Hong Kong Day Trip

     Our Chinese visas are good for a year, but we can only stay in the country for 90 days at a time.  Terry has already left China several times since we arrived in mid-August, but sometime before Nov. 10 Leah and I needed to leave so we wouldn't violate the 90-day rule.  Fortunately we live in Shenzhen, right across the border from Hong Kong.  Although the British returned it to China in 1997, Hong Kong is designated a special administrative region and has a different political system from mainland China, so when you cross the border you have to go through immigration and customs, just as if you were going to a foreign country.  If we were in a big hurry, we could cross into Hong Kong, get our exit chop, and then get in line to come right back to Shenzhen, all set to stay for another 90 days.  We decided to do just a little better than that.  Terry had to go to Hong Kong today anyway because tomorrow morning he has an early flight back to the U.S.  And today was a beautiful cool fall day, good weather for exploring.

We took a taxi from our apartment to the MTR (train/subway) station on the Shenzhen-Hong Kong border.  Outside the MTR station there were at least 5-6 vendors like this couple, mostly Muslim, it would appear from this woman's scarf and from the hats that most of the men were wearing. They were selling walnuts, several kinds of raisins and dried apricots, all newly harvested I assume.  Yum!  But we didn't buy any.  We headed for the long lines to present our passports and departure cards.  After getting checked through, we joined the hoards walking across the wide covered footbridge over the Shenzhen River, which forms the border between mainland China and Hong Kong.  Then there was another very long line through immigration on the Hong Kong side.  Once through that line, it was a short walk to buy transit cards and board the train for the 50-minute ride to Hong Kong, when we amused ourselves watching very cute little kids doing interesting things like eating, drinking and sleeping.  All told, it took 3 hours to get from our apartment to the Central District of Hong Kong, where Terry stowed his travel gear at a hotel.

Our favorite way to explore a city is to choose  something we want to find, and then see what we run into on the way to finding it. We had two Hong Kong destination ideas for today.  One was the Tuck Chong Sum Kee Bamboo Steamer Co., where artisans still make dumpling steamers by hand,  one of Terry's funky online finds.  The other was a couple of streets with costume-y attire that Leah had looked up.  She is going to a Halloween/birthday party for a school friend tonight and wanted to find a sailor hat.  So hats became our quest du jour.  We first checked out the stalls on this narrow little street not far from our subway stop.  These cobbled-together retail arrangements are a charming relief from all the sleek international designer establishments on the Hong Kong thoroughfares.  But there were no sailor hats on this stretch.

Here's Leah about to head up the next retail warren on her list, where she eventually found her sailor hat.  While she was busy with her errand, Terry and I took off exploring the perpendicular street, where we found a great little Vietnamese restaurant for lunch.  Like many businesses in densely-populated Hong Kong--which is often called the most vertical city in the world because businesses and residences are layered on top of each other--there was a sign at street level directing customers to the restaurant on an upper level.  In this case, it was up merely one narrow set of stairs.  My lunch was delicious:  2 very fresh grilled prawns, on a huge bed of pomelo chunks, cucumber matchsticks, shallots and a few cashews with a slightly vinegary dressing.

Contributing to its dense settlement is metropolitan Hong Kong's hilly and mountainous terrain.  The low rise of these wide steps made this street considerably easier to navigate than many we walked on today.

Driving Hong Kong streets is an ordeal.  You can see why most people take the subway.  It's estimated that 90% of the day-to-day trips people make in Hong Kong are on public transit, the highest usage rate in the world.  Most people in metropolitan Hong Kong live within a few minutes' walk from a subway station.

I say metropolitan because there's a rural, undeveloped part of Hong Kong that many Americans probably don't know about.  Hong Kong residents live  on only 30% of the land areas on the islands that comprise Hong Kong.  The other 70% is used for agriculture or parks or nature reserves.  Back in Shenzhen, when we look out our apartment windows a few miles across Shenzhen Bay, we see some of the beautiful hills of the undeveloped part of Hong Kong.

We saw quite a few streets with festive Halloween decorations like this, frequently with a pirate theme.  Given that Hong Kong is a maritime center, that particular theme makes sense.

After emerging from the train station back in Shenzhen late this afternoon, Leah and I walked by this man who was making peacocks, flowers and grasshoppers out of leaves.  I bought a grasshopper.  Not only was this one of those  "how did he do that?" processes, but the man did beautiful work.  What was amazing is that he had only one hand.  You can't see this in the photo, but his left arm ended at the elbow.

Here's the grasshopper, which rivals the coolness of anything we saw in cosmopolitan Hong Kong today.