Hong Kong

People have a lot of vision of Hong Kong - Financial center, super dense city, city of shopping.  For my girlfriend, Hong Kong was simply home and she still has a lot of family there.  For two weeks I tagged along a visit.

I love markets.  Hong Kong is all about markets.  Space is at such a premium in Hong Kong that people generally don't have the option to "stock up" or buy in large quantities so there are grocery and dry goods markets repeated all over the city.  Hong Kong has a massive population in a small area so specialized markets have formed and the competition has driven further specialization.  A few of my favorites:

The Bird Market Having a dog as a pet is pretty unreasonable in small apartments with no grass parks.  Having a bird is quite possible.  Apparently, in an older era, retired men would walk around with their caged birds and rest in this park.  The bird market now takes up much of the space but there were still the odd person chatting with a caged bird beside him.

We watched as stores received new shipments - large boxes with a single bag inside holding hundreds of fish.  These bags are removed and slid across the floor of the store until they get to the large tanks of a similar stock.  This is a large numbers business.

Turtles were also quite popular.  I think they are similarly low maintenance, but you can buy accessories (plastic palm trees) for your turtles.

There are a few constants.  The red lights over the produce seem to be common Hong Kong wide.  You often see Compact Florescent Lights under the shades but by no means a rule. 

The products in each stall is in general competitive.  Unlike our supermarkets where you have made an investment to go this big box store and the next big box store is 15 minutes away, here if you don't like the look of the banana's, you walk 4 meters to the next vendor and check his selection.  Prices vary, but not widely. 

Cooked food is similarly competitive.   It's common to see the same types of restaurants stacked up next to each other, each roughly with the same number of clients.  There is definitely some destination restaurants - we even saw the odd line up at lunch time, but for the most part, everything is busy or closed.
 

Food in restaurants is dominated by seafood.  People in Hong Kong like their meat so eating Vegetarian is certainly a challenge.  We visited a family favorite Dim Sum place a number of times in our trip but I didn't bother to take pictures because Dim Sum is common in Vancouver and the menu items are very similar between the two cities.  It's sea food that really stands out as different.

On the vegeratian side, I had a few new things.  Cook lettuce is rare in Vancouver here - it's pretty common in Hong Kong.  The deserts in Hong Kong also stand out.  While these kinds of deserts can be found in Vancouver (especially the night market in Richmond) they are particularly dramatic in Hong Kong.

When you think of Hong Kong, you rarely think of wildlife.  The city does actually have a few wildlife areas and of the hightlights is the Mai Po Marshes.  These marshes on the Northern border of Hong Kong used to be shrimp farms but have been retired for conservation purposes.  The area is now an important stop over place for migratory birds and one of the few areas that wildlife comes first.
 

The park has open houses on Saturdays and we booked ourselves a tour.  We were lucky that our tour coincided with a low tide so we got a pretty good bird viewing of the mud flats.  If you are a local, you can get permits to enter this area outside of a group and take photos at your leisure but this is too much to organize for a tourist.

Another one of those "Found on the internet" things, I wanted to see think pink dolphins.  We booked ahead of time (the tours go three days a week) and we got to the hotel downtown to await our pickup.  We were whisked out to near the airport and when we got on the boat, Helen commented it didn't feel like Hong Kong any more - almost everyone was a white westerner or Japanese.  The tour was run bilingual - English, Japanese. 

We toured the harbour looking for dolphins and when they were spotted, we slowly followed.

When you arrive at the international airport in Hong Kong, the first island you visit (after the airport which is on a man made island) is Lantau Island.  While Lantau seems like just a prelude to Hong Kong proper, it actually has a few attractions that make it a good destination.  One day we took the MTR to central and then hopped on a ferry to visit Lantau.  Our first destination was the Po Lin Monastery and the Giant Buddha - Tian Tan Buddha.
 

Our second destination on Lantau was Tai O, a small fishing community on the western side of the island.   When you get off the bus you are funneled into the market and the small retail area.  Fish markets here are terrific (most things are sold live) and Helen's mom were quite disappointed when we didn't have anything we need to take home with us.

Walking around the village you would often see trays of food left out drying.   It seems that seafood that doesn't get sold immediately in the market gets dried and sold as dried products. 

If you had only one day in Hong Kong, going to visit the peak in Central would probably be one of the things you would do.  We didn't visit the peak until quite late in our trip because we were hoping for a day of rain to wash away (or at least reduce) the air pollution.

For a day trip we decided to go out to Lamma Island.   We took the ferry from central  to Yung Shue Wan on the North Western end of the island.