Monday, June 05, 2006
Kowloon
After a couple of days of relative luxury we moved across to Mongkok in the heart of Kowloon on the mainland side of the harbour. It's much less 'westernised' over here, so this is where you'll find the day and night streetmarkets, and of course the tailors. Wandering around Kowloon I felt as if everyone on the street was trying to sell me a suit, not only that but they seemed absolutely astonished when I told them that I didn't want one. I mean, it's 32 degrees and 95% humidty, how could I possibly not want one?!?!We stayed at the YWCA in Mongkok (yes they do allow men on some floors), which was pretty good but did have a rather curious breakfast menu. Another guest gave us a tip to avoid the 'English Breakfast' so we eventually got used to fried egg and sausage on top of a bowl of noodles!
My first experience of Mongkok was on a Saturday afternoon, when I discovered that it's so insanely crammed with people that they just shut the roads around the shopping streets to make things easier. It's not much different at night, when three whole streets are closed off everynight, including the one which is home to the famous 'Ladies Market'. No, you don't buy Ladies here (although the number of hourly rate hotels in the area would suggest otherwise) it is so named because they used to sell clothing, bags and other such items of interest to ladies. They still sell those items, but they pretty much cater to everyone now.
We soon got used to the calls from every stall we passed: "Here missy, you want handbag?" or "Sir, copy watch sir?". So if you need a Prada handbag, Rolex watch, or an England football shirt for £3.50 this is the place to come. The football shirts were actually very good, although we did see a poster of 'Wayne Roonry' so you may wish to check the spelling. NOTE: The intervening weeks may have caused the market value of Mr Rooney's merchandise to have plummet somewhat!
There are plenty of other markets to choose from around Kowloon. The food markets are exciting to look at, with products ranging from the vaguely familiar to the "please don't tell me what that really is". There is also quite a large flower market and a bird market. The birds all seem fairly happy in their cages, although they do seem to be crammed in a bit!
The town of Sha Tin is technically in the New Territories, although there's no real gap between it and Kowloon anymore so I'll include it here. Our first weekend here coincided with the annual Dragon Boat Festival. We missed the first day of events which are actually in the harbour so we had to trek out to Sha Tin on the train to have a look. It all sounded fun and we collected our free tickets from the tourist office. Unfortunately the directions were a little vague, the 'short walk' from the station turned out to be about 1.5km, and we ended up on the opposite bank of the river from the 'stands' and facing another 1.5km walk to get to the bridge. So we watched from a fair distance and probably missed out on much of the excitement!
Sha Tin is also home to 'Snoopy's World', which is basically a childrens play area attached to a shopping mall which has giant models of Charlie Brown and Snoopy (whose career is alive and well in the far east in case you were worried about him). This really isn't a very exciting attraction, and unsurprisingly it isn't mentioned in our guidebook, but after our disappointment at the dragon boats it almost seemed bearable!
Sha Tin is also home to the 10,000 Buddha Temple, which might sound like an exaggeration until you learn that there are actually 13,000 of them. The guidebook explained how there were several hundred steps up to the temple, so we were delighted to discover that someone had now built a series of escalators to ease the journey. We got to the top and found that it didn't seem quite right, there was the odd Buddha, but quite where the other 12,999 were hiding was a mystery. After a while it was explained to us that we'd actually found what amounted to the local crematorium and associated temple complex, and would we mind awfully taking ourselves a little further up the road to the correct temple. This was all explained to us in fluent Cantonese by one or two locals, but we eventually got the message from the shaking of heads and arm waving (the international sign language for 'you're in the wrong place you bl**dy stupid tourist').
The actual 10,000 Buddha Temple doesn't have any escalators, but it did seem to have about 10,000 small, flying, biting things defending the steps (so go armed with insect repellent). The climb turned out to be worth it though as the pictures will hopefully show.
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