Most Hong Kong paper money is privately printed. There’s obviously a basic template, but different banks print their own notes within that template. Below are the current $50 notes from HSBC, the Standard Charter Bank, and the Bank of China.
The one exception seems to be the $10 note, which is published by the Hong Kong government using the same type of plastic that New Zealand uses.
I took the hydrofoil to Macau first thing in the morning on December 31. Macau is a former Portuguese colony that’s mostly turned into Las Vegas. The center of town still looks like the old colony, though, with forts and churches and densely packed, beat-up-looking buildings.
The focal point is St. Paul’s cathedral, which burned down in 1835, leaving only the facade.
So I got through that pretty quickly.
Adjacent to the church is the main fort of Macau. They’ve put a history museum in the center of it, which is mostly underground.
It’s not really a large museum, but it’s nicely done. It covers the early history of China and Portugal, done in parallel, until they converge in the 15th century. Most of the displays are commerce-related, since Macau was concerned mainly with trade and fighting off the Dutch.
The fort is, not surprisingly, on a hill, and has views of the city in all directions through the embrasures.
In the center distance, you can see the tip of the Macau Tower, which was modeled after the one in Auckland. I didn’t jump off of it, though, because no one was paying me.
That big flared building at the left is the Grand Lisboa, one of Stanley Ho’s properties. For many years, Stanley Ho was the only casino owner in the territory. Then other casinos started coming to Macau, and he had to start scrambling to compete. Buildings shaped like giant pineapples seem to be a part of that.
In front of St. Paul’s were several people handing out bright orange bags. The bags said “Jesus loves you,” plus a whole bunch of other stuff in Cantonese. It was getting hot, so I got one to put my sweatshirt in. There were also some pamphlets, but they were in Cantonese too.
Down the hill from the fort and the church facade is a tourist street that seems to get more densely packed as you walk down it, like you’re being squeezed through a funnel.
At the bottom of the hill is a plaza with another church. There are a lot of churches in the center of town, and most of them are yellow.
The nicer parts of town were like this: European-style buildings around small plazas.
Other parts were less nice.
I got lunch at a restaurant that my guide book recommended as a good place to get Macanese food. As it turns out, it was a Portuguese restaurant. The guide book also spelled the name wrong. It was good, though.
I spent another hour or two wandering around with my Jesus Loves You bag, then caught the bus back to the hydrofoil. The hydrofoil trip was uneventful, but I hadn’t considered how many people would be coming into Hong Kong for New Year’s Eve. Pscrillions, that’s how many. It took me an hour and a half to get through immigration.
Oddly, the act of going through immigration again reset the duration of my stay. An American can stay for three months as a visitor, but going to Macau for a day restarts the three months. I wonder how many times you can get away with doing that.
Having spent most of the day standing and walking, I wasn’t very enthusiastic about staying up until midnight to watch the fireworks. I went to bed at 8:30.
Bamboo is not just used for scaffolding. It’s also used to train banyan roots.
Bamboo: Nature’s PVC pipe.
I showed up at the bus stop promptly at 8:00 AM to discover that the buses to the tram start running at 10:00. So I walked. I could use my Octopus Card, so I didn’t have to wait in the ticket line.
The tram is similar to the one in Wellington, but longer and steeper. It has a maximum 48% grade, which gives it a Mystery Spot feel. (The Wellington grade is less than 18%.)
The Peak Terminal is a large anvil-shaped building with several floors of shops and restaurants and—at the top—the Sky Terrace, which costs extra. I’m sure the view is very nice, but right next to the Peak Terminal is the Peak Galleria, which also has several floors of shops and restaurants, and their rooftop is free. It’s not as high as the Sky Terrace, but if you’re already on top of a mountain, who cares? It’s not like you can see the difference.
There’s a 3.5km walk that the guide book mentioned. It was a little short on detail, but it sounded worthwhile. It starts down a steep maintenance road with banyan trees.
I walked for about a kilometer to a turnoff to a dirt path that loops back to the peak. The sign said it was 6.75 km, but the map didn’t show any other path, so I took it.
It’s a well-maintained path. There are even brooms in case you need to do some sweeping.
It’s mostly wooded, but there are occasional breaks with views of Pok Fu Lam and the South China Sea.
But it’s not really a level path. There’s a lot up and down, culminating in a long steep climb back to the peak.
Which turned out to be at the middle of the path I was supposed to take in the first place. That path is 3.5 km, paved, and level.
It was there that I encountered a little girl on a scooter, who told me, with tremendous enthusiasm, “I saw the frog! It’s there!”
And indeed it was.
After the recent controversy surrounding the fake Asiana pilot names, I think we all need to be a little more culturally sensitive.
For that reason, I will not be making any jokes about the King Fook Jewellery Group, the Hung Fat Pawn Shop, or Wing Kee Fruit.
From Central I took the MTR to Lantau Island, where I was immediately bombarded with advertising for Ngong Ping 360 and all the wonders they make available. Sky-Land-Sea Adventure! Guided tours! Culture and heritage! Local delicacy!
I opted for a round-trip cable car ride across the mountains to the Buddha statue. I spent an extra US$11 for the Crystal Cabin, which has a glass floor. The ratio of standard cabins to crystal is 2-1, but the line for the standard looked about ten times as long. Plus you get to look down. Well worth it.
Some of the other cars looked a little spartan.
The ride is about 3.5 miles and takes 25 minutes.
Eventually you see Mr. Buddha off in the distance.
The cable car deposits you at Ngong Ping 360’s photo center, where you have the opportunity to buy the photo they took of you when you departed. Then you exit through the gift shop into the Ngong Ping Village, which is a long avenue of shops and restaurants that leads to the temple. It’s basically a shopping center that’s made to look like a village. Kind of like Disneyland’s Main Street USA, but with a Chinese flavor. And Starbucks. With Christmas decorations. And numerous displays that feature a cartoon Koala who is somehow associated with the Korean company Lotte. There was also a display of cable car cabins from around the world.
It was at this point that my camera battery died.
I skipped the temple and walked up the loooong (and really crowded) stairway to the statue. The statue itself is the largest outdoor seated bronze Buddha statue in the world (presumably he would be taller if he stood up), and was made by China Aerospace Science and Technology, although I don’t know what prompted them to do so. The statue has three levels, but you have to pay to go to the top one, which I didn’t. I was allowed to visit the gift shop, though.
The view from the top is nice, and worth the climb, but there isn’t much of a reason for a non-Buddhist with a dead camera battery to stick around, so I went back down to the village and got a mediocre donar kebob at Ebenezer’s Kebabs and Pizzeria. Then I took the cable car back and missed another opprtunity to buy a photo of myself.
Once through the gift shop, the Ngong Ping people are done with you, and you go down an escalator to the street below, where you have to negotiate your way through through traffic to get back to the train station.
When I got back to the room, I fell asleep until nearly 4:00. No time to go up on Victoria Peak, so I took a harbor cruise. It was relaxing and the engines worked the whole time.
I went out at 6:00 AM, forgetting that it was Sunday. There’s not a lot open at 6:00 AM on Sunday, even in Hong Kong. But on the plus side, the streets aren’t crowded.
I took the ferry to Central and wandered around for a while until Starbucks opened, after which I went looking for the bus to the Victoria Peak tram. While doing that, I saw the stairs to the escalators to the Mid-Levels, and decided to do that first. Of course, it was still Sunday, and things were still closed, but I did go in the Man Mo temple.
Man is the god of literature and Mo is the god of war, so when you put them together you get…what? Hitting people with books? I’m not really clear on the specifics, but in practice, it seems to involve large amounts of sandalwood incense, hanging from the ceiling in coils.
Or stuck in bowls, alongside flaming candles.
Parts of the shrine had colored lights and looked suspiciously like Christmas trees.
I like sandalwood, but after a while it got hard to breathe, so I went back down the escalators toward the bus terminal.
Along the way I passed some people sitting on the sidewalk on pieces of cardboard. As I walked, I saw more and more of them.
At first I thought they were street people, but there were too many of them, and they weren’t asking for handouts. Then I noticed that they were all women, and they were apparently planning to camp out for a while, because some of them were constructing more elaborate housing.
All of this was happening outside of a mall called World-Wide Plaza, so I went inside.
There were pscrillions of people.
The vendors were selling everything from phone service to day-old donuts, and it was all marketed toward Filipinos. Wikipedia says:
The kiosks or shop units are typically from around 10 square metres, and are rented out to small traders, who sell telecommunications and banking services, to food, and magazines. The arcade is popular with the large Filipino population, particularly on Sundays, as many of the shops are run by their compatriots. The wide assortment of typically small shops caters to their needs, selling merchandise from their homeland.
Which doesn’t explain why they’re all women, or why Sundays, or why the cardboard. My guess is that they’re all domestic servants, that Sunday is their only day off, and that the place is so crowded that they have to wait hours to get in.
But where do they get all the cardboard?
This was all adjacent to the central bus terminal, where I learned that the bus to the Victoria Peak tram does not leave from the bus terminal, a small but crucial detail that my guide book neglected to mention. Instead, it leaves from the ferry terminal, where I had been a few hours earlier.
By now it was 10:00, though, so I decided to go see the giant Buddha on Lantau Island and save Victoria Peak for later.