I started my day in Hong Kong today eating the best mango and smoothest yogurt I've ever had. I felt like Julia Child in that scene in Julie & Julia when she has her first sole meuniere.I walked outside my hotel and became instantly lost. It was embarrassing how short a time it took. I turned right at the Gucci store thinking I would walk around the block but within 30 seconds I had literally no idea where I was and didn't recognize a single building and couldn't even tell which direction was which and I actually started to get dizzy. It as as if I had fallen through a wormhole. My hair had poofed out into an afro from the heat and humidity and was getting in my face so I kept whipping my head around to control it which only added to the dizziness. I remembered my guide book's advice which was something like "No human being has ever gotten lost in Hong Kong (humph) but if you manage it nevertheless, just look up and head towards the mountain." So that's what I did.
At the base of the mountain, which is, oddly, right next to the Gucci store (how did I miss it?) I started up Battery Park Road. This is the road the British built to haul their cannons up the mountain. I walked up through rubber trees and mango trees and fig trees and found myself standing in front of a sign that said "The Anglican (Episcopal) Cathedral of St. John Welcomes You." Very surprising to see the Anglican emblem here in a forest of rubber trees. The Cathedral is beautiful. A small stucco building painted a lovely pale yellow set in beautiful gardens right next to the old French Mission building that is now the Hong Kong Court of Final Appeal. The inside of the cathedral is airy and cool and beautiful -- tropical hardwood pews and carvings and huge vases of tropical flowers and cool, slate floors. Outside in the tropical garden some old Chinese people were doing Tai Chi. A lot of the inside of the Cathedral is dedicated to the British regiments who defended Hong Kong from the Japanese in WWII. There is a plaque dedicated to the Duke of Edinburgh. There are also beautiful needlepoint kneelers made by various British ladies over the years. It reminded me a lot of a Presbyterian Church we once visited off the main square in Cairo where we sang Abide With Me for a young British woman's funeral. She had been a secretary at the British Embassy in Cairo and had died suddenly of a heart attack jumping into a swimming pool in the heat. Being in St. John's Cathedral in Hong Kong made me want to sing Abide With Me.
But I had to press on to the Peak Tram -- a wonderful wooden Victorian affair that goes straight up the mountain to the, uh, peak, and that is driven by a wonderful old,.incredibly polite man in an impeccable uniform. Watching him bow to and greet each passenger made me wonder what these people think when they come to Washington and ride the metro and listen to our incomprehensible conductors mangle words like Judiciary Square (comes out Judishew-ary Square) etc. At the Peak Tram, there is a very long public announcement in Cantonese and then Mandarin (or maybe it's the other way around, who knows) and then finally the English version comes and all they say is "The tram is arriving." Surely something was left out. But up we went up the mountain through the mist and past the very tall apartment buildings half way up the Peak in an area known aptly as "the Mid-Levels." 8 minutes later we were at the top, shrouded in mist and clouds.
As they say, the views really are incredible and you call look north to Kowloon, the New Territories, and Guangdong but also south across the beaches on the back side of Hong Kong island out towards the 235 green, mountainous rocky islands in the South China Sea that make up the "Outer Islands." This was lovely and you can read all about it it in guidebooks. But the best part of the Peak is a 3 mile nature walk that is cut into the side of the rock, engulfed entirely in tropical foliage to the extend that at times one is tunneling through vegetation on the path, is not more than 10 feet wide, and was, when built in the 19th Century, considered the greatest engineering feat of all time. One side is the sheer wall of the Peak going up, the other side is the sheer wall of the Peak going down. You can look out over the steep slopes and see the brown Hong Kong kites circling for prey -- big huge birds that look as big as American eagles. The slopes are covered in a white flowering tree called the Hong Kong Gordonia that is the only tree that flowers in the winter. There were elephant ear plants and tea plants and huge figs and banana trees and all sorts of Asian species of ash trees and something called a "tea-leaf oak tree" and I was cursing myself for not having bought an Asian tree book. Next time. There were beautiful mosses and lichens among the streams of water falling over the rocks.
But the human aspects of this path were the most amazing. The Chinese government spends a lot of time caring for the "slopes" up here on the Peak to the point that each slope is given a "Slope Registration Number" (I took several pictures of the plaques) and the Registered Slopes are cared for by the Slope Brigade. Yes. Also, people have built homes off this tiny road -- their addresses are on Lugard Road. Beautiful, luxurious homes carved out of thin air hanging on the side of the peak, almost invisible behind the foliage. It is impossible that any structure could exist off this little tiny road -- which is a walkway, really. At point I even saw a garage built out over thin air. Just a garage. No house, not visible anyway -- they must have an elevator to take them down somewhere. And indeed, at one point a car passed me on this 10 foot wide pathway. Remarkable. Also I saw the Slope Brigade out working on a slope -- they had built this very flimsy looking scaffolding platform out into the thin air, loosely attached to fig trees and rubber trees, shrouded behind a very thin plastic protective sheet. They had all kinds of equipment on their platform, buzzing and humming. If it had rained, I'm sure the whole thing would have washed down the hill.Then it was back down the Tram to meet my colleague for lunch. I walked past the beautiful yellow stucco Cathedral in its forest of rubber trees and from it wafted the sounds of a Carmen aria. I went in and a stylish Chinese woman in a black leather jacket was practicing Carmen arias in the apse. It was beautiful. I sat and listened in the tranquil cool breezy Cathedral amid the roaring of the city all around. It was beautiful.
For lunch my colleague and I walked to a place called Dragon-i which is famous for dim sum and is up one of the curving winding old cobblestone roads near our hotel. We had all-you-can eat dim sum and ate and ate and ate. The food was entirely mysterious but delicious. The tastes were so unusual we couldn't even guess what they were. Something that looked like a fried bird's nest but that tasted like the Portuguese shrimp pastry Ricoes; a white roll that had something green in it a sitting on a delightful crunchy, foamy thing as light as air; something that must have been a meat ball but that tasted more like mushrooms, etc.
It was a wonderful day. I know that everyone thinks of Hong Kong as big and sleek and modern but I have actually found it wonderful old-timey and colonial and beautiful. The old streets remind me of parts of Rome -- the mid-levels and the Peak could be in Sintra, Portugal; the Outer Islands could be cousins to Capri or the Amalfi Coast.
It is wonderful.
And I'm looking forward to my breakfast mango and yogurt tomorrow.
Labels: Hong Kong, Lugard Road, Peak Tram, St. John's Cathedral, Victoria Peak
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