Friday, November 3, 2017; Hong Kong Day 1

Friday, November 3, 2017; Hong Kong Day 1

Everyone on the ship (passengers and crew) is excited to be able to get off the ship after 8 days at sea.  The Kai Tak cruise port was built on an old runway for Hong Kong’s old international airport and is a very modern and attractive structure integrating park-like spaces with the terminal functions.  It’s a little like Osanbashi Pier in that it has a grassy park on the roof.  

While the Chinese have stirred up some controversy in building artificial islands in the South China Sea to stake claims on territorial waters, they have been successfully building islands, while the US has been failing miserably at Nation building.  In the early 1990’s, they replaced Kai Tak airport, which was a notoriously dangerous airport to fly into and out of, by building a whole new island for Hong Kong International Airport, along with enormous modern bridges, rail roads and other infrastructure to support it.  They are also building a new enormous bridge from Hong Kong to Macau that will be completed in just a few years.  They may end up retiring the famous Boeing Jetfoils once that bridge is completed. 

After breakfast in the dining room, we disembarked the ship for our 9:00AM tour of Lantau Island and  Po Lin Monastery.  

Our guide pointed out government housing and condominiums on our drive out of Hong Kong.  An 800 sq ft condo could easily fetch over $2M US while the wait for a government subsidized 200 Sq ft apartment can be 10 years.  Most people in Hong Kong raise their entire families in apartments less than 400 sq ft in size.  Commercial buildings sometimes convert industrial space into “Cubits” which are 100 sq ft partitions that are rented out to families to live in while awaiting government housing.

We made a brief stop at “Long Beach” which is on the South China Sea.  There is a small public swimming beach with a small building containing bathrooms and areas for vendor booths.  There was a shark net around the swimming area.  Our guide explained that the Hong Kong Chinese didn’t think there was a shark problem in the South China Sea until after the Communist cultural revolution sent thousands of refugees swimming across the channel to escape to what was then British Hong Kong.  They began to find arms and legs washed up on the shores of the beach we were standing on- grisly evidence of man eating sharks in those waters.

Lantau Island has a quaint fishing village called Tai O, with narrow streets, houses on stilts over the water, and tiny shops.  They seem to specialize in dried seafood, with their biggest sellers being fish maws (gall bladders?), which are thought to give women smooth skin and clear complexion, dried squid to detoxify the body (why quit smoking when you can offset the effects by eating dried squid?), and the aphrodisiac dried oysters (the bigger the better.  Does it work? 15 billion Chinese can’t be wrong!).  There were tubs with live eels, sand shrimp, prawns, crabs and all sorts of live fish, as well as racks of freshly caught seafood filleted out and laid in the sun to dry.  It was a dramatic contrast to the skyscrapers of Hong Kong Island and Kowloon.  

Our next stop was the Po-Lin Monastery which is also on Lantau Island.  It is accessible by either a long winding mountainous road, or by a long cable gondola tramway.  Our guide explained that when the tramway was initially built in the early 90’s that a group of Princess Cruise passengers were trapped in a gondola for 4 hours in freezing weather, with some of the passengers suffering from hypothermia, and it held up the ship’s departure.  Since then, Princess excursions don’t use the tram way, but in the last 10 years, management was handed over to a Swiss company, and it has become as reliable as clockwork.  Our guide asked us to write to Princess with the suggestion of allowing excursion passengers to take the tramway one way either up or down the mountain, and using the bus for the other leg.  It would have been much more scenic and memorable.  There were a few spots in the road where we had to squeeze past another bus with only inches of clearance between the coaches, and tree branches scraping other side of the bus, not unlike one of the bus rides we had in Norway on the way to see a glacier.

The Monastery features the world’s largest sitting bronze Buddha.  It was actually made in mainland China, cut into bits, and reassembled on site, not unlike the Statue of Liberty in the US.  While most Buddhas traditionally face south, so as to face the main entry gate to heaven, this Buddha was paid for by the communist government, so it faces northeast towards Beijing.  Inside the Buddha is a crystal bell reliquary containing a fragment of bone of one of the most important founders of Buddhism.  There were no photographs allowed inside the Buddha.  There is a beautiful view of Lantau Island from the Buddha’s circular raised base.  Down 280 steps is the actual Monastery, which is surrounded by a hub of commercial activity with restaurants, gift shops and even a small shopping mall with a Starbucks Coffee.  There are also water buffalo and dogs that wander around the grounds of the Monastery and are considered sacred creatures. The grounds keepers are kept busy sweeping up after the animals.  There are several temples on site with gold Buddha’s and other sacred statues.  We were served a vegetarian lunch that was of mediocre quality, but got us adequately fed, at least well enough until we could get back on the ship again.  

It was odd to note that while we were on solid ground, if felt like the earth was moving, even when it wasn’t because we had been at sea so long with moderately high sea conditions.  It’ll take us a while to get our land legs back.

Our “Chinglish” guide Joanne insisted that we not try to pronounce her Chinese name because when said with the wrong inflection, it means something naughty.  She gave us advice should we decide to explore Hong Kong on foot.  One of the big problems American tourists have is getting run over by cars because they drive on the left side of the street in Hong Hong.  She advised to always use the cross walks.  When the light turns green, say a quick prayer, look both ways, and run quickly across the sidewalk.  At night, the same rules apply but because many more people are out having fun, you run more quickly.  

We encountered a fair amount of traffic getting back to the ship, and arrived just in time for dinner.  We met up with Judy from Victoria and Paul from Houston for the evening “Where in the world” trivia.  Pictures were shown on the screen and you had to identify the name of the landmark and country.  We were stumped by a few including Heart Reef in Australia, White Haven Beach, in Australia, The Tunnel of Love in the Ukraine, Pinnacles in Australia, Antelope Canyon in the US and Salar de Uyuni salt lake in Bolivia.  We got beat pretty bad by a group made of UK and Japanese who got a nearly perfect score.  

We did make a come back with the Logo Trivia that night, winning that round and getting another bottle of Champagne.  Janet says that’s our 7th bottle of Champagne this cruise. Halfway through that game, we were joined by Joseph, from Los Angeles, who just boarded the ship with his grandmother. Their flight from LA was delayed by 2.5 hours so they missed the ship in Yokohama.  They found out that Kagoshima was canceled by Typhoon Saola, so they flew to DaNang Vietnam to meet the ship.  They stayed in a beachfront resort and watched the high surf and winds pounding the beach, and wondered if there was any way the ship might make it.  Of course, it didn’t, so Joseph and his grandmother then had to fly to Hong Kong.  While spending 8 continuous days out at sea wasn’t great, flying to 3 countries over 8 days trying to catch up with a ship that wouldn’t/couldn’t make any ports of call had to be a whole another level of aggravation.  

We called it a night after winning Logo trivia and hope to catch a shuttle into Kowloon tomorrow morning to walk around downtown a bit. The ship leaves tomorrow at 1:30PM so all aboard is at 12:30Pm.