet is utterly beyond me.

Adding to the slight frustration: when people don’t understand what I’m looking for, they simply tell me they don’t have it.

Exhibition A:

Gavi walks into an electronics shop. Gavi spies laptops, cameras, watches, phones, portable speakers and TVs. Gavi asks an employee whether the store carries portable hard drives. The employee tells her, in the nicest possible way, to go elsewhere. Gavi takes another quick walk around the counters and spies no fewer than 15 models of portable hard drive.

End Exhibition A.

Somehow, I still manage to accomplish a fair amount in my first two weeks in Hong Kong. I get my ass to a hospital– finally!!– and come away with some really good drugs to properly kick the (now properly diagnosed) respiratory tract infection I’ve apparently been packing since I left Penang. I replace my climbing helmet (the old, manky, tiger-striped one, with me since my first week on rock in 2012, stayed behind in Oz). I reunite with my climbing shoes and slackline. And, I find my way to a post across from Central’s light-bedecked high rises from which I watch a super chintzy laser show after the sun goes down, in front of which a totally real pirate ship with bright backlit red sails cruises the channel.

Welcome to the Far East.