We shared the compartment of our sleeping train from Yichang with a crippled fortune teller, whose services the train attendants were very happy to use during the quiet hours of the long ride. The train dropped us off at Guangzhou on the coast of the South China Sea. I remembered just one thing from here: the city market from which I started my previous trip to China, with all the world’s misery in the alleys and all the world’s species in the frying pans. It was a difficult landing back then. Now it looked nothing like that. This time it was beautiful booming city with wide green avenues; even the concrete road overpasses were freshly painted yellow and carpeted with flowering plants. Either Guangzhou changed its face or I changed my outlook, I don’t know. We didn’t stay: we had had enough of Chinese cities, and were leaving China altogether. This was the end of our trip. We boarded a bus to Macau.
After a short ride the bus unloaded us in the parking lot of a large shopping mall. We asked when we would continue to the border and were amazed to find out that this was, in fact, the border. The passport control booths were on the second floor. This was only a hint at how different was the world we were entering into. We exited on the other side into Macau, and drove to our hostel in a free casino bus: Macau is the only place in this part of the world where gambling is permitted, and so it became the Las Vegas of the Orient; the major casinos operate buses from the border crossing which drive the gamblers and the occasional freeloading travelers right into the casino building. From there there’s a wide and inviting entrance into the gambling hall, and a slightly harder-to-find narrow exit to the street.
Our hostel was in a rather claustrophobic apartment, with bunk beds arranged to fill the small rooms almost like in a game of tetris. Outside was sunny, hot and loud. Life was being lived fast. Macau is the land of shopping and gambling — money, in other words, and lots of it. The big casinos from Las Vegas have opened branches here: there is the Venetian, complete with faux facades around channels with gondolas; there’s the MGM, and others; the most awe-inspiring is the new Grand Lisboa hotel and casino in a flower-shaped skyscraper. Parked Rolls Royces outside hint at what’s going on inside. We walked around a bit, gaping at all this craziness, and finished the day in a bar sipping a glass of Mexican beer.
The next day we escaped to Coloane, a low-key fishermen village on the southern tip of Macau which has so far managed to fend off urbanization. It was so remote that it used to be a hangout for pirates until 1910 when the Portuguese expelled the last of them. Since then the islands of Macau have been connected to each other by land reclamation and bridges. Now it is the best place around to sample the local Macanese and Portuguese cuisine. A rather drab-looking restaurant with gruffy staff served us one of the best meals we had on this trip. We passed the time until the evening, when the main event for which we came to Macau took place: the annual international fireworks competition. Macau was an major center of fireworks production until the mid-20th century, when Chinese factories made the traditional craft redundant and the workshops all closed down. The annual competition remained and it was quite a show, featuring creative displays such as fireworks that explode into smileys and flowers. Thousands of people, armed with picnic baskets, gathered to see it — it was a big celebration. The next morning we took a ferry to Hong Kong.
Hong Kong is the perfect big city, the kind we most like and enjoy. It is a true metropolis, a hectic island rushing at a mad pace making your head spin. It ticks like a well-tuned clock, the subway trains coming and going, unloading thousands of people and then thousands more, all hurrying somewhere and indeed getting there on time. Being limited by the surrounding water, central Hong Kong stretches upwards — not only the buildings soar higher and higher, but so do the buses and even the trams, the only double-decker trams in the world, large unwieldy cupboards rolling around on little wheels. Ten-storey shopping malls line the streets: Hong Kong is the shopper’s paradise. After half a year on the road with two pairs of jeans and a few t-shirts, we were near the end of our trip and decided it was time to refresh our wardrobe. We spent three days shopping — an inconceivable amount of time for us, since we normally get tired of it after 20 minutes.
We stayed in a hostel on the 11th floor of “Chungking Mansions”, a misnomer if there ever was one, in a room just slightly larger than a double bed — they don’t come bigger than that for any reasonable price. Chungking Mansions is the cheapest place in the downtown, and so it’s probably the most cosmopolitan spot in all of Hong Kong, with Africans, Indians, Pakistanis, Arabs and Chinese constantly in motion around the restaurants, shops and money-changers that fill the first floor of the building.
Hong Kong, in a true international fashion, offers an endless variety of cuisine. We had the most diverse meals in a long time. Besides that we visited art galleries, and generally indulged in the best that the civilized world has to offer. Our longtime friends Yael and Yehuda had just moved to Hong Kong for a two-year period, and meeting them was a little bit like coming back home. We we gradually returning.
Somewhere around the same time Oktoberfest, the biggest beer festival in the world, was opening in Munich. Since Munich was where we started our trip, it made sense to us to end it there, too, and so we took a long flight from Hong Kong to Munich via Moscow. Our trip of six months took 13 hours to cover by plane in the reverse direction. All our memories were now condensed before us in a small world map on the plane’s inflight information screen. There’s Xi’an and Chengdu, there’s Bishkek and Dushanbe, there’s the Caspian and the Black Seas. There’s Asia, there’s Europe. There’s Munich. Tired, satisfied, jet-lagged and broadly smiling, we stepped into the apartment of Jessy and Bernd who hosted us here half a year ago as we were setting off. We had made it. We were coming back.
September 19, 2011