What's up Winnie The Pooh lovers (I'm allowed to say that because I never technically stepped foor in Xi Jinping's wonderful country, glory to the People's Republic of China). Weclome back to another Blog Post
I hope you have tea or coffee otherwise STOP READING and go make some RIGHT NOW or I'll shut down your internet permanently.
I hope you're ready for a very HOT AND SWEATY update because oh my god Hong Kong is freaking EXCRUTIATINGLY hot. That was the main thing I noticed when I stepped off the plane, the second being that english is also very common there and I felt mega blessed to be able to find my way around the airport with basically zero difficulty :D I really liked one part of the airport because you had to take this
super long underground tram and it felt like the opening sequence of Half Life with the very brutalist Bare Concrete Walls we were driving past.
ANYWAYS the next biggest hurdle to my cool time in Hong Kong was trying to find my hostel. This is where my expectations really started to wane on Hong Kong as a whole. Spoiler alert, my trip was not as
awesome as I would have liked, my opinion on Hong Kong is well and truly Neutral right now for many a reason I will soon get into. Firstly and foremostly sorry, my hostel. So I take the big double decker bus
from the airport which was pretty cool and get dropped off in the Tsim Sha Tsui neighborhood. Now, some of you may know already where this is going, but luckily, no I did NOT stay in Chungking Mansion, that
was a MASSIVE weight off my shoulders once I realized it. I ended up needing to find Mirador mansion, which was just next to it. My hostel was called Kung Fu hostel, and at the time I booked
it I thought it was just a silly name becasue oh haha China, Kung Fu, Bruce Lee heeheehee, but no, I walked up 4 flights of stairs, past a bunch of random shops and people's homes and presumably businesses, and
rolled up to an actual Kung Fu studio at like 1AM, and there was a homie at the front desk waiting to check in the late guests. He then led me up ANOTHER flight of stairs to the ACTUAL hostel where
I was sleeping. What a wild ride that was for me I'm not gonna lie, I was starving and dead tired and wanted to sleep so bad, and this was not an excellent start to my trip. The kicker here is that when I
finally managed to try to sleep, the bed was so small. So very very small. Even laying down horizontally I could not fit. My oh my I was not a happy camper that night.
The next day was a lot better though. I met a really nice Finnish dude in my hostel room, and he had a friend attending university in the city. We chatted for a while and went to get breakfast, and then him and his friend invited me out to chill and explore some of the city with them which was AWESOME :D They were super chill bros and we got along super well, it was a crazy good time in comparison to the night
That was such a cool start to the week I had planned to be there, but the next day was pretty crap. After an uncomfortably hot (and drunk) sleep, I tried to go out to explore the city, but got slapped so hard by the heat that I was just dying all day. Coming from the still-springtime-and-fairly-temperate Japan and even the I-still-have-to-defrost-my-car Nanaimo, I was NOT at all prepared for 30 degrees and humid. My white boy ass was sweating from pores I didn't even know I had. It was terrible and I felt very ill all day. GROSS, YUCKY, HATED IT. At the same time, the hostel I was staying at had a very poor bathroom situation, as in No Toilet Paper and No Soap, so every morning I would try to wake up as late as possible waiting for the luxury malls nearby to open so I could grab some breakfast stuff from the local grocery stores and then poop in their very clean bathrooms. Also, shoutout to the 7-11 onigiri, I ate them quite a bit in Japan, but oh my god they were a lifesaver in Hong Kong. Shit is EXPENSIVE there, like borderline Canada Level expensive depending on what you're buying which I was also not prepared for. The onigiris and grocery store snacks absolutely saved my ass, they were the one consistently affordable food item I would get when I was starving.
After that second terrible day things did start to look up a bit though. I met another fairly nice older gentleman in my room who, while a bit too business oriented for my usual conversational liking, was a nice guy at the end of the day, and showed me where all the cool and cheap restaurants were since he'd been in HK before, shoutout Cafe de Coral, you the GOAT for HK fast food. Unforturnately for most of the week, we were sharing the room and while he had been living in Fiji and could sleep in the heat, I was dying of heat every night in my tiny ass bed since the AC didn't work, and if I turned the one very loud fan on (which I could sleep through just fine thank you very much) I would get angrily shushed and he would just turn it off right away. Needless to say the majority of my sleeps were very bad.
I also managed to get a couple good hikes in the day after as well thankfully. After getting a bit more used to the heat, I went out to the Temple of 1000 Buddhas. While not much of a hike, it was a really cool location, basically just a huge staircase with unique buddha statues lining the whole way up. It was fun to try and find all the funniest ones, I think I got some cool pictures of them. The view was also pretty good, nothing crazy but not bad either :) That same day I also managed to grab a ferry to Lamma Island, which is a bit south of the main areas. That was probably my favorite part, it was a super chill island with a couple of relaxing beaches and a SUPER cool and not too hard hiking trial between the two main villages on the island. Walking that trail was a joy, the wind was picking up the later in the afternoon it got, so it was actually SOMEWHAT COOL, and the view the whole way was really nice, expecially near the second village. It was a super nice escape from the city and made me forget my woes, at least for a couple hours.
Otherwise, most days I just kinda cruised around the city as best I could to check out all the cool things it had to offer. I made it to the Horse Racing, some cool parks, saw a BUNCH of random parts of the city. The more I saw of it though, the more I became kind of disillusioned with it. There are a LOT of really cool parts of the city I got to see, lots of people just going about their daily lives, but at the same time, MAN it really just feels like a rich people's playhouse a lot of the time with all the fancy malls and luxury shops and stuff :( Shoutout to the one cafe I went to that was playing a cover of Creep by Radiohead, brought me right back to being in Vancouver.
Like I said before tho, things are quite expensive in Hong Kong, ESPECIALLY accomodation. There's only so much space to build in the city, and at that most of the places of stay for visitors are high class hotels or airbnbs, with extremely few budget options with hostels or the like. This means that even for my shitty space with no TP and a tiny ass bed, I was still paying like 25 dollars a night which was a bit ridiculous. At least my place was clean, I was genuinely considering going homeless one night because I almost couldn't find a place that wasn't in Chungking Mansion, and everyone I spoke to and everything I read online suggested you avoid staying in the place as a guest at all costs (old building + poor maintenance and cleaning in guest houses). And then for food, while luckily my one roommate and the Finnish boys helped me find some budget options, most food was still very expensive! I splurged and got Jollibee a couple times, and prices were basically about the same as they'd be back in Canada. And then any actual good fresh food would be probably anywhere from 150 to 300 HKD, or like 25 - 50 Canadian dollars per meal :(
I did end up doing ONE MORE big hike kinda deal, and went up to go see the Big Buddha on the airport island. Nothing crazy, there's a little temple and there is a really big Buddha, but if it wasn't ridonkulously hot, there were some actually really cool hikes to do on the mountain! I just took the bus up to the Buddha (it was like 5 bucks and not even an hour of driving, not bad compared to the 50 dollars overpriced ski lift that goes up the mountain), and while walking around the area, it turns out the whole mountain was a really cool hiking trail. It looked SUPER cool, but oh my god I was not about to do any serious hiking in the heat, I was sweating so bad already. But there were two brave souls trying to climb part of the mountain, and I got a cool picture of them way off in the distance. Sucks there was a bunch of clouds as well for them though LOL. The Big Buddha was also very cool, it really was just a really well made Big Buddha, and it had a little museum inside with some older relics and stuff, pretty freaking cool. The village beside it was also kinda neat, but it also felt too commercialized and well maintained LOL. It felt like a pretty out of the way place, taking the bus up, but then you look and there's a very modern Starbucks and McDonalds and other shops on the top right before you get to the Big Buddha. Very westerner friendly I guess? But definitely ruins the vibe for sure. The forested area and Buddha were definitely the highlight, shoutout to this funny hiking sign I saw, that was gas.
Ermmm, I think that's all I wanted to share from Hong Kong? That's all the positive stuff at least, it was mostly just me wandering around the city for a week sweating my ass off LOL. While it IS a
super cool city, I don't know if it's really for me? I think I WOULD go back, but only with enough money to afford somewhere nice to sleep. I think sleeping like shit staying in that hostel definitely ruined
a lot of the fun for me, being alone is one thing, but being alone and having to sleep in such awful conditions did not make m a happy guy. Also a lot of thing just went wrong for me? Like the time I thought
I lost my glasses not even 1 month into the trip. Or the time my credit card stopped working and almost stranded me hours away from the city. And the hostel having no TP. No TP for my bunghole! WTF!
There's definitely a lot to love about Hong Kong, but only if you've got the cash to spend. Otherwise probably just visit mainland China? It'd probably be more fun for a budget traveller if you don't mind the possibility of your social credit being lowered. (ALSO HOLY SHIT quick shoutout to the chinese guy I roomed with for 1 night in HK, we chatted a bit and then he asked if I thought Taiwan was a part of China. I told him it was a pretty loaded question, but he insisted, so I told him as gently as I could that I thought it should be it's own country. He disagreed and then left immediately and wouldn't talk to me for the rest of the night LOL I'm sorry Chinese guy.)
yes yes anyhowzit, next time I post I will have some fun stories from Bangkok and beyond to share with ya'll :) Have a lovely morning or evening or whatever, I am a tired guy so I'm hitting the HAY!!! SEEYA!!
