Hong Kong is the first place where we've spent any length of time without a guidebook to guide us. I wouldn't recommend visiting Hong Kong on a budget without a guidebook, especially if you can't read Chinese or speak Cantonese.
I find that travelling without a guidebook leads to a lot of wandering around looking for decent, inexpensive meals. This is fun in moderation, but can lead to long gaps between meals and snacks. I don't do well without regular meals - when Pierre's hungry he handles it graciously, remaining polite and interactive. I, on the other hand, have to shut down a few systems to keep things civil. Until my blood sugar gets back to a normal level, I work hard to muster up a polite tone of voice to say things like "Can we maybe not talk until I'm fed?" This isn't new to me - in every city and every country we always have to fumble around a bit before finding places to eat. By the time we leave Hong Kong on Day 48 we've almost got the food thing figured out, so we're a little more prepped for upcoming visits. (We'll need to drop into Hong Kong a few times over the next seven months to catch flights to other countries and for visa runs.)
The first two nights we stay at the Dragon Hostel, which is located in the Sincere House building on Argyle Street near Mong Kok station. In spite of the dodgy-sounding signs of some of it's neighbours ("Hourly Spanish Hotel- 70 HK$ one hour") it's an award winning hostel and in a decent, central neighbourhood.
In Canada, Pierre tried to describe to me the quirks of the hostels in Hong Kong, but I didn't really understand. Here's what I know after my trip to Hong Kong: a hostel's office may be located on the 9th floor, but it may also have blocks of rooms on multiple floors. A hostel may have rooms on only one floor, but no one floor is dedicated to only one hostel. From what we saw, the Sincere House building has many floors (let's say 16) and each floor is a mishmash of personal residences, hostels, businesses and whatever else someone decides to use their apartment space for.
Since something got mixed up with our reservation, Dragon House has a room for us Day 45 (6th floor), a room for us on Day 46 (9th floor) but nothing on Day 47. So, on that day we switch to another hostel that's conveniently located a few metres away from our Day 46 room, which in turn was located next to an apartment-slash-belly dancing studio.
The main reason we're in Hong Kong is to get to China and this requires a tourist visa. Getting a visa for any country can be a hassle (especially without a guidebook to ease the way) and according to my Internet/news reading, Chinese tourist visas are still a bit tricky to get - this is a hangover from the tight restrictions initiated for the 2008 Olympics. On top of this, it's Thursday morning before we start getting our paperwork together, it takes at least 24 hours to get a rush visa, and the visa office isn't open Saturdays. We really don't want to stay in Hong Kong until Monday or Tuesday just to get a Chinese visa, so we cave in and pay Dragon Hostel to take care of the footwork for us. Our tourist visas/passports return to us Friday afternoon without a hitch - it costs a couple hundred dollars for two double-entry visas but it's worth every penny. I don't know if we would have had a chance to see much of the city otherwise.
I've been saying "Hong Kong" a lot but, technically, during this visit we never cross over to Hong Kong proper . Our hostel is located in Kowloon, north of Hong Kong. When we walk south to the pier and look across the water we can see Hong Kong. Near dusk, Hong Kong looks like this (on the left):
...and at night it looks like this:
During our next visit we plan to check out Hong Kong, but on this trip we've got our hands full with Kowloon. A tourist brochure we pick up at the airport recommends a few self-guided walking tours, which lead us to the bird market:
...the flower market (where the flowers are pretty typical so this is the only picture we have from the flower market):
...the goldfish market...
...and, eventually, a night market:
On Day 47, we wander around outside a bit before heading into the Harbour City shopping mall. It's hard to describe a mall and make it sound different, but this one's really big - two-million-square-feet big. The mall has piers next to it to allow cruise ships to pull up and drop off passengers for a few hours of shopping and these cruise ships are dwarfed by the mall.
(Part of me says, "hey, the square footage of the West Edmonton is more than twice Harbour City's" but, really, I think that 2 million square feet is the point at which "really big" and "bigger" stop meaning much. Super Big Gulp vs a case of pop...either way is still too big for one person to be drinking...)
We get disoriented wandering around the different wings of the mall before we escape to the street again, but the visit is not a loss - we find both a reasonably-priced restaurant with amazing food (Canton Deli) and a huge mostly-English bookstore. I'm 90% sure we can find both of those stores again someday.
Photo credits: P, P, P, P, P, P, D, P
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