We arrived late evening in Hong Kong on Saturday 5th April after a 4 and a half hour flight from Tokyo. To say we were thrown in at the deep end is no exaggeration. I don’t think anything can prepare you for the madness and frenetic energy of Hong Kong. It is unbelievable the pace at which this city moves. Even the skyline seems to be changing daily and absolutely nothing stands still – ever. I couldn’t stand the pace here for more than a few days; it makes London seem slow. We checked in to the Cosmopolitan Hotel which actually overlooks Happy Valley race course on one side but only if you have a deluxe room; we don’t so we are 23 floors up but with no view at all because the back of the hotel overlooks a graveyard and the Chinese are very superstitious about graveyards so all of the windows are covered with frosted film. We hit the streets for something to eat as we were starving; looking in a lot of restaurant windows we decided to pass on pigs head, live eel, whole pigeon complete with head and beak, chickens feet, somethings penis, squid, snakes’ heads – and instead dined rather finely at the Red Pepper where we were oblivious to how anything looked before it was put on our table.
The streets at night look amazing as everything is lit up and shops are stacked on top of shops on top of restaurants; things reach up 9 or 10 floors which you access by small crummy lifts – and then apartments are stacked on top, it’s mental. I have never seen so many street signs in my life. Total sensory overload.
Even the money is brightly coloured.
The next day we took the Victoria Peak Tram up a really steep hill way up above the skyscrapers to get a view of Hong Kong from above – and this view shown below is just a very small part of it.
So you get amazing skyscrapers costing billions of pounds mixed in with crummy old high rise apartment blocks, crowded in on top of each other and reaching up in to the sky everywhere you look. Literally thousands of people must live in each one, and all of them seem to hang their washing out of the windows to dry, regardless of how high up.
This skyscraper is called Jardine House, stands at 52 storeys high and was Hong Kong’s first ever skyscraper when it opened in 1973. It features 1,750 porthole-style windows and has earned the Chinese nickname of ‘House of 1,000 Arseholes’ ! All of the buildings below are based around the Central district.
Below is the Hong Kong & Shanghai Bank which remains the most expensive building ever erected; designed by Norman Foster and known locally as the Robot buildings because you can see chains and motors of the escalators and other moving parts working inside. It has been said that the HSBC is guaranteed its view of the harbour by the government. You may not think much of that – but Hong Kong harbour is shrinking as more and more skyscrapers are being erected on it.
Just around the corner from the hotel is a huge shopping centre in Causeway Bay called Times Square. It is very bling and lots of designer labels. There is a lot of money in Hong Kong.
The streets at night look amazing as everything is lit up and shops are stacked on top of shops on top of restaurants; things reach up 9 or 10 floors which you access by small crummy lifts – and then apartments are stacked on top, it’s mental. I have never seen so many street signs in my life. Total sensory overload.
Even the money is brightly coloured.
The next day we took the Victoria Peak Tram up a really steep hill way up above the skyscrapers to get a view of Hong Kong from above – and this view shown below is just a very small part of it.
So you get amazing skyscrapers costing billions of pounds mixed in with crummy old high rise apartment blocks, crowded in on top of each other and reaching up in to the sky everywhere you look. Literally thousands of people must live in each one, and all of them seem to hang their washing out of the windows to dry, regardless of how high up.
This skyscraper is called Jardine House, stands at 52 storeys high and was Hong Kong’s first ever skyscraper when it opened in 1973. It features 1,750 porthole-style windows and has earned the Chinese nickname of ‘House of 1,000 Arseholes’ ! All of the buildings below are based around the Central district.
Below is the Hong Kong & Shanghai Bank which remains the most expensive building ever erected; designed by Norman Foster and known locally as the Robot buildings because you can see chains and motors of the escalators and other moving parts working inside. It has been said that the HSBC is guaranteed its view of the harbour by the government. You may not think much of that – but Hong Kong harbour is shrinking as more and more skyscrapers are being erected on it.
They are filling up areas of the harbour close to the diminishing shoreline, with sand transported in on massive barges and then starting to construct on top of the new land mass they have created.
The Travel Diarist 
Your photos are amazing. What an amazing city.Have you been to any night clubs or gigs? Very curious of the Hong Kong nightlife.Please keep enjoying and please keep sharing!xxxS&T
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