Under the Baobab Tree

• My flight was exhilarating and reminded me again why I love United so much. We flew from Chicago to HK straight over the top of the globe. Our pilot told us we were 600 miles west of the North Pole and then we came down across the entire Asian continent, over Mongolia, straight down to Hong Kong. We made no turns at all on our flight until got to the Pearl River Delta in Guangdong (Canton) Province.



• My seat lay flat down to 180 degrees and I slept as comfortably as if I were in my own bed, just without the cats. The only things that disturbed me were a bump of turbulence when our airplane crossed onto the Eurasian landmass below the Artic circle and another bump of turbulence when we hit the Gobi Desert. I woke an hour before landing to a bowl of steaming hot noodles and some Oolong tea.



• The in-flight map was a Google Earth map (newly renovated airplane) so you could zoom in and see the vast wasted expanse of the Gobi Desert and Mongolia, or the rocky, mottled coast line of Southern China down to every last underwater rock and wooden pier. Southern China looks beautiful from the air -- bright green with a jagged, mountainous coast.



• The Pearl River delta in Guandong Province is also beautiful and mountainous and green and very unexpected. The new Chep Lak Kok airport at Hong Kong is out on one of the outer islands that is so mountainous it makes the Big Sur coastline in California look small and docile. I am so surprised at how dramatic and beautiful and tropical everything is here. I had no idea, but then again, I'd never really thought about it much before. Which is shocking. Huge sheer rock cliffs plunging straight down into the green sea, dotted occasionally with super huge container ships that look tiny next to the coastline. The South China Sea is jade green and the mountainous coast is covered in lush tropical foliage with sudden rocky outcroppings. It's like the Caribbean or the South of France only on steroids.



• When I landed at the airport, the mountains around it were purple and pink in the dusk.
  I was greeted by a "handler" from the Mandarin Oriental hotel who drove me through the humongous beautiful clean airport (largest in the world, I'm told), crowded all around with huge purple mountains, in a cart and whisked me through immigration and customs and put me on the express train to downtown (several islands away). I was not expecting this nice Oriental man. He called me "EGAN! Kimberly Katherine!" the entire time at top volume (each time staring quizzically at the big piece of paper with my name on it), which made it hard to keep a straight face. He handed me a card when he put me on the train that was printed in English and Cantonese and that told anyone who found me astray to return me to the Mandarin Oriental -- I refer to it now as my "Paddington Bear" card. It also has preprinted requests for taxi drivers, in both English and Cantonese, -- "Please take EGAN! Kimberly Katherine! to the Peak Tram!" for example.



• The train into Hong Kong was beautiful, sleep, modern, and very quiet. Like the Heathrow Express only much more beautiful. It reminded me once again that Dulles, JFK and O'Hare are among the only major international airports not served by an express train to downtown.



• Public announcements here take a long time because everything has to be said in English, Mandarin, and Cantonese.



• I met my colleague at the restaurant bar at the Mandarin. He had arrived from San Francisco earlier in the day and had made the idiotic move of getting me a visiting office in our offices here. I told him I had NO INTENTION of setting foot in the office, thank you very much.



• I ate a huge steaming bowl of Wonton Soup that was like no other wonton soup I have ever had. There was actually no soup component to it at all. Big pile of very tasty noodles, mounds of wontons shaped like meatballs in it, and four or five strips of sweet and sour pork thrown in for good measure. If you wanted liquid in your "soup", you could pour a little bowl of soy sauce and a little bowl of a mysterious reddish brown viscous substance on it and tried to slurp it all down gracefully with chopsticks that were made, as far as I could tell, from mahogany. With this, I drank a ginger-orange-hibiscus infused golden yellow non-alcoholic beverage called a Young and Beautiful Lady. Very appropriate, I thought for EGAN! Kimberly Katherine!



• Our hotel is right under the big colonial cobblestone walkway up part of the big mountain to the Peak Tram. So tomorrow I am going to venture up there to the top, through the botanical gardens and the old English churchyards and whatever else I find. That is all I have on my To Do list, other than to also try to find the Giant Bronze Buddha known as Tian Tan. He shouldn't be too hard to find (210 feet tall or something -- see right) and have dinner tomorrow night with a client.

Good night!

posted by Anonymous @ 9:26 AM