HONG KONG means “fragrant harbour” dating back to the scent of sandalwood piled up at Aberdeen. Today, Hong Kong usually tops the world index of economic freedom, and the government gets most of its revenue for its huge public housing needs from land tax. MACAU, named after the goddess A-Ma (A-Ma Gau meaning Bay of A-Ma), became a Portuguese trading base in 1557. In the foreground of the photo of her temple is a painting of a Chinese trading junk. Most of Macau’s wealth came from trading monopolies, that is, the ability to charge exorbitant duties on any goods passing between China and the outside world. Any restraint on trade usually leads to conflict and, in 1622, 13 Dutch warships tried to take Macau. Here are John, Rebecca and me sitting where the cannons used to defend Macau. It was a Jesuit priest who fired the cannon on that day. The cannon ball hit the admiral’s gunpowder store, blew the ship out of the water, and the Dutch turned for home. Today, tourism and gambling drive the economy.
One of the benefits of a scattered family is the board and lodging both parents and children provide for each other when travelling. So, in Hong Kong we usually stayed with Kate and Alex. One of the benefits of a university is study leave. And so, as a “Visiting Fellow” in Macau, I was provided with a three-bedroom flat which, at various times, accommodated Joan and me, Nana, Kate, John, Madeleine, Rebecca, Rachel and Gabby. This chapter follows our adventures in this corner of The Orient, roughly in year order. With no diaries kept and few photos surviving our real estate migration, I have reconstructed 1984and 1987 from memory. For 1991, 1993, 1994 and 1998, but not necessarily in that order, I have pruned some of the monthly diaries that have survived our computer migrations.
IN 1984 Peter Melhuish, now living in New Zealand, phoned me from the airport. He had two hours to kill, why don’t we meet for a stroll along Cronulla beach. Essentially he was asking me to spend two months teaching undergraduate and weekend MBA classes at the University of East Asia. As it happened I had two months free in my study leave and, for Joan and me, it looked like an adventure. The textbook on Systems Management was late arriving and the first MBA started on Friday night, so I spent most of the flight reading it and designing possible student exercises. I had been warned of the approach to the Kai Tak runway but I wasn’t expecting to see people looking at me from a 25th floor kitchen as the 747 banked suddenly at 45 degrees and dived between the skyscrapers at Tsim Sha Tsui. “Where can I phone my wife?” I asked John Monin, the New Zealander lecturer who had come to fetch me. In those days the Macau ferry terminal was next to a dark, deserted alley obviously awaiting demolition. John pointed to some boxes in the gloom and gave me my first lesson about surviving in East Asian culture when he said “You are quite safe at night here”. The jets kicked in, the boat lifted out of the water, and we skimmed to Macau in a hull held up above the water on four fins.
I was sharing an apartment at UEA on Taipa Island with an American, Ray Zepp who was asleep when I arrived and, next morning, showed me my part of the fridge, but offered me none of his food. John was sharing with Cho Chan, the tutor assigned to our classes, so I banged on their door. They gave me breakfast and we arranged to share food and cooking from then on. Since Cho was new to teaching we would help him with marking student assignments and he would introduce us to Chinese cooking. So we caught the shuttle across the bridge to go shopping and, as we stumbled through the crowds to the Leal Senado square, I learned my second cultural lesson: to avoid collision never make eye contact. I noticed an elderly woman, obviously English, sitting in the square and watching the Asian crowds with a look of sheer rapture on her face. Mary Willes had retired from teaching, probably Jane Austen at a polytechnic, into the oblivion of looking after an elderly Aunt. The Aunt died, Mary saw an ad for UEA, sold her Aunt’s inheritance and, having never left England before, started her new life the other side of the globe. My tiny office looked out, I thought, to the misty horizon of the South China Sea. But two days later that mist had lifted and we were looking straight across to the Macau mainland, in my third lesson about these parts: shifting humidity.
Next morning Ray Zepp’s kitchen radio was providing me with some baroque music beamed across from Hong Kong so I lent him that old cassette Choirs and Brass with Dufay’s Gloria ad modem Tuba. That afternoon I gave my first lecture to the first years, about 40 in all, very keen and polite, and I received my fourth lesson about the Orient. I was asked a question the answer to which differed between American and British textbooks, so I said “I don’t know”. There was a gasp across the room: the teacher, the professor, the anointed holy man doesn’t know!! I went on to discuss the topic and, at the end, the questioner came up to apologise profusely to me. Cho, who had sat at the back, explained to me later about losing face and also said he had been surprised at how good my lecture had been. Vance Gledhill, an ex-IBM salesman and our new head of school at UTS also admitted surprise, after walking past the lecture rooms on his first day of semester. I think the reason is that lecturers off duty are a quiet, timid lot, but capable, like any actor, of suddenly performing on stage when adrenalin or fear lifts them out of their research topic reveries.
My third year class was a breeze, only six nerds and I knew Andrew Parkin’s two text books by heart. The MBA classes were hard work, Friday night and all day Saturday and Sunday morning. They were mostly managers and businessmen from Hong Kong and, in those days, delighted to be shown in the workshop sessions how to use Microsoft Word, the Lotus spreadsheet, and very basic programming in Basic, skills of the sort that, today, Peter and I re-learn from our grandchildren.
John, Cho and I got on well, fried rice lunches at the Hyatt and runs for exercise in the afternoon. Usually we ate at home after work, occasionally joining others at Jimmy’s Tavern for barbecued chicken wings in the evening. The Registrar, whose wife was a “blue stocking” who taught at a university in HK, invited us to watch the Macau Grand Prix from his apartment overlooking the finishing straight. Next we were joined by Peter from New Zealand, who seemed to work in, and be paid by, two universities simultaneously. Since I was anticipating the arrival of my own family, and since Ray was showing no sign of moving out, I mentioned it to Peter and Ray was soon relocated in a one-bed apartment. The first to arrive were Madeleine and Rebecca, I met them in HK, we stayed down-market in the Kowloon YWCA, and next morning caught the Star Ferry to the up-market Oriental Hotel. Mike and Barbara Toogood were entertaining guests for the day and we were invited. We were escorted by waiters carrying silver trays of smoked salmon to two Mercedes that drove us to the company yacht moored at Wan Chai. After lunch anchored off an island in the New Territories we swam to the island for a game of cricket on the beach. Back in Macau Cho became the girls’ minder for their exploring, shopping (photo Rebecca negotiating the price) and Yum Cha at the Lisboa. I realised how quickly they were adapting to Macau cuisine when we joined John and Ray for curried crabs at the Fat Sui Lau restaurant. Our neighbours Rolf and Heidi Cremer looked after Madeleine and Rebecca while I was away in HK for a day and, as Rolf’s speciality was China trade you can find him in the chapter on China.
When I fetched Joan from HK the jetfoil broke down on the way and we arrived only just in time for John Monin’s birthday cake before he left for New Zealand. Joan settled in quickly, meeting other wives, exploring the markets, churches, gardens and fortresses. Our neighbours were sometimes audible, Heidi’s newly-wed giggles, and Ann Melhuish complaining of Peter’s habit of overworking (he had been persuaded by millionaire entrepreneur Stanley Ho to computerise the ferry terminal check-in system, a prestige project). In HK we crammed into the Toy Trams, went up The Peak railway, and shopped in Stanley Market. It was there that Madeleine chose the leather jacket I still have. Of Japanese leather, it had the sort of rough surface normally associated with skidding off a motorbike.
(I have put the story of The Song of the Emperor’s Daughter and of our China tour and our return to Sydney into the China chapter)
IN 1987 Peter Melhuish again found me with an elastic study leave schedule that could be stretched around a stint at UEA, now renamed the University of Macau. I thought, as was the case three years ago, that I would simply be helping out with teaching, until I talked to the Scots lass in the next office. I found out I was expected to be the boss and, incidentally, that my pay was far lower than that of the tutors. My staff were few but problematic. The Texan disciple of Baha’i, who saw his mission in life as “to spread computers across China like wildfire” was erratic. Keith, an ex-IBM technician who should never have been hired, saw his mission as selling IBM to the university and undermining anyone (such as me) who got in his way.
At this point I’ll introduce George Hines, the professor of our faculty and, in Peter’s long absence, my boss. George himself, like Peter, combined long absences with an uncanny understanding of what was happening while he was away. He was a born manager, but a baffling enigma. For example, he also held a professorship in New Zealand, he drew a salary from the US military for activities in South East Asia when he was absent from both universities, and he was apparently an academic authority on the ethics of warfare. He returned from one of his tours of duty to find himself under attack from “Mac” MacMillan, professor of English. Since Keith was implicated I was asked to explain. I gave a full account and soon understood that George had considerable expertise in kindly but skilled cross-examination, and that he understood Keith’s character very well and had intended to sack him anyway. At the end of a fairly gruelling morning George complimented me on my handling of a difficult situation and then said that his problem really was that Peter was away so much, implying some heart-to-heart discussion. I then said “Your problem really is that Peter is very good at his job” implying that Peter was indispensible. Since the whole interview had given me a profound insight into the art of management I then said “John Monin once said you were the best boss he had ever worked for, and I would have to agree with him.” George then apologised for his own absences and I said “That doesn’t seem to matter, George, you seem to pick up where you left off.” For years after I would get a postcard from different parts of the world, offering me teaching work, and then he died.
I now wonder why I am including all this potentially boring detail about long gone problems. I suppose right now I am the main beneficiary of these memoirs, but they may one day be read by my curious children and grandchildren. If my father had written similarly I would, in my youth, have been bored. But now, too late, I wish he had. And, somehow, interesting ideas are sparked when these memory networks are disturbed. For example, for well over an hour I discussed the enigma of George Hines with my friend Bob Vermeesch over coffee. While with the Graduate School of Management Bob had helped design an MBA course. The final unit, supposed to pull the whole course together, was to be called Management. The advisory professors from Harvard and Chicago differed radically over its definition while the one from Manchester doubted the existence of such a subject since managers were born. It then occurred to me that the title Master of Business Administration rather than of Management had probably been chosen way back since Financial and Management Accountants had already laid down an extensive basis for administration. Chris Richardson, working for a Beirut consultant firm, once said of his Lebanese boss “I love that man” and I think Peter, John and I felt something for George that exceeded loyalty. Maybe good management is an emotion, not an academic discipline.
Meanwhile I had asked the university, through the Registrar, for a lump sum payment in recognition of my unexpected managerial role. I felt “sure that the university would give the same professional consideration to this request that I myself was giving to my work here.” I asked the Registrar, when we were both paying our salary cheques into the Bank of China one day, what he thought my chances were. “Good” he said then laughed as he quoted the Bible “The labourer is worthy of his hire.” I was sharing an office with Fritz Schippers, Chris had nick-named him Fish and Chippers, who chain-smoked Dutch cigars. I am seldom sick, never in term time, but the cigars had put me in bed with sinusitis for a day. Peter, with impeccable timing, happened to fly in for a couple of days and took over my classes. There was no one else. I was grateful to him and he was grateful to me for having worked up some visuals on the new Cobol screen handling verbs. Computer teachers have always had to invent their syllabi on the fly in a process once described as folklore.
Catering for myself I enjoyed the markets, “Ngoi, yap yee goh”, and was fascinated by the live chooks beheaded and spun in drums to remove feathers, and the poor fish, cut open to reveal a pumping heart in proof of freshness. Joan arrived for a wonderful ten days when September’s heat sent us to pools at the Hyatt and at Cheoc Van beach. It was good for us to be together again and, with a few days university holiday, it was good to be away from staff problems. Embedded into the tip of Macau’s peninsular is a winding tunnel of rock leading up into what was a defensive fort and is now the Pousada de Santiago, an elegant outdoor restaurant with views of misty mainland mountains that seemed to go on, one behind the other, for ever. We caught up with friends of three years ago, Maggie (Scots) and Joe (Portuguese) Rosario for lunch at Fernando’s, a tin shack on the black sands of Coloane’s Hac Sa beach, its garlic prawns a well kept secret. Fernando preferred it that way as newspaper reviews always drew health inspectors as well as diners.
For the Christmas holiday Joan and Rebecca arrived first. Heidi Cremer was still giggling but other international relations had changed since 1984. Chris Roberts’ tempestuous affair with Gael McDonald had blown up. We remained friends with both and when there was a peak in the arrival pattern of our extended family she found beds for us. Chris Roberts, by far the most entertaining of our friends, would call in and once (he was six foot four and big) consumed 11 cans of beer (Nana had counted them). Win MacMillan was now staying on in Scotland after Mac had had an affair with an ex-Pan-Am air hostess, a masters student who became a mistress. Even the Registrar had left his blue stocking in HK. We met his new wife the day Kate and Rosie arrived. We were walking up through pine forests on that craggy side of the island when they came round a corner towards us. Children were most unusual at the university and the new wife was clearly delighted to meet Rosie. Three years ago there had been an English couple with two small children, but he had made the mistake of asking for a more democratic academic forum and his contract was terminated.
We had met Kate and Rosie at Kai Tak airport where her tight yellow curls had attracted an admiring crowd. The same thing happened in Macau when some amazed mainland Chinese visitors to Chok Van beach tried to pluck at her hair and pinch her cheeks. We hired a Moke, I think the reason was to collect some large Chinese vases we had bought, but it was a lovely day and we drove Kate and little Rosie all round Taipa and Coloane, little thinking that they would one day live in HK. Kate says they were detained when returning through Sydney airport since Rosie, on Kate’s British passport, was an illegal immigrant. “I suppose she did look a bit like a doll I’d bought in Zhuhai” said Kate. Though I cannot remember when, John and Madeleine came and then Nana, bringing Rachel and Gabby with her. And I can’t remember how it came about that the congregation at the cathedral gave a choral welcome for Nana. But I do remember her concern when Rebecca took Rachel and Gabby to the Hyatt night club one evening. But by then Joan and I knew how safe children were in this corner of the world.
With Joan and Rebecca in charge of Rosie, Kate and I crossed into China on a one-day tour, and I do remember seeing flattened rats hanging up in a butchers shop. Joan had befriended an English teacher called Heather and her Macanese husband Simeo showed us round a tiny walled traditional Macanese village in the middle of Macau. I was now sharing an office with Sorab, a likeable Indian rogue who told me his politics were somewhere to the left of Marx, that The Law was nothing more than codified property rights for the rich, and that his favourite, imaginary, newspaper headline was “Archduke Ferdinand found alive – World war One A MISTAKE.” His evening revelries were cut short by the arrival of his wife and child from India, though I found out later that the weekend MBA classes in Kuala Lumpar had provided the opportunity to install a mistress there.
Around about this time Joan and I escaped for two nights at a favourite expat’s hotel at Silvermine Bay on Lantau. It must have been December since, in the photo, I am wearing a sweater. Walking across some fields we astonished a man working his vegetables by saying “Josun”. A full ten seconds later he called out “Josun, Josun, Josun”. We toiled up over that spine of Lantau that presents the full view of HK harbour in the other photo.
After Christmas I took Nana on the ferry to HK, and Nana, always concerned for her brood, worried that the others were not at the rendezvous at the airport. I knew better, it was the lure of HK shopping. I stayed on in Macau into January. On account of a taxi strike on my last day I had to carry my bags across the long, hooped bridge to reach the ferry terminal, but my reward was with Lantau Island. And there were those white clouds, floating high above Lantau’s majestic peaks, like the billowing sails of Magellan’s galleons.
POSTSCRIPT The University of Macau, and sketches of Macau, Taipa and Coloane
HONG KONG, 1991
Technology is on the move. Doug Smith, next to us, is a robotics engineer headed for Taiwan and Japan to install assembly line robots from his small but successful company near Tullamarine airport. Our family is also on the move. Arriving at Hong Kong we find Kate, Alex, Rose and Sophia now living in a 5th floor trading company in Wanchai. Three offices now function partly as living rooms and, with several thousand surgical gowns and other assorted merchandise (from all over the world and eventually going all over the world) moved into the corridors, 2 storerooms now function as bedrooms. Hong Kong is also on the move. Although our window looks upwards to the sharp, mountainous backbone of the island, amazingly unspoiled and green, everywhere else is changing. More foreshore land is being reclaimed and, filling the valley floors and straggling up the ravines are thousands of what look, in misty sunlight, like the towers of fairy castles, each of which is a 30 storey block of apartments, or a 50 to 100 storey block of offices, the latter being amongst the most architecturally daring in the world. In contrast to this serenity and fantasy, one steps out into streets seemingly containing dozens of toy-like trams and bustling double-decker buses, and footpaths containing thousands of people. The public transport system is frequent, fast, punctual and cheap; it needs to be to move 6 million people around such a tiny country.
All shops, and there seem to be dozens just in this block, are open from 10am to 10pm. The big ones sell the latest cars, fashions and jewellery, the side alleys sell everything from computers to crabs. The minibus zig-zagged up the hills, past “The Honest Car Company” (I’ve yet to find one), and the “Good Luck Driving School” (You’d need it in this traffic) past “Cloud View road” (aptly named) to Rosie’s school. Last time in HK I found an ad for “The Amazing Grace Elephant Company” but never found out what they sold. Went to the local street market with Kate at lunchtime and nearly tore my trousers on the horns of a bull whose severed head lay in a basket on the pavement. Annie, the bookkeeper and ever helpful friend, called in later – asked if we had preasant fright from Sydney.
On the second evening we all jammed into a taxi and raced (nothing moves slowly here) up and down the ridges, bridges and overpasses round the island to the university. There we listened to a rehearsal and then a performance of a Bach motet in which Kate was first soprano. R and S clung to Kate’s skirt during rehearsal, but we managed to divert them off the stage for the performance, in which Kate sang beautifully. The HKRT choir is conducted by Nicholas Routley, who used to conduct the Sydney Uni chamber choir when John and Kate were in it.
While still dark Joan and I caught the Kennedy Town tram to Central to attend mass. Congregation mainly Philippine women, many of whom have left children and landless, unemployed husbands in order to
earn money as housekeepers to send home. The Philippines has one of the highest concentrations of land ownership in the world, with, inevitably, one of the highest incidences of poverty. Walked to the star ferry
(occasionally we call it the “five star ferry” by mistake) and enjoyed its magic to Kowloon side.
There are comparatively few beggars in HK, so I was doubly surprised to see a young white girl squatting on the pavement with a two year old across her lap, a begging bowl and placard saying “We need money to go back to our own country”. After noticing marks in her arm, maybe I’m cynical in suspecting drugs rather than homesickness, but I’m afraid I gave my money instead to a withered bent old Chinese woman who looked like she had slept on the street that night.
Salaries (in A$000) for clerks go from 10-16, for programmers from 14- 20, for systems analysts around 30. Income tax is very low and wages are very flexible so there is virtually no unemployment, and even the very
poor are far better off than across the border in China. Industry (untaxed) and trade (free) are buoyant, both providing employment in HK and China and cheap goods to everyone else, though there is deep concern
over the effects of growing protectionism in USA and EEC. All land (excluding improvements) is taxed at 11.5% providing one third of government revenue from which is provided subsidised housing for a large part of the population.
Which brings me to “general impressions” about the human situation, and reflections on one’s environment, which are always sharply focussed by travel. By way of introduction to this thought stream, I happened to
meet Wal Taylor again a week before we left Sydney, and I started a conversation about Asian poverty. Wal advises on UNESCO projects and travels much in S.E. Asia. Wal admits he finds the fatalism of the Indian caste system depressing. But elsewhere in Asia, despite the poverty, he finds a sparkle and liveliness in the people often missing in Western countries, and he feels they have their own kind of fulfilment and contentment.
So, when I see people in HK working 10 hours a day, 6 or sometimes 7 days a week, working hard and working fast, when I see the same people living in crowded high-rise apartments in crowded cities, but peaceful and friendly, and when they appear to be in good physical health, I question some of our own assumptions underlying things we complain of and to which we give labels such as “the system” (a 20th century mythological entity), “the rat race” (Pascal said we cannot opt out, we are embarked), “rights” (always rights, never obligations), and “justice” (often nothing more than a transfer of value to a vocal minority from an unaware majority). We complain, but are we all that badly off? Advanced democracies score high in any political cost-benefit analysis when compared with examples I am finding in the Readers Digest world geography in John Cula’s fascinating bookcase. In the following examples the political benefits were dubious, but the costs were enormous: (Pol Pot 1M executed, Stalin about 30M, China civil war 11M killed, not to mention Hitler, third world feudalism, etc).
Went for a walk in Hong Kong’s Happy Valley racetrack, the “Horsey Park”, but the wind was so icy Rosie wished for a pair of “Ear muffins”. After dark Joan and I went to the street market with its orange lanterns and got fresh bean sprouts, bok choi and peppers for our evening stir fry. Apparently there is a bean supply company in Sydney called “The Mung Dynasty”! Sophia is now watching one of her favourite videos which she calls “The Seeping Bleauty”.
After an early breakfast Joan and I walked round to the Lee Gardens hotel to catch the shuttle to the Macau ferry terminal. Temperature up to 8, but a gray windy day with patchy drizzle. I still get a thrill from walking along the glass-walled sky-corridor in the huge Shun Tak centre, high above the sterns of the ferries carrying
romantic names like “Magellan” and “Vasco da Gama”. The jetcats have now been replaced with larger jumbocats and there is a variety of hovercraft and smaller boats. We got front seats in a jetfoil and were soon doing 50 mph along the shipping lanes out of HK harbour. There were ragged rainclouds obscuring the jagged peaks of Lantau and later on the waves were white-capped, gray-green turning to dirty brown as we crossed into the wide Pearl River estuary. Got good views of the university on Taipa island as we swung round at high speed into the Macau shipping lane and slowed down, as always only just in time, to glide into the pier. Now we slow down from the 21st century of Hong Kong travel to the 19th century of Macau’s third-world customs procedures.
There was a seething mass of people in total confusion at the ferry exit which encased us for 30 minutes while guides retrieved whole families who had gone, fortunately not far, on wrong buses. Our guide was from Venezuela, very friendly, especially when he found I was from the country next door to his. Finally collapsed in our hotel room overlooking the Guia fortress, with Zhuhai, the edge of the Pearl river and China beyond. Went down to have Portuguese Caldo Verde soup and Indonesian Nasi Goreng (actually, the one I make is more tasty) looking across the straits to Taipa. In the foreground is a new land reclamation (a common activity in HK and Macau where land is scarce and land values astronomical) from which we were entertained by 2 ultralights operating from a makeshift (everything here is makeshift) hangar and runway. One came dangerously close to the top of the hotel -I suspect you don’t need a pilot’s licence here.
My previous two stays in Macau were hard work, and with staff problems I had to deal with. This time I am a tourist! So, as tourists we set off back a few centuries down in old Macau, past the fascinating jumble of Portuguese facades and churches on the main streets, and, in the back lanes, street vendors, tiny shops and tottering tenements externally festooned with vine-like electric wires which incidentally hold their crumbling masonry together. Each narrow shop is jammed with clothing, or piled high to the ceiling with hardware, or, occasionally, full of rigging for junks, or live snakes, owls and unfamiliar furry creatures for the restaurants. Saw an exhibition of calligraphy in the Leal Senado (town hall) and walked up the cobblestone lane to the ruin of St Pauls (see 1987 family photo above). The cobblestones came in sailing ships as ballast on the outward journey from Portugal. The Portuguese have been building here for four and a half centuries. We haggled, not very successfully, over unfamiliar items such as gold rings and diving watches for friends and relatives, but paid the full price A$5 for an umbrella and A$1.60 for a pair of slippers.
Simao and Heather picked us up at 9 pm. We had left arrangements to them and they suggested Fernando’s on Coloane Island. I remembered a windy tin shack on Hac Sa beach with bent steel tube chairs and old formica tables (which nevertheless served excellent Macanese food) and started shivering. But fortunately there was now a large brick built annexe and we got a table close to a roaring log fire. The main course came in 4 parts: mussels in a sauce so tasty you mop up with your bread roll so as not to lose any, huge spicy fried prawns, veal and thin sliced onion, and finally pigs trotters and red beans. Vinho branco seco, then thick black coffee and Portuguese cognac. Simao is Timorese, educated in Lisbon and now director of music in Macau, a small, dark, hesitant, almost delicate little man, in contrast to Heather who is blunt, direct and Yorkshire. Fernando escaped from jail in Iraq, no one seems quite clear about the circumstances, and set up in Macau. It worries him whenever his restaurant gets a good review in the papers, in case the health inspectors call. Simao drove us back through Coloane village, where they are still building wooden sea-going fishing junks, all around Taipa island, where the junk slipways have been replaced by a racing track (investors are inflicting billions of dollars of “improvements” on Macau), and back to Macau past the old banyan trees along the Praia Grande with the lights of the very long bridge and the islands reflected in the water. Simao is a musician, not a mechanic, and drives his old Ford leisurely in top gear everywhere regardless of gradient or muffled complaints from the engine room. He dropped us at our hotel on the Avenida Amazade, which happens also to be the main high-speed straight used for one week every year in the Macau grand prix, creating a competitive tradition kept alive by the local hoons for the other 51
weeks. We watched apprehensively as he pulled his Ford out into the stream of pseudo-Ferraris, but he made it and drove sedately past the racing car pits at 20 mph. Slept soundly in a 6.5 foot wide bed (Emperor size?).
Maggie Rosario is Scots, married to Joe, a Portuguese from Mozambique. Maggie’s highland accent often confuses me, and I occasionally wonder how her Chinese students cope. Maggie collected us at 11 am and drove us around, first to the university. I had half hoped to see Rolf Cremer, the German professor of economics, but he was in Indonesia, so work on our paper “A Ricardian Analysis of the China Land Reforms” remains distant. We ate at Ricardo’s again, since Joe was working nearby and joined us for lunch. Joe is an architect, project manager for the Bank of China skyscraper (he denies any responsibility for its controversial design), and currently supervising the dynamiting of several hills in Coloane to make way for a luxury golf course. His slow promotion is probably due to his conservationist views, but he has made it to junior partner. Successful partners retire at 48. One senior partner owns a house in HK which he rents out for A$200,000 a year. (The Feenstra’s Repulse Bay apartment, provided by the government, would sell for around A$1.2M.). More sightseeing, more shopping, more walking, then room service dinner (seen it in Hollywood movies, never had it before, probably never have it again) and an early night.
We are sitting at breakfast looking out over the South China Sea before going to meet Kate’s ferry when Rosie and Sophia came racing across the dining room towards us. They had caught an earlier jetfoil (must have got up at 5 am) and traced us to the dining room. Said goodbye to Heather’s son, one of the waiters there at the Mandarin Oriental, and packed our belongings while R and S used the emperor-size bed as a trampoline (the emperor would not have been amused and nor was the chambermaid). Checked out and caught a cab to Taipa village where we hired bikes with side wheels for the children and we all cycled/walked/ran past the incongruences of tin shacks teetering over the mangroves on one side with new scooters, Toyotas and Hondas on the other, up to the sea wall with its views of misty Chinese islands stacked one behind the other to the horizon. Returned bikes (about 60 cents an hour to hire) and walked through the old, picturesque, “unimproved” part of Taipa, past “Travessa do Rebecca”, along the rutted road past the “Dog and Duck” bar (so-called by a visiting English academic with suspicions about its menu), to the Hyatt hotel for lunch. Caught the shuttle bus to the Lisboa casino, walked along the side of the bay past “Jimmy’s Kitchen Garden”, actually a kitchen serving meals in a garden, Cantonese translations being admirably literal, into the Largo do Senado where some ever friendly Chinese gave R and S fire crackers and bubble pipes with which to join in with their own children playing near the fountain.
Through the Mercadores do San Domingoes where the distractions of shopping nearly caused us to miss our ferry. I have evolved a simple 3- step procedure which I am sure would save our better halves an immense
amount of time: (1) Decide exactly what you want to buy, (2) Decide where to buy it, (3) Go directly, buy it and not something else, and come straight home. Joan and Kate are not impressed. We got on our High Speed Ferry just before it cast off. Unlike the hovercraft, jetcats, jumbocats and jetfoils, the HSFs are real ships with real decks where you can walk about in the breeze (at 25 knots there is always a breeze), and feel the vibrations of real engines kicking up a huge wake stretching back to the horizon.
We weaved between misty islands, some mere uninhabited rocks, some with peaks nearing 4000 feet, until we slowed to thread our way through dozens of container ships and all the modern ferries and launches which ply side by side with the ancient junks across the harbour. The aboriginal boat people were of Malaysian-Oceanic origins, before the Chinese conquests of this coast in the Han dynasty. And these boat
people still live on their junks in a quite separate life style.
2 Jan. There are 7 phone extensions and 3 outside lines in our trading company home, reminders of John Cula’s more prosperous times. Occasionally the phone rings and Kate or Alex take messages and send
faxes. Occasionally Annie comes in to do the books. Yesterday Bolly came to check his mail and arrange to go to Indonesia. I cleared the toys off his desk. They all have their own keys to the flat and come and go on
mysterious business like Kafka characters. Kate and I went shopping in the street market. Every day an amazing variety of fresh food arrives very early from China – enough for 6 million people. Then it gets topped up during the day according to classic textbook supply and demand. So Kate and I made way for a huge truck full of tanks of seawater from which, without stopping, fish/crabs/prawns/frogs/whatever are fished out with a net on the end of a bamboo pole and sloshed into the tanks and trays of waiting street vendors. Then the truck moves on sounding its horn to suggest to other traders that they check their stock and top up from the truck as it passes.
Larry Armstrong, a Texan had said over the phone an interview would be “mighty fine”, so I met him at the East Asia Open Institute in the Shun Tak centre. No weekend teaching opportunities until later in the year, and they no longer pay your air fare, so have written to 2 local polytechnics and 2 universities instead, but academia seems to be cautiously winding down to 1997, and suspicious of retired itinerant academics peddling their wares. Met Gael Mcdonald and Mary Willes. Joan and I took R and S to MacDonalds, of all places, for lunch. I tried to sneak 3 of Sophie’s potato chips, but she caught me and said severely “That’s enough, Gaga”. Her vocabulary is improving. Robert and Suellen came to dinner and Kate made a delicious prawn soup followed by fried spicy okras. We had reckoned our luggage was already well over 20 kg when Annie arrived with a gift of a large Chinese tea set “as expression” to us.
After waiting 2 weeks for John to send the key to his office from Wollongong, Kate finally broke down the door. The key arrived in the mail an hour later. Alex and I are rebuilding the door with glue and about 100 tacks. Took the ferry to Discovery bay to have cucumber sandwiches and afternoon tea with Mary Willes (she is English). All high rise apartments and expat clubs with virtually no ethnic content, but superb views of the islands and shipping lanes from the 16th floor. Mary taught in a midlands polytechnic and cared for elderly relatives all her life until they died and she retired, as she thought into watercolour painting and obscurity, until she saw an advertisement for Macau teaching staff which has changed her life into a busy, cosmopolitan and exciting existence, holidays in Thailand and the Philippines, and business trips around the Pacific rim.
5 Jan. Alex and I went to Sham Shui Po and priced a dozen computers before I bought a 286 with mouse and windows for Joan and a pile of software for me, for an absurd A$700. Met Chris Roberts (ex UEA in Macau) and a friend from England, both 6ft 4 inches, in a Wanchai bar before meeting up with Joan, Kate and Alex (Annie babysitting while doing the books) at the “Viceroy” Indian restaurant. Still puzzling over a shop sign which advertised “Self Serving Leather Goods”. I suppose computer programmers spend their lives resolving ambiguity, and can’t stop trying when they retire.
6 Jan. Suellen showed us round the architecturally startling and superbly equipped Academy of Performing Arts where she is doing post- graduate music studies. Caught one of the dinky toy trams and walked
home through the street market where, incongruously, a large Rolls Royce was moving silently between the stalls. Usually drivers have their hand on the horn, but with a Rolls Royce this is not necessary, even in Hong Kong. Checked our luggage in downtown early, weighing in at 29 kg each without the slightest objection. Must remember that in future. Alex came with us on the airbus, after sad farewells to K, R and S and assorted friends. Already running late, got stopped at departure gate as computer too big as cabin luggage. Procedures explained in Cantonese English were more hindrance than help, and when we finally caught the very last bus across the tarmac and boarded the 747, sweating and glowing respectively, found airport congestion had delayed takeoff half an hour. Tried out the music headphones and finally traced the source of some puzzling interference to Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis which Joan was rehearsing quietly next to me. Later: “Our radar is detecting areas of turbulence -please return to your seats and fasten your seat belts”. Tailwind now 153 kph so we should catch up some time during the night.
7 Jan. Now 1 am HK time, 10,000 metres above the Philippines and headed for Timor. Short night and no sleep. Breakfast above the Simpson desert at 5 am HK time. Joan couldn’t face prawns, noodles and bean sprouts. With me NO PLOBLEM. Phoned Tony Bosch Reitz from Melbourne airport. Tony very pleased to have got a letter from Madeleine. He says 50% of architects in Melbourne now out of work. Now en route for Sydney with Rolls Royce engines driving us at 1000 kph. Takeoff was shorter and steeper with less passenger and fuel load. Now descending over the Blue Mountains and coming round to NW of Sydney. Can see a good left hand break at Long Reef beach. As we lose altitude I can now see the Spectrum
building, Berry island, Balls head, but not Morton Street. Took 2 photos of harbour bridge and opera house as we locked into the runway approach. Great to see John waving to us at arrivals as we peeped over the top of our trolley with its overweight and oversize baggage.
JANUARY 1994 DIARY
The young man going home to visit his family in Varanassi (Benares) works for NASA in Florida, analysing satellite data. At Delhi his place is taken by a school teacher from Hong Kong. I point out Cheung Chau Island to him as we turn over Lantau for the final steep descent and he wishes us a pleasant “fright” to Sydney. By Thursday we have recovered enough for shopping at Stanley markets where Joan cleverly plugs me into a shop which has a video of a Hawaiian surf competition for a couple of hours. For New Year’s Eve we are in a (fortunately quiet) hotel on Cheung Chau Island, right next to “Afternoon Beach”. Six months ago in the summer we had brought a picnic lunch here with Kate and swum with Kate and Sophie. Today, lunch is shrimps and greens, deep fried, on the salty, pungent waterfront overlooking the sampans and junks. Small square serviettes are obtained from a familiar perforated roll in the middle of each rickety iron dining table. Further down, racks of squid are drying in the sun, looking like tiny white ghosts.
When Buddha commanded all the beasts of the earth to assemble before him, only 12 turned up, so he rewarded them by assigning their names to all the years. The Hakka fishing boat people of Cheung Chau acknowledge the animal kingdom in their own form of Buddhism. During the Bun Festival the villagers make offerings to the spirits of all the fish and animals whose lives have been sacrificed to make food, and they abstain for 4 days. We didn’t see the Bun festival but, as we hoed into our mussels, fried ginger and bok choi at our picturesque if somewhat unhygienic waterfront table, a white robed procession, men with headbands, women in hoods, carried joss sticks and a large squawking duck down to the harbour. Later they returned with a wet duck in a towel. Next day, sitting next to a Chinese couple on a bench by the water, we found out that there had been a funeral the day before. The spirit of the man, carried in the duck, is set free in the sea upon which the man had spent his lifetime. Our new acquaintance blamed Margaret “Fletcher” for selling Hong Kong down the river to the Chinese government, in his opinion to benefit her son’s business connections in China. Interesting theory!
WHAT’S IN A NAME?
Yesterday we said “Josun” to the waitress and “Guten Morgen” to the German couple sitting next to us at breakfast. At lunch the previously opened bottle labelled “Carlsberg” tasted more like Beijing beer. Today, on the bus to catch the high speed “fairy” to Macau, we pass “The Healthy Mess Vegetarian Kitchen” below a block of flats called “Intelligent Court”. The futuristic Shun Tak terminal and the names of the ferries always fascinates me. There, far below the moving walkways the familiar jetcats “Magellan” and “Vasco da Gama” still rock at their moorings. We go to Macau on the “Cheung Kong”, about the size of the ship in which Gran, Tim and I crossed the Caribbean and the Atlantic, 14 weeks at 6 knots. Today 2 hours at 30 knots. The 200-passenger jetfoils “Madeira, Ponta Delgada, Santa Maria and Flores” pass us at 50 knots, high up on their absurd stilts. With Lantau abaft the starboard beam (how’s that for name dropping!) I mistake the man on the aft deck for Portuguese, but find he is Italian with a Chinese wife. He has a
wealth of information on every subject. I ask him why there is so much trouble between China and HK, so little between China and Macau. Answer: “The Portuguese traded, the British invaded”. Another interesting theory.
150 years ago Lord Palmerston described Britain’s purchase of Hong Kong as a massive bungle, “a barren island with hardly a house upon it”. Today, the island which the “Middle Kingdom” (China) ceded in perpetuity to “White Barbarians” (Britain) is the only country in the world combining a high standard of living with a rapidly growing economy.
Nearly 450 years ago Amagao (Macau) was rented (never ceded) to the Portuguese as a reward for wiping out the coastal pirates. In those days the Portuguese brought Malaccan spices to China, exchanged these for Chinese goods which they took to India, exchanged these for textiles which they took to Malacca, etc, etc,
etc. Today, the Sol Mar continues the trading tradition, serving “African Chicken” cooked in Indonesian spices by a Chinese chef. And, of course, a bottle of Dao Branco Porta dos Calvadeiros 1987 from Portugal. So, what’s in a name?
BY MOKE TO TAIPA AND COLOANE, WITH NUMBER ONE TO THE AIRPORT
A moke is a kind of jeep you can hire. My heart sank when the Avis rep explained the need for a temporary Portugese driving permit and pointed on the map to that shrine of bureaucratic incompetence where I used regularly to waste 3 hours getting my visa renewed – and we only had 5 hours for the moke! However, we bluffed our way into the police compound, parked in the commandante’s spot, got the permit, the sentry stopped the traffic and waved us out into the street, and soon we were rattling across the old bridge and
round the islands as we did with Kate and Rosie 6 years ago. The tin huts of Taipa village are now called Taipa City in recognition of the column of 25-storey apartments advancing towards it; there is a new bridge to link the international airport runway, built entirely out at sea, to Macau and China; and, as in Macau itself,
we have almost seen the last of the decadent Portuguese and old- world Chinese life-styles which gave it so much character. Back in Hong Kong, with suitcases packed for the last time (almost), “You are lucky, I am number one” says the extrovert taxi driver showing us his photo and an article “Hong Kong’s number one taxi driver” in a faded, 20 year old magazine. No problems in 1997 he says, plenty of money working in HK, but don’t go to casinos in Macau “Inside happy, outside unhappy”. Even the unpredictability of Air Bangladesh didn’t prevent us meeting up with Kate, Alex, Rosie and Sophie for 2 hours as our paths crossed at HK airport, and we will see them again in Sydney in February.
TRANSIT CAMPS
The first one on this trip was a most welcome bedroom at Paree and Neil’s before an early dash to the airport. In England we have spread our belongings across rooms and our laundry across clotheslines at various times at Avril’s and at Chris and Madeleine’s. At year end an ashram accommodating unscheduled travellers from “India tour” and itinerant Smileys, can also resemble a transit camp. While we were away in Cheung Chau Thelma came home late from work to find an American girl plus 5 children, and Martin, Kay and their two, all asleep on the floor. Lyndon, Jayashree and Thelma respond on a day by day basis with cheerful hospitality. And, back in Sydney, Ann and John met us at the airport, and Ann gave up her room to us in her new townhouse which we soon converted to another transit camp as we awaited our tenants’ departure from Morton Street. To all of you, Mgoi sai, Molte grazie, Merci beaucoup.
1998
It is The Year of the Tiger in China. As we take off for Hong Kong there is a distant view of Kilcare beach on the horizon. Then we climb across the Blue Mountains to a region where thousands of puffy white clouds are splattering inky-black shadows across an olive green landscape. Outside the window the air rushes past at 900 kilometres an hour, at minus 35 degrees. Inside the window is a beer, some peanuts and a Bach trio sonata. A great welcome at Kai Tak airport, and K,A,R,S and O take us to their flat, where Isabel comes straight to me with armfuls of dollies. “Babies” she explains, then offers me two hamsters from the cage. Then on to the Wesley hotel. The Asian currency meltdowns are providing good bargains for travellers, and our air ticket includes 5 nights hotel accommodation, and a Hong Kong tour for which Rosie and Sophie join us. First we drive past some low-cost government housing. Out of a population of about 6 M, nearly 2 M people are accommodated at heavily subsidised rents funded by income tax at 15% and a land tax. At the other end of the social scale, membership of the HK golf club costs more than A$1 M, and a luxury flat can cost A$4 M. HK has the highest percentage of mobile phones, one third of the population. Our tour continues with a brief ride on a sampan, shopping in Stanley markets, and a drive up to Victoria Peak. Also a visit to a jewelry factory where coffee and tea are free. The coach tour guide has a sense of humour. “You can be my guest, so long as it is free”. 90 percent of HK water supply comes from mainland China. “Always wear a shower cap in the shower. Then you don’t get brain wash.” Mainland China has made no impact on HK so far. But 10 million of them are scheduled to join the 6 million HK inhabitants who must be saying to each other “never sell real estate.”
HK is the quintessential consumer society, so we consume. Shopping takes so long on the first day that the restaurant has only seaweed noodles left for lunch. We do better next day at Dim Sum. I order Won Ton soup with shark fin. Sophie’s eyes get bigger and bigger as the large soup bowl arrives. “Can I see the shark, grandad?” We do even better when Lily takes us all to the Hong Kong club in the Bank of China for lunch. But I think I prefer wooden chopsticks to solid silver ones. And then, on my last night (I have to get back for classes, Mum has another 4 days) we are even luckier. There is a Chinese wedding banquet with 10 courses (suckling pig, melon stuffed with scallops, prawn and celery, prawn balls and minced prawn, shark fin soup, abalone mushroom and lettuce, grouper, crispy chicken, fried rice with prawn and pork, and red bean soup with lotus seed pastries). The Chinese bride is An-Mae and the French groom is David. His mother speaks no English so Mum takes the opportunity to sharpen up her French grammar.
News interchange: Family, Children and Grandchildren. Uncle Frank is recovering from his operation. John is enjoying teaching and had to lead the singing of the national anthem at assembly. Raji is working at the chocolate factory. Madeleine and Chris say Faith is blooming. We got a Christmas card from Rebecca and Sumanta when we got back from HK. Rebecca now has her passport. They had to go to Calcutta to get it – 34 hours each way. But Shivaji’s grandad was able to see him for the first time. That’s one grandad down and one to go! We had filled our suitcases with presents to be delivered from Cold Ashton, Billericay, John and Raji, and a box of mangoes from John and Kathy. Alex is well and very fit. Kate looked stunning in her dress for the wedding. Rosie will be a serene and beautiful young lady soon. Sophie will either go on the stage or be a manager: “Blow your horn, Aunty Lily”, “Get the bill, Gaga”. Lily had hired a TV entertainer to do conjuring tricks at Jessica’s birthday party, but Sophie blew her cover: “I know how you do that, you just …” and she was right! Olympia manages the hamsters, one of which is “pregernant”. Isabel trots around trying to follow the action (like Rebecca used to) and has learned to shout back in self-defence when she thinks the others are being naughty. Grandads were sometimes naughty when they were little. For example, when I saw the washerwoman coming, with a huge basket on her head, I’d climb a tree. From high up I would throw star-apple seeds down onto the basket. All I could see was a rather puzzled basket slowly turning this way and that but the washerwoman never saw me. I would also wait until someone went to the toilet in the back yard. Then, if I turned on the garden tap just the right amount, I could create a deafening racket in the toilet pipes. While we were in HK, for some reason the story of Madeleine and the burglar came up, causing shrieks of laughter. Madeleine and friends had disturbed a burglar at Burwood who tried to escape through the window. They hung onto his trousers and, when these came off, he surrendered!
The choice of names is all-important in Hong Kong: So “Happy Valley” is the race track near where Kate and Alex live. On the way there on the tram from our hotel we pass the Generous Book Company, the Loyal Cafe, the Lucky House Seafood Restaurant, the Sincere Insurance Company, the Infinity Hotel, and a shop called Truely Treasurely Gold and Silver. On the way to the Fragrant Harbour (highly inappropriate translation of Hong Kong) we pass the H2O cafe and the Mister Bean coffee bar.
Friday night is program night in HK, so Mum and I go to a student concert at the spectacular Academy for Performing Arts and, the next Friday, to a Peter hall production of “Othello”. We decide against the “Bacchae” by Euripides as the dialog is in Cantonese and the songs are in ancient Greek, and against going to a Chinese opera as it runs for 9 hours. I am reminded at this point of a definition of Greek culture: “Euripides trousers, Eumenedes trousers”. Instead, we all go to a concert of modern Indian dancing, and to a delightful Japanese shadow puppet show “The Tale of Princess Kaguya.”
The high-speed ferries were too slow and had to go. A pity, they were real ships on which you could walk the decks and watch Lantau island slide past. Even the 50 mile-an-hour jetfoils are now old-fashioned. Mum and I are taking Rosie and Sophie to Macau for 2 days and we board one of the new turbo cats, like a floating jumbo jet, except that the cabin is 14 seats wide. We overtake a jetfoil as we tear round the corner of Lantau, bounce across the Pearl River estuary, and soon we are catching the shuttle bus to the Hyatt hotel on Taipa island where rooms are now less than half-price. The big drawcard for Rosie and Sophie is the large, heated outdoor swimming pool. Every time we say its time to get out they seem to have their heads under water. But maybe that is because, though the water temperature is 27, the air, blown by a late monsoon wind, is only 14 degrees. We have Dim Sum in the beautifully restored dining room. Sophie, always hyper-active, disappears under the table cloth and pops up the other side. From there she pops into the kitchen to hurry them up, in Cantonese, and get some soy sauce. The grand old Portuguese buildings round the Leal Senado square (opposite) are now magnificently restored. The road to Taipa village, which used to pass swamps, kitchen gardens, and tin huts selling barbecued chicken wings, is now a 4-lane street lined with 30-storey apartments and shops. So we don’t venture to the village with its charming little alleys like “Travessa do Rebecca”. I suppose it is still there. Certainly the cluttered back streets behind Macau’s new, shiny high-rise waterfront are unchanged. In a 3-storey, tumble-down antique shop Mum and I nearly buy a beautiful old red-lacquered wooden bridal suitcase with a forlorn view to converting it to a coffee table. At the top floor it is HK$1900 (about 150 pounds), when we reach the second floor it is HK$1500 and HK$1100 by the time we escape through the door. We look for the shop of live snakes but it is closed for lunch (for whom, I wonder?). Later we go to the Sol Mar for dinner, a Macanese restaurant specialising in Caldo Verde soup and African Chicken. Sophie has a malleable puppet made from a rubber balloon filled with flour and, you guessed it – the thing explodes in the restaurant. The diners jump, the head waiter’s inscrutable face twitches, and I feel it prudent to add a large tip to the bill.
1993, THE BIG ADVENTURE. As I line up to collect our visas I read that India is a sovereign, secular, socialist, democratic republic. Joan rings Hong Kong and Sophie answers. “Sophie, can we come and stay?” “Yes Grandma. Grandma, do you know the way to Hong Kong?” Then, everything happens at the last minute. I find huge fungi growing out of the big gum tree at the back. The morning before we fly I sit a three-hour exam on The Bourgeois revolution in South Asia, then the tree men come in the afternoon and demolish the tree. We are so late cleaning up the house for the tenants that Paree offers to bring round a cooked supper, but we finally lock up and catch a cab to their place for a welcome overnight stay before our early start. They hope to join us in Italy but their plans are a bit vague. “It’s all in the lap of the god” says Paree, pointing at Neil. We weigh in at 30 kgs each, in my case 2 kg for toothbrush and change of clothes, and 28 kg of assorted belongings for assorted daughters.
“Last minute call for passengers Smiley” as we staggered along endless corridors to the very last departure gate. As we lifted off and headed for Brisbane I could see a good left hand break at Wanda Beach. Later we cross the equator, outside air temperature minus 40. Far below is a lonely coral-reefed atoll circled by an emerald-green lagoon. We must now prepare ourselves for new cultures. One of Joan’s colleagues, recently returned from Indonesia, had entered in her expense account for each visa stamp and transport bribe she was forced to pay as a “service and handling charge”. I open Mary’s Lonely Planet guide to India and learn that tipping has a rather different function in India. “A tip to a station porter will assure you a seat even when the train is packed out to the limit” and “Judicious baksheesh will open closed doors, find missing letters and perform other small miracles.” I read on and decide against rail travel “Toilets are often unusable and in any case there will be someone asleep in it. Trains stop often for no apparent reason. Often it is because someone has pulled the emergency stop cable because they are close to home.”
We circle Lantau island and view the largest civil engineering project in the world, a new airport with high speed road and rail links to Hong Kong (there is no recession at Hong Kong). Landing at the old airport is as hair-raising as ever, but there are Kate and Alex waving and Sophie running up the ramp to hug us.
THE NEW TERRITORIES. Phil, an architect friend, took us on a Sunday drive North towards China. As we left I noticed two men sawing through a nine-inch replacement water main with a ten-inch hacksaw. We drove past Sai Kung beach, where the local tiger shark had removed yet another swimmer’s leg last week, to a Hakka fishing village. Lunch at the HK Yacht Club, superb views of bays and mountains, then home where the two men are still sawing the nine-inch pipe. Sophie, a child of many talents, has been watching the Indian Mahabharata epic dramatised a few years ago by Peter Brooke. The 5,000 year old battle was first recorded in 220,000 lines in 500 AD. Today it fits onto a five-hour video. Tonight, after a concert of Beethoven, Copland and Hindemith, in descending order of enjoyment, we caught the Star Ferry, Joan calls it the Five Star ferry, for coffee in the decadent splendour of the 19th century Peninsular Hotel in Kowloon.
OUTLYING DIDTRICTS. It was already very hot as we caught the ferry to those districts that out-ly, specifically Cheung Chau Island which we had passed on the Macau jetfoils but never visited. After yesterday’s Dim Sum banquet at the Royal HK Jockey Club I knew we were in for a budget lunch when Kate and Joan emerged from a shop with a loaf of French bread and a bottle of water. Walking up slowly in the heat we rested in cool shade near a temple before dropping down a steep path to a beach, appropriately named “afternoon beach”. We lazed in the water for a couple of hours watching high cumulus convoluting above the New Territories and, over the headland, the serrated backbone of majestic Lantau Island. That night, after a last meal with Kate and Alex at a Korean restaurant, we made half-hearted attempts at packing our scattered belongings into a sequence appropriate to our next set of travelling conditions. Then, on the way to the airport, we found a tailor, operating a primitive machine in a workshop no more than two feet wide, we got the backpack mended. True to our fashion, we caught the very last bus across the tarmac, one minute to take-off for India.