Day 23 We are getting weary…
We slept in until 10:30 and did not make it out of our hotel until noon. I believe we were reaching the end of our travel rope. We decided to venture out of town to a monastery that claimed to house 10,000 Buddhas. When we arrived, we found one. A landslide buried the other 99,999 just one short year ago. We decided to explore the grounds anyway and discovered that they housed thousands of cremated bodies. They lay in what looked like a safety-deposit box wall found in a bank safe. Each one had a black and white picture of the current occupant. Random junk food littered the otherwise serene rooms seeming very peculiar. Only later did we find out that relatives left favourite snacks of the deceased in case they got hungry…
Since we were in a non-tourist zone (other more intelligent tourists were probably aware of the landslide), we sought out a local eatery. We entered a dim-sum restaurant and promptly realized we could not communicate with anyone. Although guidebooks may tell you that people in Hong Kong speak English due to the British influence, do not believe them. This particular dim-sum establishment did not wheel the food around in carts. You simply choose from the menu. Since we did not understand the menu, we just pointed and prayed. Everything that arrived seemed palatable but I could not for the life of me tell you what it was.
Our Octupus card allowed us to take the train right to mainland China knowing that the trains were air-conditioned and no walking was required. We happily hopped aboard until the last stop Shenzhen (a city actually larger than Hong Kong) simply to view the countryside. However, we could not disembark because we did not have a Visa. Therefore, we sat looking like idiots as everyone left and still sat looking like idiots as a new wave of local commuters entered.
We tried our luck with one more monastery closer to the city center but were chased away by, you guessed it, incense. Mary predictably went to sleep and I can not remember for the life of me what I did. I do remember waking her up by opening the door to the safety deposit box. It creaked rather loudly… I proceeded to coax her out of bed by cranking the weather channel music that was on a loop and started over with the same tune every 2 minutes and 37 seconds. She had to get out of bed in order to clobber me.
We found a Szechwan restaurant that turned out to be our favourite restaurant in Hong Kong. The owner’s brother actually ran a similar restaurant in Vancouver! We consumed shrimp and cashews, fried Won-Ton, spring rolls and General Tao’s chicken. This was in stark contrast to the restaurant we walked out of half an hour earlier whose tamest choice on the menu was snakefish head and duck tongue.
We visited the markets for the last time in order to buy gifts for everyone back home. The immense influx of people had taken its toll on us by that point. Since I had been the subject of blatant staring for almost a month now, I decided to stare back. Eyes locked for what seemed like hours until the Asian usually averted their eyes first. It was a fun game to play and kept me from tearing off all my clothes and bowling naked through the constant mob of people in defiance. My height served as an advantage most of the time within these hordes since I could still see ahead. Mary, however, became quite frustrated with her viewpoint and sometimes aggressively stepped off the sidewalks weaving around traffic to escape the endless humanity.
Upon our return to our hotel, we always passed by a long row of pet stores. It was sad since puppies and kittens were piled up on top of each other in the smallest cages. Across from our hotel was the most cockroach- infested youth hostel in the world called the Ann Black Guest House YMCA. Check out tripadvisor.com for reviews about that horror. Near our hotel was a modest supermarket where we occasionally loaded up on squid chips and cheep beer.
Day 24 The Big Buddha
Today we enjoyed a reprieve from city life. We travelled for over two hours on public transportation (including a ball-numbing bus ride along a gravel road up a mountain) not to see 10,000 Buddhas but simply to see just one gigantic one. As luck would have it, he was enshrouded in dense fog. The weather, however, was below 20C for the first time on our vacation. It was heaven as we traversed a tropical mountain trail past little villages and spiders the size of a basketball.
One of the most surreal experience of our trip was encountering a series of 20 m tall prayer spires that when seen from above made the infinity symbol. Please see the pictures on Facebook and my website for this fantastic shot. When we finished our hike, enough fog had lifted to view our big Buddha. We climbed thousands of stairs in order to take close-up pictures of every angle imaginable.
We took another bus to a quaint little fishing village and really saw how the locals lived. Even though they had so much more space than Hong Kong, they still lived nearly on top of one another.
We took the fast ferry all the way back to Hong Kong and ate at our Szechwan restaurant again. Afterwards, we lounged in our rooftop pool trying to recover from the illnesses the pollution of Hong Kong certainly bestowed upon us. I was constantly feeling dizzy and achy and had a hard time swallowing. Something was wrong…
Day 25 Oo-a??
As we woke up close to the lunch hour, we felt the need to try dim sum one more time. The hotel front desk told us about a place called Oo-a right across the street. After frantically searching for nearly half an hour including within a grocery store (where we found many ducks and geese wrapped like ground beef with their feathery little heads still attached) we gave up. We went back to the front desk and asked them to spell out the name of the restaurant. To our surprise, they spelt out H-O-O-V-E-R. As we all know, the Chinese can’t pronounce the letters H, V and R. Why they would name one of their restaurants with a name they can’t pronounce is beyond me. The Hoover restaurant was in plain view of the hotel lobby directly across the street.
The search was worth it. This was dim-sum paradise. Mary and I consumed such delicacies as dumplings, fried mango, minced meat, shrimp and a mystery meat. As we had already learned, wait staff never approach you in any Chinese restaurant until you beckoned for them. We were beckoning quite a bit in order to sample all of this scrumptious food.
Our last full day took us to the gambling mecca of Macau. This area is predicated to eclipse Las Vegas within the next ten years in size and grandeur so we were curious. Apparently, this city is an independent city-state within the country of China just like its sister, Hong Kong. The ferry ride to Macau was fascinating, zooming past the gargantuan commercial harbour of Hong Kong. It had an anti-smoking video that was 15 minutes long and portrayed smokers as criminals. It was quite intimidating even if you were a non-smoker. We couldn’t believe that we had to go through customs upon our arrival in Macau. It took nearly 45 minutes!
We should have heeded the warning that Macau was “expected” to surpass Vegas “within” ten years. As we discovered, Macau was “presently” in its construction stage after a disappointing romp down its so-called “Strip.” Security was tight while entering two of only perhaps five “completed” projects such as Wynn and Sands. All we wanted was a tiramisu sundae from a McDonald’s that lurked within the casino!
Although the new Macau was evolving, the historical one was a treat to experience. As Hong Kong used to be a British colony, Macau was a former Portuguese settlement. All signs were now in Chinese and Spanish! The architecture was European including a stunning façade of a Catholic church. The snack of choice from the vendors was strips of thinly sliced meat. It was fairly tasty!
We got lost finding our way back to the ferry terminal and had our second altercation. I think it was time we headed back to Canada. The timing couldn’t have been better.
Day 26 The flight marathon begins
The longest commute of our lives began with a SLOW shuttle bus ride to the Hong Kong International airport. The driver seemed more intent on talking to a passenger than getting us there on time. We drove 50 km/h in a 100 km/h zone. The airport, just like the ones in Tokyo, Seoul and Bangkok was beautifully laid out. After an expensive lunch within the terminal, we flew back to Seoul where our return ticket would take us back to Canada the next day.
We booked a hotel that night in Korea near the airport. It was just like the Castle Motel but with even more amenities such as a 6-way spray shower, separate sit-down bath, separate toilet room, separate sink area, ultraviolet disinfectant machine, water cooler, a fridge, a huge Samsung flat-screen T.V, a cosmetic area and stereo. It even had a remote that controlled everything from the lighting to the bum-cleansing spray of the toilet bidet that had a “drying” feature for the ladies. I had lots of fun with the remote, but accidentally engaged unwelcome features during Mary’s daily private moment.
Five super-friendly Koreans at the front desk quickly stood up every time we entered the lobby. We were going to miss how sophisticated Asia was. Our last Korean meal in a nearby restaurant was delicious as always. We felt like locals as we ordered. Memories of Apa and his magnificent family sadly echoed through our heads. This was our first and only meal in Korea without the company of any of them.
Day 27 Reverse Culture Shock
I probably had the worst sleep of my life as the pollution from Hong Kong had completely ravaged my body. Miraculously, I began to feel better as we were shuttled back to the airport. We each ate a foot-long sub for breakfast at Subway within a huge food court. Meanwhile, Koreans were eating hamburgers from Burger King and drinking beer at 7:00 a.m. in the morning. It was quite a sight.
We flew back to Tokyo and then endured the 10 ½ hour flight to Chicago. The flight path took us on a more southern route this time across the northern states instead of Canada and Alaska. The plane was very well served by stewardesses as it was loaded with trainees.
The biggest culture shock of this whole trip wasn’t in Asia though. It was at Chicago’s O’Hare airport. We had become so accustomed to the serene polite tiny Asians that nothing prepared us for the loud, obnoxious and bulky North Americans. We had to wait almost 2 hours in line at customs EVE N though we were connecting to a flight to Montreal.
O’Hare airport was in disarray. Subsequent tornado warnings had delayed flights resulting in half of America’s offensive sector of the population congregating in one place. Baggage screeners disgustingly chomped on gum and shouted at one another. Airport patrons pushed, prodded and farted. Next to me in a bathroom stall, a man mumbled quite loudly in a Midwestern twang, “Its gonna be a long fuckin’ daay.” He was right… our own flight was delayed by three hours.
Civilized Asians were nowhere to be found. They were probably scared off…
We ate at a bar and grill and watched as customers either ignored or snarled angrily at the wait staff. Beer was either consumed or belched in high quantities. A mindless baseball game droned on through countless T.V’s. In fact, anything that could have contributed to actually encouraging human beings to communicate was removed in favour of technological distractions. Mary and I both sighed…we could learn many things from Asia, especially Korea.
While Mary tried to sleep on the horrific airport seating, I found a sanctuary of sorts. A moving walkway underneath one of the runways led to another terminal. Above this on the ceiling was a laser light show. It was my salvation from this cultural madness.
We finally made it to Montreal and collapsed in our hotel room. The next day the hotel had a breakfast special. A croissant and juice box for $5.99. We shared it between the two of us. Our saintly neighbour picked us up around noon and two hours later we were back in Ottawa.
Epilogue
Nearly 50 pages later I would like to thank my wife, parents, Sunday mornings in September (before school got too crazy) and a two week all-inclusive vacation in the Dominican Republic for helping me complete the longest trip report I’ve ever written.
Finally, I’d like to thank you the readers. Without your encouraging words every time I electronically send out one of these reports, I would have been content with consulting the rough scratches in my travel journals if I wanted to re-live our journeys.
Since I still have a week left here in the Dominican, I think I’ll create a Canadian’s guide to surviving an all-inclusive resort. Believe me, it will be a useful guide for any of you hoping you will find paradise.
