In Pictures: Hong Kong, China

I had come to Hong Kong by ferry from Macau, one hour to the west.  By the time I was checked for SARS, got my passport stamped, and found my way from the international terminal (on Hong Kong Island) to a hotel (across the harbor in Kowloon), it was late afternoon.  At the hotel I threw my backpack onto the bed and walked the five minutes back to the waterfront.  It was almost sunset.

I stayed in the grubby-looking building above.  My hotel was a dorm room, actually, and most of my roommates gave me the creeps.  Predominately middle-aged Western men who refused to speak much about their past -- or about what they were doing in Hong Kong -- several others in the dorm were African refugees.  At least one was here illegally, hoping that the UN would grant him political asylum someplace.  If he were deported back to his home country, he assured me, he would be executed immediately.  He begged that I find a way to help him.  All I could offer were my prayers.

In addition to listening to people with desperate tales to tell, I kept close watch on my belongings.  The building was a haven for thieves.  On my way up the elevator one evening, I came across an agonized couple from Sierra Leone: someone standing behind them had slit their shoulder bag open only minutes earlier, relieving them of the thousands of dollars they had stashed inside.

One of the few younger men in the dorm was a European fellow who never replied when I said hello.  But one day he did tell me that he was living in Hong Kong to fulfill his kung fu acting dreams.  I thought the man was a bit off, so you can imagine my shock when six weeks later I was sitting in a cafe in a middle-of-nowhere Vietnamese town as someone pulled out a pirated Chinese DVD and stuck it in the television; there on the screen appeared my old roommate, bludgeoning some Chinese actor with impressive leg maneuvers.

But back to Hong Kong...

For many reasons, I sought to spend as little time as possible in my lodgings.  So apparently did people trying out their new computers...

  chatting on their cell phones...

and both chatting on their cell phones and fishing...

I spent my evenings around Kowloon's Star Ferry Terminal.  So did quite a few other people, including tourists...

people in love... 

other people in love...

and still more people in love.

Others, based on the babies they carried, had also at some point been in love, though rather than bear-hugging their partner in public they coddled the fragile products of their love, in this case a baby boy...

There were only a few of us who came to the harbor alone.  I wondered what older men like this thought about while they stood quiet watch along the railing.

Ferries and ships, trademarks of Hong Kong, plied the waters...

not only along the harbor front but also elsewhere, including the less urban section of the New Territories as well as off the coast of Hong Kong Island...

On Hong Kong Island, after emerging from the subway, I rode around on the top of a double-decker bus.  The only people on the bus were myself and two young students, returning home from school... 

While riding the bus, the students and I were treated to wonderful advertising, plastered several stories high on various apartment buildings.

The advertising on Hong Kong Island reminded me of some of the advertising I had seen across the harbor in Kowloon.

The advertising, of course, is a reminder that people come to Hong Kong to shop, consume, spend money, find bargains, buy knicknacks and techonology.

While I did buy a few stamps at the post office, 12 mini-DV cassettes for my video camera, and a battery for my dead watch, I wasn't in Hong Kong to shop.  Like the students below, I was mainly here to chill.  The natural beauty of Hong Kong would be worth a visit even if there were no shops to lure the traveler.

And had I brought a fishing pole to Asia, maybe I would have spent my evenings fishing.  Instead I devoted my evenings to the art of wandering, which meant I watched others fish, love, and chat on their cell phones.  And sometimes in my wandering I may have even remembered to pray for frightened African refugees, for they were farther from home than anyone reading this would ever wish to be.