The day we left Heathrow off on our Honeymoon to China there was, out of the whole aeroplane, just one woman who felt brave enough to publicly declare herself a piggy paranoid petunia by sporting the irksome surgeons mask.
They were the latest fashion accessory for the streets of Mexico City and in Spanish speaking Texas at the time, but hadn’t really gained a marked popularity amongst us I’m-not-ill-I’m-just-tired British.

I wasn’t sure if it was for our benefit because she herself was ill or because she thought the rest of us were Oinky but she did look a little silly, and even more so when she took the mask off to go to sleep before putting it back on to be awake and aware, as if she could see the disease coming.

The H1N1 Swine Flu outbreak was in its infancy, and nobody else on board looked even mildly concerned.

Ten days later and I’m Man-Poorly (exponential rules of man-suffering apply) on a 2 hour 40 minute Cathay Pacific flight from Shanghai to Hong Kong surrounded by shifty Doogie Howser MD lookalikes all masked up.
Three days earlier two sickly foreign people in Beijing airport had tested positive for swine flu and so had panicked the entire nation of Chinese air travellers who donned their masks of suspicion en masse and occasionally pointed at clammy men.

I too was clammy and ergo more paranoid than a teenager going home after his first giggle cig to find his mum waiting up for him in the brightly lit kitchen.

Despite my best efforts to get us a guaranteed place on the quarantine express, I got from the toilet on one side of Hong Kong Customs booths to a toilet on the Hong Kong side without being carried off and locked away.

Into Arrivals, and we were met eventually by a laissez faire female who generously supplied us with a ticket and a bright orange sticker and told us where to sit to get taken to our transfer coach.
I exchanged glances with my shiny new wife and knew we were both wondering what had happened to our private guiding and immediate taxi transfers.
Clearly I’ve been affected by the previous 10 days of 5 star treatment, but honestly? a coach? With other people on?
I gently adjusted my sticker so the smiley logo was straight and sat with the general public and waited for my bus.

We used the time on the coach reading our free maps and both valiantly displayed an embarrassingly sketchy knowledge of this former colonial outpost that was handed back to China in 1997 by Chris Patten and a very large key.
We thought we were going to Hong Kong, but as it turned out, we were going to Kowloon Island instead, and as the Airport was on Lantau Island, we could see the famously crowded skyline of Hong Kong and crossed a huge bridge that ran beside the largest Container dockyard I’ve ever seen, having never seen one before, but we hadn’t actually got onto what I would consider proper Hong Kong before things took a turn for the absolutely brilliant and we realised our hotel was in a corner of Kowloon called Mong Kok.
Brilliant for me at least – my inner monologue was instantly that of a nine year old boy shouting

“Mong? Kok! Stupid Penis! Ha! On Roadsigns! Stupid Penis Everywhere!”

I was nine back in the 80’s when that sort of thing wasn’t frowned upon.
For those looking to be educated, Mong Kok actually means “Busy Corner” and whilst they’re not wrong, as the one-way streets are jammed with taxi’s and coaches and the pavements were awash with crowds of people, so an appropriate name but I don’t know how they knew it would be when they built it.

We were staying at the 5 star Langham Place hotel, and on arrival the kindly receptionist mentioned that now “Might be a good time to remove your badge, sir” in such a way to send a clear message that this wasn’t the sort of establishment that would tolerate stickers of any sort.

Our room was on the 29th floor, and had it not been for the skies being darkened by clouds and heavy rain, the floor to ceiling windows would have given us a grand view of Kowloon Harbour and Hong Kong Island, but as it was, all we could really make out were the lights on the shops and cars on the streets directly below, and the dramatically huge ventilation fans on a vast curved roof that belonged to the One Langham Place Shopping Mall, an actual 10 story shopping mall with big brands like Nike and Adidas shops, L’Occitane, the unfeasibly expensive soap shop, alongside electrical outlets and a shop that for 50GBP would make a miniature cartoony model of you, after a 3 day wait for manufacture all attached to the hotel by a glass bridge – how posh does a hotel have to be before a souvenir shop or two just won’t do anymore?.

We had no time to explore these things now though as, in case you forgot, it was my 30th Birthday on this day of diverse transport (Car to Maglev to Aeroplane to *shudder* Bus) and after corking the complementary champagne and polishing off most of the posh looking but not-so-posh tasting complementary chocolates, plus a doomed and short-lived play on the mysteriously complementary hotel branded Yo-Yo, we headed down to ground level and hailed a cab to take us to meet our second coach of the day for a pre-booked jaunt to ‘R66’ and the Temple Street Market.

At the pick up point, we met our tour guide for the trip that would eventually end with a float down the river in a Junk, and he introduced himself as “Derek”.

By now, we’ve had a Jean, a Katherine and a Chris, and I totally understand the reasons for the Chinese to have an “English Name” as traditional Chinese names like Nguyen or Dinh (pronounced ‘Nwhen’ and ‘Yin’) confuse our English mind’s understanding of the sounds letters make, but if you are going to choose a name, why would anyone choose ‘Derek’? He was a nice man as well, not at all derek-ish.

R66 is a revolving restaurant on the 62nd floor of the Hopewell Centre office block reached by a winding road half way up the side of Happy Valley which is quite possibly the most melancholy location ever.
“All the way to the top of Happy Valley sir?”
“No, just halfway please.”

The restaurant moniker R66 is because it takes 66 minutes to do one full 360 degree rotation, although for 33 minutes your table does look mostly at the side of the contented slope, before slowly slowly catchy motion sickness the view stretched across the buildings and islands of the Special Administrative Region that is Hong Kong and out to sea where the sun had just begun to disappear into the water in a blaze of squinting temporary blindness.

The food was served buffet style although a la carte was available, and was actually very good, with Western, Eastern and gamblers choice unlabelled dishes. Starters were mostly seafood based, including lobster, crayfish and spider crab legs alongside a plethora of salad choices, where mains had noodles of all ages, as well as meats of all creeds and breeds, and all presented just like your mother would.
So long as it was 1989.
Herein lay the issue with R66, apart from the detail that they need to speed up to one revolution per 62 minutes so that being on the 62nd floor appears more deliberate and less like they got something somewhere wrong, but it seems to be a destination restaurant resting on it’s formerly glorious laurels. The décor was basic; verging on Welcome Break with pub patterned carpets.
Then they fired up the Casio keyboard and out emerges a singer in a glittering blue evening gown who sang all the most contemporary hits by Chicago, Berlin and Europe. I think the irony was lost on the two resident performers though.

Back on the coach and we were taken back across to Kowloon and to the Temple Street Market, which is a Chinese version of Bury Market, with less black pudding and more genuine silks and fake football shirts. The night market on Temple street starts off a little bit seedy, with the stalls on the crusts selling sex toys and unambiguous porn manned by men who obscure their faces from view by sitting behind a piece of cardboard dangling on a peg tied to a length of string, providing you only wanted to look at the vendors faces when paying, this contraption worked as a modesty protector. One step to the left, and his face is clearly visible. One step to the right and you’re in incongruous company.
Wandering down the busiest section of market, where the fake handbags met fake
ipods and more of the same artwork that we’d been shown in Beijing hung resplendently on crocodile clips. We’d already had to invest in a third suitcase to contain our growing collection of weird gifts and souvenirs, so I managed to restrain myself to an ipod charger for £2 that surprising worked without smouldering.

At this point, we were supposed to be going onwards with Derek for a 40 minute Junk ride, but sadly the crampus gutteratii had returned for me and being on a wooden boat on a porcelain chair didn’t capture my enthusiasm and as our hotel was just down the road, we explained to a sympathetic Derek and left via a Mcdonald’s pit stop. This did mean that I hadn’t been able to do rail, road, air and water travel in one day, but it was a trade worthwhile.

The following day, and for 55 HK Dollars or 5 GBP, we were gilded with an all day Metro underground rail ticket that meant we were able to leave our hotel and mall conglomerate and head out independently to explore, and hopefully pick up a bargain or two amongst the Tax Free Shopping haven that we’d been led to believe Hong Kong was.
Apart from the Levi jeans and the Clarkes Shoes which were both around 30% more costly than our own shores, everything else available seemed to be priced on a par with the U.K.
An 8Gb Nano converted out at £106, which is hardly a steal and as the numbers involved in calculating the cost of a Gucci or Bendi or Prada lunchbox were mind boggling, we’ll just assume that all the posh shops are the same as here too, so there.
We did almost find successful bargains in a place that had advertised sportswear at 90% discount, but then an unexpected Achilles heel, and the rest of my foot, prevented my transaction when they insisted on repeatedly putting my size 45 feet into size 43 shoes before finally the shopkeeper conceded that he didn’t even know people had feet as big as mine and suggested I try somewhere else instead, so I rode the moving walkway, an 800 metre long escalator that you are able to get off, but should you be curious like us, you’ll ride past the antiques market and bookshops and up into a residential area before it dawns on you that the thing only goes in one direction and you’re left to do a walk of shame back to whence we came, albeit telling people still gliding along onboard that there was a pot of gold at the end.

We were in Hong Kong for the shortest period of time in comparison to the other cities on our tour, and I think coming from the architectural success that is Shanghai, into the bustling neon lined streets of Hong Kong, where residential skyscrapers sit so closely together that some balconies are just a few feet apart even at 60 stories or more, and from the wide open space above our heads in all cities we’d visited across China to Hong Kong where having a view of the sky perfectly letterboxed by buildings is instead the norm.

We departed early, Yo-Yo replaced upon discovery of a “just because it’s left in the room doesn’t mean it’s free” rule, and onwards further south we flew, to Borneo.

Land of the Monkeys.
And Apes.
Apes are not Monkeys.
Remember that.