Ordinary Gweilo

My sister is arriving in Hong Kong today (with two of her children) and will be staying for a week.  This is her first visit to Hong Kong, and so I need to show her around, which probably means that I won’t have much chance to post to this blog for the next seven days.

I was thinking back to my first visit to Hong Kong.  There are three things I particularly remember about arriving here – the first was the hair-raising arrival over the rooftops of Kowloon, the second was the chaos of the old Kai Tak airport and the long queues for taxis, and the third was the heat and humidity as I walked out of the terminal building.  In addition, the taxi ride to my hotel in Tsim Tsa Tsui was always evocative – and the places on the way are probably fairly typical of the older parts of Hong Kong with a mix of industrial and residential developments.

These days, arriving at Chek Lap Kok is much less exciting, and the airport itself much more efficient, but also larger and more anonymous.  There’s normally no need to take a taxi, and certainly the queues seem much shorter.  For most people, the first sight of Hong Kong is now from an Airport Express train or a vehicle on the Lantau Expressway, and the view is of shiny new Tung Chung town, the mountains and the sea. 

I am not particularly fond of Singapore, but the drive along the highway from the airport is one I always enjoy.  I am not sure that I can explain why, but the traffic is normally moving smoothly and they have obviously gone to great trouble to make it seem ‘green’ by the large amounts of vegetation they have planted.  Arriving in Bangkok, on the other hand, you are immediately thrown into the chaos of the city and the perpetual traffic jams. 

The Airport Express is clean and fast, and is quite a relaxing way to arrive in Hong Kong, and it is a short walk at each of the stations to the taxi rank.

Of course, coming here in February you also miss out on the heat and humidity.  Right now the weather is actually very pleasant, all the more so after the long spell of cold and wet weather we have been enduring.

So, all in all, I reckon that my sister’s first impressions of Hong Kong are likely to be rather different from my own!