A few weeks back I expressed an opinion that John McCain was going to win the US Presidential election. Part of that was the polling, part was a relentless lack of faith in the American mass…the bits in the middle, and a part was a strange desire to play devil’s advocate…..just in case

Of course in the interim a couple of freight trains hit his candidacy, as both the economic chaos and the insane, and irresponsible, choice of Sarah Palin imploded on him.

The first didn’t have to impact quite so badly, although there is no doubt that anything with the tag “Republican” on it would have been a target then, but McCain’s response simply underlined that he was a man out of time, as Obama put it. That said I almost felt sorry for the poor old fella, quite clearly out of his depth and floundering about when reasonably he should’ve been sitting in one of the 13 homes he, as a maverick, owns, enjoying the quiet life. Instead we were all exposed to one of the more pathetic sights I’ve seen in politics, as he tried, like the train in the old children’s story….I know I know I can, I know I can…to play catchup and understand, except, unlike like the train, with his relentless breathy, gormless “Fight for…..”slogans, John simply couldn’t.

Then there was Palin. It was bizarre watching the media fawn all over her post RNC. He speech, read from a teleprompter and cliché ridden simply wasn’t very good. It was dishonest and insubstantial and she had little to with it beyond providing a well dressed talking head. Of course, those same commentators have changed their wee minds now.

But, she got the raves then. And she did exactly what she was expected to do, she, to, to use the cliché, energized the Republican base. Unfortunately, that base, overwhelmingly was scaringly batshit crazy, and Sarah soon exposed herself as both viciously ambitious and alarmingly ignorant (which appealed to those who see intelligent thought as elitist). Those outside the base..the other 55% of America who are not nuts, went fuuuuuuucccccck and ran a mile…or at least most did. Some, happily sit somewhere in between..your swinging voters who are really too dim to make their minds up either way after months of this.

I have to be honest, I get some sort of perverse pleasure reading the wacko sites and blogs, and I don’t think I’m the only one. A fine place to start for an hour’s WTF entertainment is the Readers’Blogs section of Real Clear Politics, itself a fairly good resource for articles and links, as well as polls although the right wing bias of the place means it’s fairly selective about who it uses in its averages…GWU, with a strong Republican bias is fine but Research 2000, commissioned by, but independent of, KOS is not. But if you head down to the lower right hand corner of the front page and click you are on your way to Obama is Marxist (Obama is the new Stalin is a current fave) / socialist / baby-killer / Muslim / Manchurian candidate / terrorist / terrorist lover / non-American / N**ger and every other insane variation of that selection, and, yep, there you’ve found Palin’s Republican base: ignorant but angry as hell, and the result of years of isolationism, shitty media & education and money raking hate vendors like Malkin and Limbaugh. Those are Palin and Rove’s real Americans. Do you laugh or cry?

And I’ve become a polling addict….I go to FiveThirtyEight several times a day. I’m really finding hard to give a toss about what’s happening in my home country but I’m fascinated by the massed moronic soap opera that is the American election.

So, do I still think McCain will win..well yes, given the way the “energised base” laps up every little scrap of fear filled garbage about Marxism and wealth redistribution without having any idea what either term actually means, and the way that middle bit still lives down to my expectations, maybe. Is the divide in America too great between that elite and that energised base?

I hope not.

Ok..is that playing the devil’s advocate enough?

I felt sorry for the guy in the Airbus office at Jakarta’s Domestic Terminal 1, Zone C. There he was, in a grotty little, dark and rather dirty room just before the luggage carousels. Like most offices in places like this here, the paint was stained from years of smoke, there were wires held by duct tape on the walls, and a hand written name on the door: Airbus Liaison.

He looked French, and likely was, and whilst his friends had been sent to New York or Sydney or Shanghai, this poor guy had drawn the short straw and, because Mandala Air and Air Asia had both bought reasonable numbers of his company’s product, he’d been shuffled off to one of the hell hole airports of Asia.

To be fair, parts of Jakarta’s expansive airport are almost ok. Terminal 2 (International and Garuda) has passable lounges & cafes, clean toilets, and like most international airports around the world now, free (and very fast) wifi.

However Terminal 1 seems stuck in the age it was built, the mid 70s, after which it won awards for its design (and the bones of that design are still evident..but only just these days…however it’s potentially quite stunning). It was meant as a Sukarno showpiece back in the day when he was starting ludicrous wars and trying to take over the world, whilst quietly bankrupting his own nation. They’d not got around to starting the place before he was deposed, so instead, like much of Jakarta it stands as a monument to the corruption and gross failures of his successor. The grandeur of it all is still there in the long open fingers that take you to and from the departure lounges with gardens in between. Sadly, half the light bulbs seem always blown, the paint is chipped and grey, wires hang everywhere and it feels now like a third world military barracks rather than the centerpiece of anything you’d want to admit to.

1C is inhabited by two airlines that we’ve used. One, Air Asia, was one of the ones exonerated from the recent random inspections of aircraft at this airport (on the other hand 7 of 9 Garuda aircraft were grounded on the spot….which throws major question marks over its attempts to get back into Europe which, some would say, wisely, banned all Indonesian Airlines from its airspace a couple of years back).

Air Asia is Malaysian essentially and remains one of the few airlines here I’m comfortable boarding, even if their flights tend to be random in their departure times, as are all in this country.

The other in this sub-terminal that we’ve used is the afore mentioned Mandala Air. These were the guys that, when their plane crashed into a suburb of Medan in Sumatra, famously gave the relatives of each victim a bag of rice and few litres of kerosene, to kind of act as a sorry token and a memorial to their charred relative. I guess it saved on a more permanent marker or a park.

But to be fair, again, they, on the surface at least, seemed to have upped their act..got a fairly aggressive management team, including a New Zealander (lets not mention Ánsett), and bought a bunch of new planes to replace the some of the 1970/80s vintage 737s…hence the poor guy in the Airbus office.

That said though, last time we flew with them, less than a year back, they left 15 minutes early, seemingly without all the passengers, and forgot most of the onboard safety demonstration….not forgot the parts of it, but forgot to do it.

So, I was hoping that with all the hype they’ve had, flash new offices and so on, they’d resolved all these sorts of things.

We flew from Bali to Jakarta on Air Asia…on time, clean and professional. To Terminal 1C.

The terminal is an absolute shocker, and rates as the worst I’ve seen…Penang and Macau are the other two shockers we’ve seen in the region….Penang because it’s filthy and run down, and Macau because it’s just dull with terrible food. Terminal 1C is all those things and much more, including being very smoker friendly without AC.

It may be the only airport in the world is smoking, via the advertising everywhere inside, is actually encouraged.

So, after a day in Jakarta, we struggled out, through gruesome traffic…2 hours for a 30 minute drive, to check in for the Mandala flight to Semarang. After the taxi driver tried to take us across to the wrong terminal (I’d happily go via Terminal 2 but it was not to be), we eventually struggled into 1C and went to check in.

Delayed…5 hours. The normal practice in Indonesia is for delays, and there are many, perhaps most flights, to be notified by SMS txt to passengers. Mandala it seemed had known about this for a while but not bothered. But we had our allocated seats, 13B & 13C. Cool….I’m not superstitious..or wasn’t.

With no a/c, and only a few broken seats in the smoke filled terminal, we asked if we could sit in the lounge?

Not unless you pay.

Really?

Yes…and go away.

Can we talk to the manager?

No.

So we sat and fumed, I obviously took photos of the staff, and then we decided to wander outside for a stroll / think.

Outside was the airline’s sales office, so we strolled in and explained to a girl, our problem and asked if we could go into the lounge for the next few hours.

No.

Who do we talk to?

The manager, inside.

He won’t see us..who do we complain to?

Saying nothing, she got up and walked away, and from the other end of the counter began talking about us to others, pointing and laughing at us.

Fine, thought we, it’s got a/c, comfortable seats and the counter is a perfect place to stretch out and read for a few hours. That, as we’d placed ourselves there, they were no longer able to access customers from that half of their office was really neither here nor there.

So out came the books and magazines and we smiled at them and settled down. Eventually about 40 minutes later, a guy came and sat down and asked if he could help. Yes, we said and explained our problem…

Why don’t you go to our lounge?

Really?

Yes..free of charge

And off we went, towing our bags behind us, to the Mandala lounge…through the smoke filled rooms and into the wee room with free water and pastries. The lady said she’d tell us when it was time to board so I settled down to surf a bit, and read…and I wrote a rather more conciliatory version of this post than the one that appears here now.

A couple of hours later the nice lady came out to say that it had been slightly delayed again and the flight would board at 6.50. And we each got a piece of KFC and some rice…ta…I think…

At 6.55 I wandered up to the desk to ask when the plane was going to board…6.50 says she. It’s 6.55 I say. Run she says…

So run we did, checking the sign at the x-ray machines..Gate C5..so down to C5, where the sign over the door says RI292..correct, and in we go to five or so confused looking non-Indonesians and a young girl behind the desk.

Ke Semerang? I ask?

She smiles and giggles.

After a minute or so we sensed that something was wrong so we wandered out. C4 had a sign on the gate with a flight to Semarang, but with a completely different number & time and marked as cancelled. So I walked in, looked around for a Mandala staff member however none was to be found anywhere. There were, however lots and lots of people with KFC boxes. Brigid suggested that, pursuant to normal Indonesian airport disinformation and confusion, this may be it.

After a minute or ten, someone arrived and grabbed a microphone.

RI292 to Semarang boarding now..here.

With a great deal of being pushed, quite violently by the KFC engorged masses, as the rush turned into a scrum and a brawl (and whilst Mandala’s just arrived staff member looked vacantly on and did nothing) we finally found our way to the door of the plane and went on board. It was, joy, one of those very ancient 737s that Indonesian airlines are so fond of, usually passed down through several owners. We walked down the aisle…11, 12, 14……

We held tickets for 13b and 13c but they didn’t exist. The hostess seemed not to care either way. So we sat in 15c & 15d and waited. And we waited as the brawl to get on tumbled past our seats and no-one asked why we were sitting in their seats. No-one at all.

But three other people turned up with the same seat numbers for the same non-existent seats that we’d been allocated. That made five who wanted the seats.

And the aircraft staff wandered around taking little notice or caring that there were not only several people with tickets for non-existent seats but also too many people for the plane’s seats, real or otherwise.

People seemed to squeeze in somehow but as we reversed out to taxi one guy remained standing.

Once again, nobody on the aircraft seemed to care particularly until he decided to make a noise and demand a seat. Moving a baby onto its mother’s lap they found a place to seat the guy as we headed towards the runway.

We, Brigid and myself ,were seated in the emergency seats…beside the exit. It’s standard practice on these flights for staff to explain to the occupants the emergency procedure and check to ensure the floor is clear. In our case they did neither, preferring to chat amongst themselves.

And then we flew.

And, when we landed, the whole aircraft shuddered and the engines screamed as we quite clearly landed far too fast (having landed at least 200 times on commercial flights around the world over the years I trust my instincts on this) and, considering the infamous Garuda flight into Jogja a couple of years back when the same caused quite some loss of life, you’d imagine this sort of thing wouldn’t happen again…but it did and the passengers as a whole were rather shaken by the experience.

The crew said nothing.

Returning to Jakarta few days later we wandered along to the Mandala lounge, with the day’s boarding pass for the flight returning from Semarang and asked if we could perhaps, as (suffering) Mandala customers, wait in the lounge for our Air Asia connection, and offered to pay.

No she said…the lounge is only for Mandala customers, and you are not as you’ve landed…and I guess it clearly won’t be us again as it will be a cold day in hell before we return to Mandala

These guys are banned from the skies of Europe and one can reasonably see why. Their staff were rude and incompetent (with one exception) and their boarding and on-board systems and procedures were at best described as appalling.

One wonders what their maintenance is like.

Just a question, sitting in a sushi bar in Jakarta last night, where Brigid and I were the only people drinking. Isn’t it a strange logic that a beer is worse for you than a Coca-Cola?

Odd.

The train from Shanghai’s airport to the city was very fast.

In fact, they claim the Maglev train is the fastest in the world and since you hit speeds of 430 km/h it’s hard not to find that rather believable. Yep, it’s an impressive tube of high tech and the level of that tech is nailed when one passes the train going the other way at a joint 860km/h..faster than most jets.

The whole world shudders when that happens.

That said, the bits at each end are a disaster. To get on the train you trudge about a kilometre through poorly signposted tunnels, with virtually no trolleys in sight (we found one eventually, with a bumpy wheel), to buy your tickets ($6 each…can’t really grumble about that) and are then faced with a grey, non air-conditioned, standing room only waiting room. When the train is ready to board you then battle, now trolley-less, through a massed rush to a single narrow escalator (no lifts a-la Hong Kong, Singapore or KL) and, once down, face an unbending conductor telling you loudly and very firmly in either shrill Shanghainese or Mandarin (don’t expect me to know which) which door to enter (the one farthest away naturally).

At the other end you are dumped in an industrial wasteland / building site some distance from the city centre, face another narrow escalator, a walk across a few  roads to a taxi rank and then 45 minutes in relentless traffic, admittedly over some of the more astounding bridges I’ve ever seen, to your hotel.

And that really sums up China, I guess.

Shanghai is astounding. There is no other word for it…well maybe mindblowing. Either way I’ve seen nothing like it and I’ve been to many of the world’s larger cities. There is nothing quite quite the same as sitting at where Brigid took me for my birthday brunch, high up amongst a row of large early 20^th century commercial buildings, in which, clearly, no expense was spared in design or construction by the financial institutions of the occupying powers in the years before it all came tumbling down, now topped by large Chinese flags, looking across the Huangpu River, with its boats with massive electronic billboards to the futurism of Pudong’s skyscape. It’s a city of not just massive contradictions but overwhelming visual drama.

M on the Bund,

There are, they say, 1042 high rise buildings, with new ones every week.

We were lucky in Shanghai, we had the guiding hand of our old friends, Philip Kelly and Tracey Lee, who’ve been living there for some months, to lead us. It doesn’t matter how many guide books one owns, local knowledge is, as always, absolutely everything.

So we found ourselves, on my birthday evening (Philip having given me, as a gift, a magnificent print of a photo he’d taken of Detroit meister, Paul Randolph..Brigid gave me a MacBook Pro 17” but that’s another post)  at an astoundingly good  Hunanese restaurant, Lost Heaven, where we drank New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc whilst eating, and at pretty good prices (Shanghai, like Hong Kong, was not by Western standards expensive, even at the higher end) and from there to Constellation, a long narrow bar with a killer cocktail list that could easily have slipped out of that golden late night era that was Auckland’s High Street circa 1995 (you had to be there I guess).

The next night we were taken to LAN, a four story bar / restaurant complex designed and themed by Patrick Gilles and Dorothée Boissier in a rather dramatic way, from the Jellyfish Tank to the infinity long room. The place was surprisingly empty which suited us and we were taken on a guided tour of the whole place and wandered from theme to theme, and ate (modern pan Asian ..but isn’t everything) for probably a quarter of what it would’ve cost us in anything approaching the place in Australasia.

My earlier experiences of China were in the south..in Guangdong, and the psyche seems quite different further north. Whilst in Guangzhou I found the populace as a whole extremely gracious, helpful and generous. Shanghai is different though. There we found the pushiness and rudeness that we’d been warned about earlier but not encountered. People pushed, no threw, you out of the way, they yelled at you in what I can only assume is the legendary local dialect, and the driving….in particular the taxis, who seemed unable to see a red light no matter whether it had been red for one minute or three and simply careered through pedestrian crossings with horn blaring, and people jumping in every direction.

A bit like Bali really, except here every does it. And at least in China there seemed to be some rules and some people trying to enforce them.

And we saw fights…lots of them…the most dramatic being two guys in a pet market fighting over something which ended with one throwing turtles at the other! Not for the faint hearted. Clearly the Shanghainese are a little more highly strung than their southern compatriots.

The river divides the city into two clear halves. There were several ways to cross the river..taxi of course, the ferries, and foot and bus. But we chose the most exciting. This was my birthday after all.

Just about every guide to Shanghai recommends the train under the river. Why do  they recommend it? Is it the thrill, is it a glass viewing tunnel (which would give one a view of brown sludge judging by the river), is it a tech blast? ¹

In Shanghai terms it was quite pricey..about US$4 a head, but after wandering around trying to find the booth, we handed over the dosh and got our tickets. They included a complimentary pass to the Shanghai Museum of Sex!

And down we went, we three and three happy German backpackers, until we came across the train, except it wasn’t really a train it was a wee capsule and in we all went and off we went through a tunnel lit with what locked like a neon lighting show left over from some early 20^th Century future tech show. It was, as they promised, so truly awful it needed to be seen. And then, just to emphasis that point, two blow up rubber ghosts popped up and everyone began to laugh.

And it was over. We decided to give the Sex Museum a raincheck and we walked out into the sunlight and the base of the Pearl Tower, with busloads of Chinese tourists swarming around, touts offering to take your photo (folks from the villages, bussing in for the Chinese National Day holiday, likely don’t always have digital cameras for those shots to take back to the village) and a bunch of milling Australians looking for the Bund.

We wanted to go up the Jin Mao Tower, the 5^th highest building in the world, partially so we could look at World Financial Center, recently opened and the 2^nd tallest in the world, partially because the other had huge queues and partially because the deco-ish geometric stainless steel structure really appealed.

Wandering into the wonderfully named Superbrands Mall, a faceless relic of a Stalinistic past, like the No.1 Department Store across the river in Nanjing Lu, we worked out, as we were buffeted by the holiday crowds, that both the map and the eye showed a short walk to the Jin Mao and headed off.

It wasn’t to be. We walked across the road and were quickly diverted into a loop into the other direction. We walked and followed the signs which said in several languages that we were going the right way despite our eyes telling us we were walking away. At issue were vey large road works which seemingly are part of the massive (and I mean absolutely massive) building projects that are redefining central Shanghai, partially for the Expo 2010, and partially just because that’s the way it is: In China they build and do so in a way we can’t comprehend in the rest of the world.

So we walked..we walked further and further away, through the spotless, groomed parks that fill the city, across multi-laned roads, dodging taxis accelerating through red lights into scattering pedestrians, until eventually we swerved back and, having watched a fight between a courier on his electric tricycle and a office person in his pressed white shirt, we got to the base of the 5^th tallest building in the world. The sign on the side said ‘no climbing’ so we decided not to and went it.

One of the things I like most about very tall buildings, and I’ve done a few, is the speed of the lifts. The lamented WTC in NY had, until now, the fastest I’ve experienced but the Jin Mao, from the basement (why is it that lifts to the top of tall buildings often leave from the basement?), is like a rocket. Seeing that this was the week that China had put another man in space, it seemed somehow appropriate. I wonder if the thought occurred to the two lift attendant girls who were busy checking their hair and makeup in the stainless steel walls on the way up? No, I guess not.

The view of course was incredible and I’ll let the photos speak for themselves. I bought a badge I think (I like a souvenir) but lost it. It said something about Pandas but there were none there, that I’m sure of.

We decided to get a taxi back and headed across to the French Concession to eat more. The day before Isabella and I had walked main drag in the Concession..looking at the Hugo Boss and Gucci shops before wandering south. I had an urge to visit the famous site of the first Congress of The Chinese Communist Party which was a block or two in that direction. Brigid had gone fabric scouting and I needed to see this, at least so I felt an affinity with my Shanghai Tang red stared baseball cap I’d bought a few days earlier and because, well, I was in China, so you do these things.

Bella and I wandered past antique stores, Starbucks, several rather pricey looking design stores with Stark and Herman Miller chairs, a Porsche showroom and a cluster of expensive cafes and restaurants until we came to it. It was free to enter so we went it, with me trying, under my breath, to explain to Bella what this placed was about. It was impressive, fusing technology with understated design and it did some justice to a place, regardless of your politics, where one of the most important political parties of our time fused it’s first manifesto. We walked through until we came to a life-size diorama of the congress, with it’s dozen or so participants. Standing at the table was a young man. Isabella asked who that was..Mao Zedong I said. Wasn’t he an evil monster Bella asked very loudly?

I shut her down rather quickly as several stern young men looked angrily in our direction. Were we headed for re-education or a lifetime of floor scrubbing in some western new town.

I rushed her downstairs where the looks seemed to have abated somewhat and I bought a souvenir..a Mao keyring and we walked outside where I noticed an Amway presentation in the park over the way. It seemed oddly appropriate as was the fact the CCP’s congress happened in a precinct with some of China’s most desirable property now and we sat down in a Coffee Bean cafe new door to ponder these things and the fact that Mao no longer appears in any High School text books in the city.

And that’s Shanghai I think. A vast vision of the future overwhelmed with it’s long past history but not quite sure how to treat it’s more recent past. Or at least as best as I  could figure out in a week there.

As in Guangzhou I had no problem accessing most web sites. I read Wikipedia’s Tiananmen pages and watched video of both that and Tibetan protests. My friend Philip said that in his exclusively, aside from Tracey and he, Chinese residential compound, the free internet periodically came up with a blocked page, but if one waited a minute or two and tried again it usually came up. Any censorship seemed very half hearted. I, on the also free, very fast broadband in the serviced apartments we were in, was able to access everything aside from Huffington, who notoriously pissed off the Chinese some time back. So is the blocking of websites overstated? I can’t say that, but on both my visits to China, in two regions, I had no real problem in or out of hotels.

What else? Well I loved the cynical twists on revolutionary art and communist icons which we saw in the hip young designer shops in the back alleys of the French Concession…Mao with first generation gameboys and the like. And I wish I’d been able to comprehend some of the literature in the vast Chinese language bookshops..although I could look at the graphics books with some awe. As I did at the high end DVD copy shops with it’s box sets of art-house directors (I bought a box of 43 Hitchcock movies, beautifully packaged for around US$30, and collections of classic music videos for a buck a disc)

Then there is the long neon Vegas like overstatement of the designer mall strip that is Nanjing Lu, complete with hustlers offering you watches, strange roller-skating devices, bags and them scuttling as a cop arrived.

And even a week wasn’t close to enough…on the last day we discovered the missing modern art museum…missing because every day we’d run out of time and missed getting there. So, with Beijing and the north beckoning too I think Shanghai will be a destination I’ll need get to again, hopefully rather sooner than later.

The never-ending joys of being in Asia….

The defining moment of the last two weeks in China and Hong Kong came not when I wandered into the Vegas-of-the-Orient (at least as far as the night-time electricity bill goes) that is Shanghai’s Nanjing Lu for the first time; not when we climbed the 88 floors of the deco steel framed Jin Mao tower (with an internal lobby of the same height); not when we indulged ourselves in the cuisines of the world (often at incredibly low tariffs); and not when we watched the Chinese National Day fireworks, all 23 minutes of them, from Hong Kong’s Victoria Peak. Although all those things, and much more, floored me…and I’ll get to some of them, in this post or next, none defined my trip.

No, the defining moment for me was far simpler. It happened outside the little boutique hotel in HK’s Cheung Wan district, on our second to last night, a few days back, when I got to call the police.

It’s a silly thing, but I’ve been building to it for a while. Back in a mall in Kuala Lumpur, hot, bothered and very tired in June, I lost it and threatened to call the police after a dispute with shop staff over an attempt to, how shall we say, rip off a customer. Hell…I wasn’t even the customer, but that’s beside the point. It was an invigorating moment though and many is the time, especially here in Bali, where one would like to ‘call the police’ to sort out the petty retail rip offs that seem to be the norm rather than the exception. Unfortunately in Indonesia, you’re more likely to end up having to pay the cop as well.

I can be as hot tempered as John McCain (but I don’t want to let that irrational volatility near any red nuke-linked buttons…thus putting a gulf between John and myself).

However I finally got my chance. A taxi picked us up from the airport train at Central Station, and, laden with bags from too much shopping in the lanes and markets of Shanghai we stuffed ourselves in, putting bags on laps and the like.

Upon arrival at the hotel, a fairly short distance, he demanded over double the displayed fare…too many bags he said. Since a) he’d not helped us in any way, b) he was demanding monies for our shopping bags and Brigid’s handbag and so on, and c) it ran contrary to the wording on his displayed tariff sticker, we said a resounding no and proffered the correct fare. After starting in English, he started yelling at us in Cantonese and gesturing wildly…refusing to let our bags go. Call the police I screamed…and he did…thinking, and this is conjecture, that we’d happily hand over the rest of the cash to this rather clearly praying-on-tired-tourists rogue instead of facing the cops. Having faced down, once or twice, the cops of Bali and Kings Cross, both of who are philosophically, and in practice, closer to Kowloon’s triads than the Hong Kong force, I wasn’t worried.

And neither should I have been. The clearly bemused officer who turned up a few minutes later was both pleasant and keen to move on. First up he said that the taxi driver spoke no English…which was somewhat odd as he’d clearly had a grasp of the tongue a few minutes back. Secondly he too was confused as to how the guy could charge as he did based on the published tariff but said that it was written so as to be open to some liberal interpretation. We stood our ground, the cop didn’t quite know what to do and little happened until I pulled out a notebook and began to write the driver’s taxi number and name down….this non-English speaking driver seemed to understand the phrase:

I’m going to report you to the Tourism Authority and ask that they revoke your license.

With that, he grabbed the correct money and took off in a hurry, no doubt back to the station looking for less feisty passengers.

All of this is rather irrelevant, unless of course you were a participant or one of those lucky bystanders who saw us all yelling at each other.

But the story does take this somewhere else in that I was / am intrigued by the policeman’s uniform. In 2008 the constabulary of the Special Autonomous Region of The People’s Republic of China that is Hong Kong has a uniform that is, except in detail, exactly the same as the iconic uniform that British colonial police forces wore across the Empire in the last few decades of it’s life.

Which to me really sums up Hong Kong. I absolutely love the place…it’s one of the most exciting, vibrant and cosmopolitan bits of dirt on the planet. So much has been written about HK, there is little I can add beyond the fact that every corner you turn ramps up that excitement just a little in a way I’ve rarely found in a western city, aside from maybe New York, but that’s a big maybe (but found have in the east in a few places…for me I guess it’s those formative years as a toddler in Singapore).

But for all that it’s an oddity stuck in a time warp placed in a bump located in a pimple on the torso of a superpower. I’m sure at many levels things have changed quite dramatically since 1997 but on so many levels they haven’t too. It’s so very hard not to think of Hong Kong as a part, still, of the British raj. It looks, thinks and behaves like a bastion of the old empire, albeit a part that, in 150 years, the British never really quite managed to extract absolutely from China. Take Stanley, on the southern sea facing coast, the name aside, you’re still in the cafés drinking Newcastle Brown Ale on a boardwalk that, if you overlooked a couple of tiny details, like the PLA garrison on the point (much smaller than the British had in the same barracks I’m told) you could be in Brighton.

For the city, a small dot, against the mammothisity (I invented a new word) of China next to it is both futuristic and rooted in a past that is supposed to be long trashed. But I suspect that it’s that past, the British Empire and the stern administration of that from dusty Whitehall, that gave the city it’s future. Singapore, Malaysia and India are evidence too, that for all the uglier side of British colonialism (The Opium Wars for example….you go to war with a country if they resist your attempts to subjugate them all as junkies), they were the least ugly of all the European powers when it came to pillaging. I wandered through, of all things, the Hong Kong Medical Museum (the Sun Yat Sen one I wanted was closed) and in places like that the pride and the sense of lineage with their past, which is uniquely Hong Kong, is fairly evident.

Of course, after wondering about all that then you go back onto the streets and do the things that people do when visiting a place where 70% of the world’s luxury goods are sold…shop, and eat the food….Gunga Din’s in Wyndham Street offered us fantastic, complex, North Indian; and then the next night we stumbled across Cecconi’s in Elgin Street (we were actually looking for the place next door…Brigid wanted to study the walls but we happily walked into the wrong door and sat down anyway), which not only floored us with it’s food (like the Pan seared scallops with cauliflower puree, sundried tomato and chorizo…oh yes…) and service, but actually wiped one of the main courses off the bill at the end as a bonus. Or the food found on the streets or in the MTR stations. As our friend Felix said, in Hong Kong not only do you get what you’ve paid for, but often you get far more than you’ve paid for.

And sometimes you get less

The common wisdom is that Hong Kong is very expensive …they’ve not been to Australia and New Zealand. Maybe it is for the average Hong Kong salary / wage earner but so much was ludicrously inexpensive and little was beyond what you expect to pay in Australasia…even the ever present designer goods (a pair of Armani jeans was about half what you’d pay for a pair of Workshop jeans).

And our hotel room, a tech hotel, no less with every gadget known to mankind, including free blistering fast in-room wi-fi, was about $100 a night…then again if you really want to do things like the shoddy overpriced tourist trap of the Peninsula Hotel’s High Tea, it can get pricey, especially when it includes stale. I guess it’s your call…..

But as a Hong Kong newbie (this was my second visit) I just loved wandering the streets with my mouth open, I loved Hollywood Road with its Chinese antiquities (both real and not) and the Communist memorabilia on Cat Street (mostly as phony as the claim to such in the mainland these days), and walking the god knows many stairs up from Hollywood Rd to the elusive Sun Yat Sen Museum

And I watched the psychological tussle between saving ones physical self and going into just one more shop that Typhoon Hagupit caused amongst so many young Hong Kongers down there in the shopping mayhem and mecca that is the chaos of Causeway Bay.

The shopping generally won out as did the taxi drivers who tossed an extra $20 danger charge onto the fare…I bet that prick from Central Station was there.