Category: Hong Kong

My final full day in HK . Today I visited the Man Mo Temple which was again busy with people getting their devotions in ahead of the lunar new year.

Lunch was taken in the cooked food centre of the Sheung Wan market. These markets and eating places can be found in every neighbourhood and are a legacy of the colonial government’s largely successful attempts to get traders off the streets in the seventies and eighties – they are not easily comprehensible to gweilos (westerners) like me and I had to do a few circuits of the bustling space before finding an English menu. I ordered, and forgot to photograph, beef and scrambled egg with rice which was just what I needed. Hongkongers don’t like their scrambled eggs all that well done which was fine for me, although I suspect some of the cooking process is still going on when the food is brought to you. With a drink included it cost the princely sum of fifty-three dollars which is about a fiver in sterling – amazing value for money!

There was then further afternoon wandering.

I took my ease in a cha-chaan-teng café for egg tarts and a cup of milk tea – both HK delicacies in their own right. The milk tea is made with evaporated milk which I have a childhood weakness for.

I’m now out for a few beers and something to eat, before heading to the airport to fly home tomorrow lunchtime. I’ve enjoyed beyond measure the bustle and chaos and east-meets-west of this place, and am already thinking how I can work HK interludes into my future family visits back to Australia. Cheers!

My penultimate full day in HK. Today I visited the Taoist temple of Wong Tai Sin, where many Hongkongers were lighting incense and various other combustible offerings that could be purchased from stalls around the temple, in advance of the lunar new year. If I believed in such things, I could have also availed myself of a reading from many of the fortune tellers also located in the arcades of the temple!

I then travelled on the MTR (Hong Kong metro) to the bustling neighbourhood of Mong Kok, home of many watch dealers, where I may have treated myself to a little something following some reasonably extensive internet research as to the more trustworthy vendors. I was offered a seat as I tried on various watches and received several advices including “buying a watch is a tiring business” and “you can’t be a real Hongkonger without a proper watch”.

I also visited one of Mong Kok’s cha chaan teng cafés to experience fusion food in the opposite direction. Years of British influence here have led to these fine establishments offering a wide variety of caff-style food but with a definite Cantonese bent – my “combo sandwich” of spam and scrambled egg being a fine example of this, providing vital fuel for an afternoon’s Kowloon wandering. I might start a campaign to get these introduced in my favourite British greasy spoons.

I’m now out for evening bunkers (that phrase again) and making plans for my final full day!

I dined at Hay Hay Kitchen, 11 Luard Road in Wan Chai where I enjoyed a cold beer with my barbecue pork and fried egg.

Day five in Hong Kong . Last night I returned to Sing Lum Khui in Kowloon for another bowl of beef and pork noodles in that fiery soup that I so enjoyed the other day (see posts passim).

Today I travelled cross-border to Macau which was to be honest a slightly frustrating experience. Where Hong Kong is easy for a Brit to understand, I found Macau to be confusing to navigate with the ferry terminal being on the outskirts of the centre.

Practically it’s difficult as well as few places seem to accept western credit cards (in HK Visa, Mastercard and Amex are universal in the same way as they are at home), preferring the Chinese payment systems that are based around QR codes but need to be tied to a local bank account, or a system completely proprietary to Macau that again requires you to have a local bank account. I was finally able to pay for something in cash with HK dollars to get Macanese Patacas as change.

The Portuguese architecture that is probably worth seeing isn’t easily walkable from the ferry terminal in the time I had so I spent most of my time wandering around various unlovely 1960s shopping arcades and the all-enveloping Vegas-style casinos which were of little interest to me.

As someone who does much of their tourism by walking around it was a bit of a disappointment and I would have probably benefited from some slightly better planning.

That said we are all the richer for the experiences we choose to take! I was however pleased to get back to Wan Chai for evening bunkers in a pub I had come to quite enjoy.

Day four in HK, and a visit to the Kowloon Walled City park. The Kowloon Walled City was a Chinese military outpost that despite being in Kowloon never entered into British possession, however because of that possession covering everything around it could also not be used by the Chinese. It thus became something of a grey area and the home of one of the densest unofficial settlements anywhere. Surviving numerous attempts to shut it down, it persisted until the early 1990s when the colonial government was finally able to relocate the 35,000 residents. It was replaced with a rather lovely park containing a detailed model of the settlement in its final days.

The previous evening I dined at Wan Gui Chuen, 107 Hennessy Road in Wan Chai. This is another of those places with an Argos-style form that you fill in to communicate your order. The form here (annoyingly I forgot to photograph any of these during my stay) contained no English so I had to complete it with the help of Google Translate.

What appeared was maybe not quite up to the standard of Sing Lum Khui the night before but I really had little to complain about, the soup was hot and the umami strong.

Yesterday evening I paid a visit to Sing Lum Khui at 23 Lock Road, Kowloon where I enjoyed noodles with various bits of pork and beef in a hot and sour soup (ordered “medium spicy” on the Argos-style card that I forgot to photo) that provided a delightful spice blast unlike anything I’ve known before.

The soup these noodles came in was really something, well-seasoned and incredibly spicy with the abundant coriander providing a welcome punch of freshness. The Argos-style order form that’s often used in these sorts of restaurants is just visible in the container with the chopsticks. If you come to Hong Kong you should really make an effort to eat here, it is superb.

This morning I crossed the water to Kowloon once again to hop on a bus to visit the street markets of Sham Shui Po and sample some of the food available from the various walk up shops around the market. And now I’m out in Wan Chai for some evening refreshment – can anyone spot a theme here?!

All of Hong Kong’s infrastructure standards were imported from the UK. Thus, HK is one of the only places other than the UK where one can find double decker buses in mainstream use. The two main bus operators, Citybus and Kowloon Motor Bus, run large fleets of air conditioned triple axle vehicles, all with bilingual real time information and announcements. Hong Kong also has a tap-to-go card called Octopus that can be used on all public transport (except taxis) and for a host of other things – the vast majority of convenience stores and fast food places accept it as well. There’s an Octopus phone app (which I’ve got) that you can recharge using Apple Pay or the Android equivalent as well.

These rice sticks are a bit uninteresting until they get covered in soy sauce, peanut sauce, some other type of sauce and sesame seeds at which point they become really quite nice. Apologies for photographer hand, you eat them in an alleyway so there’s not a lot to put the bowl on.

Curried fish balls – the Hong Kong delicacy everyone should apparently try. To be honest I didn’t think these tasted of a great deal. The photographer’s hand (and watch strap) makes another appearance.

I ascended to Victoria Peak via the nearly vertical Peak Tram and walked the scenic path around the base of the peak. Later, I travelled across the water to Kowloon for evening bunkers in a properly authentic Irish pub.