Around The World In 80 Waves

I have run out of time in Hong Kong, which translates to Fragrant Harbour in Cantonese. The smell hasn’t done anything for me though so I pack my bags for Vietnam, which is up next on my itinerary.

It is time to say goodbye to the Ibis hotel which has been my home for the last few days. It was lovely to have allowed myself a modicum of comfort and I enjoyed having my own space whilst staying there

I just have time before heading for the airport to offload another postage parcel full of souvenirs that need to go back to the UK.

It certainly lightens the load I have been carrying on my back so far through Asia, but I am sure it wont take long to find other tat to replace it with!

Not far from Bruce Lee’s house in Kowloon I spotted this Liverpool Football Club themed kindergarten. I know the Premier League clubs are always looking to nurture young talent, but I fear a Kindergarten may be taking things a  bit far.

As a consequence I am hoping this has been set up by an ardent fan who just suffers from a limited imagination.

As I walked back down the hill towards the harbour my path took me through the night markets which spring up all around temple Street

I am sure you could pick up just about anything you might want as well as plenty of thing you probably never will desire too whilst shopping here. Lots of fun to wander through the market though.

The priceless experience however is seeing Hong Kong Island from Kowloon after nightfall.

The skyline is magnificent and so many of the buildings have had light shows added to their standard construction it actually compares with Las Vegas in its extravagance.

Bruce Lee was a Hong Kong American who is fairly credited with helping to change the way Asians were presented in American films, because his films and TV characters were one of the first to bridge the gap between the east and the west.

Although his training was in the Wing Chun style of Kung Fu he felt it was too restrictive and went on to develop his own martial art called Jeet Kune Do, which can be seen as a forerunner of the various types of Mixed Martial Arts that have exploded all over the world in recent years. 

He was undoubtedly one of my heroes when I was growing up as a result of watching all his martial arts films, so I had to go on a grail quest to explore the areas of Hong Kong where he had grown up and gone to school.

This building across the other side of Victoria Harbour in Kowloon is his former house. Try to imagine me in a pair of shaolin pajamas practicing Bruce’s famous one-inch punch outside paying homage to the great man. (Optional sound effects can be added)

There is also this fantastic statue of him on the harbour side in Kowloon.

A few random Bruce Lee facts for you:

Bruce kicked the backside of Chuck Norris, Jackie Chan and Batman on screen.

Steve McQueen and James Coburn were pall bearers at his funeral.

Most martial art films of the era were sped up to make fighting scenes appear fast, but Bruce’s moves were actually too fast to be captured on the regular 24 frames per second film. As a consequence they had to film him at 32 fps, and run the film slower so you could actually see more than just a blur.

I get up early to head eastwards on Hong Kong Island. My first stop is the racing ground called Happy Valley. There is a part of town called Happy Valley back home in Llandudno but somehow it doesn’t quite compare with the huge stadium set among the skyscrapers here. There had been a race meeting last night that I had wanted to go to but I had been feeling too tired and still a bit unwell to trek across town to attend.

It is the only place where gambling is legal in the city and is massively popular with the locals as a consequence. To give you an idea of how huge a sum of money gets bet each week it would probably dwarf the totals of both Britain’s Grand National and Australia’s Melbourne Cup combined.

I don’t stick around long because I am keen to get to Victoria Park because I have heard it is where the locals go to practice their martial arts in one of the few green open spaces available here on the island.

I visited china a decade ago and have always regretted not going down to Tienanmen Square to see something similar on a grand scale whilst there. 

There are hundreds of people practicing various forms with enchanting grace in just about every free space in the park including in and around the swings and slides.

As well as the familiar Tai Chi Chuan, there were variations with fans and sticks. However my favourite group was this group of grandmothers practising with swords. Anywhere else I have visited it would have seemed ridiculous but here it seemed quite appropriate.

After my night of Tsingtaos with Ryan I can hold my hands up and say that I have felt awful all day today. It must have been a dodgy pint, although which of the many pints I enjoyed it was I cannot be certain.

Leaving my hotel room this morning was reluctant at best and quite painful if I am honest. As a consequence I was keen to do as little walking as possible today.

I don’t want to waste the day though so decided to catch the tram up to the top of Victoria Peak. It has been operating for more than a hundred years and goes up some staggeringly steep gradients.

It is quite impressive but less so than the view of most of Hong Kong Island from the top of the mountain. It really does feel like you are looking at Mega City One from this angle.

I’m still not feeling too clever after coming back down the mountain though so decide to rest my weary feet and take one of the old trams that run around the city back to my hotel. They are charming vehicles which rattle along and look like a double decker bus that has been squeezed in a vice.

Public transport is excellent in Hong Kong although the cabs that are all identical, which you also see here, are not big enough to get my surfboard into, so I do not think I am going to be able to get to one of the beaches nearby while I am here.

My feelings on angry fish are well documented in this blog, however I have to say I have been quite saddened by the number of health food shops and medicinal suppliers located around my hotel that are supplying shark fins. It is clearly a popular dish here because the first restaurant I went into dedicated its first page of the menu to variations of shark fin soup.

I don’t think I have any more right to tell somebody else what they can eat, than they do to tell me that I can’t eat bacon so I don’t know what is the right way forward on it though. It just seems so wasteful to kill such magnificent animals just for their fins in much the same way killing elephants and rhinos for their ivory does.

Such an unsustainable shame based on ill informed beliefs about virility and strength of the animals being passed on to the consumer, which have no basis in science and sound like they are straight out of the dark ages. 

The elder brother of one of my best friends has been living in Hong Kong for nearly twenty years, and I am delighted to meet up with Ryan for a few Tsingtao beers. Based on how I am feeling the following day it must have been a couple more than a few though

It was fantastic to see a familiar face and talk about all the people I grew up around. It was a real fillip, but inevitably gets me thinking about everybody back home in the UK. I will be seeing them before long though because I now have only six weeks left of my travels.

It is time to say Ahn Nyeong Hee Gyea Se Yo to South Korea. I say goodbye to all at Bong House (which is a reference to its owner Bong rather than any illicit smoking habits) where I have been staying and head for Incheon airport once more.

I am pleasantly surprised when Cathay Pacific do not charge me for daring to travel with a surfboard, but am less impressed with the results of their work when my surfboard looks like it was involved in the Axe Murder Incident upon arrival in Hong Kong. There were five huge holes in it.

It was only a few hours on the plane to Hong Kong airport, which is located on a vast man made island within the harbour area.

From the express train I catch to Hong Kong Island I can see that there appears to be a great deal more terra-forming going on close by, although I have no idea what else they are building. The cargo container port is breathtaking in its scale too.

Speaking of construction though, you cannot help but be impressed by the skyline here in Hong Kong. Land has clearly been in such short supply historically here that everything has just stretched skywards.

Every inch of space seems to have another skyscraper built on top of it, with anything below twenty stories high being dwarfed by all the other towers. The development model that started here, has now been followed in the developing cities all over Asia.

I will be up in the clouds myself whilst staying on the 17th floor of the Ibis Hotel in between the Central and Sheung Wan areas of Hong Kong Island.

The first thing I do upon arriving here is establish a ding repair shop in my hotel room to repair the damage done to my surfboard by the airline. I suspect that the hotel will not be very fond of the smell of curing fibreglass resin and I have decided to play dumb on that if asked.

It is my last day in South Korea so I decide to do some sightseeing. Seoul has 6 palaces within the city and Changgyeonggung is only a short walk from the hostel I am staying in so is first up.

It has beautiful grounds and a number of buildings that have been constructed in the style you see here.

Next door is Changdeokgung which is equally stunning having far more buildings to admire. I’m not entire sure which way round it is but one of these two palaces was the crown prince’s and the other was for his concubines.

Whilst in Changdeokgung I get to see what I would look like in Korean national dress. I think they might need to give me a bit more room around the shoulders.

Seoul was captured and lost four times during the Korean War so was largely razed to the ground by the end of the conflict, and the palaces did not escape from the damage. A great deal of restoration work has been completed bringing all the vibrant colours back into old buildings and replacing those that have been destroyed.

Gyeongbokgung palace was the home of the Josean dynasty who ruled Korea from here from the fouteenth century until the peninsular was taken under Japanese control at the start of the twentieth century. You can see the craggy  Bugaksan rising behind the palace to the north.

I arrived there perfectly to watch the inspection of the guards ceremony catch a little bit of footage of the colourful outfits. It was a marvellous spectacle.

The royal family were all eliminated by the Japanese but Gyeongbokgung remains the centre of the identity of the Korean people and the hundreds are visiting the palace today.

The grounds and the buildings within them are stunning at times. I can’t imagine the length of time and hard work it would take to create such things. Some must have taken centuries.

Bizarrely on a traffic island in the middle of the road directly opposite Gyeongbokgung  there is a festival being run. I saw these martial arts performers who were fantastic being particularly impressed with the four girls who could clearly whoop me with their taekwondo skills. I also watched a group of drummers that were amazing. You can see a little bit of footage of their performance here. 

From here I took a stroll down the Insadonggil market area where you can pick up souvenirs and craftwork. I wasn’t tempted by anything and to be honest was starting to get a bit riled by all the people who bump and jostle you.

I think it must be an east Asian thing due to the cramped conditions, but if I barged into people the same way that others are doing to me I would be knocking people over. There is an awful lot of gnashing of teeth on my part as a result of it.

It was a quick ride on the metro down the international food festival which was going on at Itaewon.

In amongst the stalls supplying tastes from all over the world there were sound stages, breakdancers, and crowds, which by this stage I didn’t have the energy for. I was delighted then when I found a bar that served John Smiths bitter, and didn’t move a great deal further than that until the end of the day.

Returning to Seoul from the madness that is the DMZ I have realised that it is Saturday night and I need to go out and party with the locals.

Psy’s parody of life in the Gangnam area of town, which is all fake tans, implants and designer labels, means I am looking for something a bit more authentic. A little bit of research suggests either Itaewon which is usually full of personnel from the local US army base or Hongdae

I opt for Hongdae because I am in South Korea and not the USA after all, and am staggered at how busy it is.

Think Times Square in New York or Piccadilly Circus in London and then double the number of both people and light bulbs.

There are an huge number of very attractive local ladies wandering around here too in particularly short skirts or hot pants, which is very easy on the eye.

At the point where I realised I would really need a wingman to have any success in chatting up the local talent I bump into a fighter pilot from a local US Air Force base. His call sign is Prox and he flies an F16 often on patrols along the North Korean border.

He is in town due to being given extended leave as a result of the US government’s funding issues. I am fascinated by what that must be like to work on the front line knowing that your any move could escalate to World War III.

With the sort of swagger you would expect from a fighter pilot he tells me that the only concern he has is the handful of MIG-29s that the North Koreans have got hold of. I have no doubt he fancies his chances against them too. The two of us enjoy a few drinks together and I’m quickly chatting to the female service personnel and ex pat teachers who are also in the bar we are demolishing tequilas in.

The only other thing to report here was what Prox (I can’t remember his real name as a result of the tequila) told me about what he can see from his rather unique vantage point of the North. There are virtually no trees because all have been cut down to be used for fuel, and at night you can see almost nothing across the border because they can’t supply their population with electricity.

Something which I can confirm from this night time photograph of the Korean peninsular that I found online, which probably tells the real tale about what is going on around here.

My Top Gun days might well be behind me because after a few hours I am more interested in bed than thinking about dueting ‘You’ve lost that loving feeling’ to impress the talent on offer. Getting home was a nightmare though because I didn’t note the hostels address and obviously my pronunciation of Hyehwa, which is the nearest train station, was nowhere good enough for most of the taxi drivers. It took me 30 minutes before anybody would let me in their cab.