Day 3 (November 5)

I arrived in Hong Kong at 7:00 am after a very enjoyable 15 hour flight from Los Angeles (via Anchorage). On approach into the airport, the pilot gave the typical weather report and said it looked like it was going to be a nice, sunny day. Looking out the window,  all I saw was  an unbroken layer of clouds; until I realized  that it wasn’t clouds, but Hong Kong’s smog layer. So yes, it was sunny – through the smog.

After getting off the plane, it was a quick trip through customs, checking to make sure my bike was checked all the way through to Perth (I wasn’t looking forward to lugging a 69 pound, 103 inch box around town), getting some local cash, buying a train ticket to downtown, and then jumping on the train. About an hour and a half after landing, I was in downtown Hong Kong.

I did a lot of planning for this trip, but one thing I forgot to do was to look up the U.S.-Hong Kong currency exchange rate. I forgot to do that once before, on my Oslo-to-Rome bike trip. I don’t know if you have really experienced a complete sense of helplessness and idiocy until you’ve stood in front of an ATM, with a line of people waiting behind you, trying to figure out how much cash you should get. Compound that with being in a new country for the first time and not knowing what things cost, and you truly have a completely random decision in front of you. So, you plug in a number and out pops a wad of cash, which to you at this point is just worthless paper – but hey, all the pretty colors are really neat! So I ended up with HK $400 of color – $30 of which went for an ice cream bar!

My flight to Perth didn’t leave until 10:30 pm, so I had all day in Hong Kong. I didn’t have any specific plan of action for the day, so I just sort of wandered around and found myself down by the bay, and remembered my friend Ben’s suggestion to take the ferry across to Kowloon. It was easy enough to find the ferry dock, so I paid my fare of HK $2.50 (how much is that in U.S. dollars? I have no idea, but it seemed like a reasonable fare). The ferry ride was short – just across the bay – but it was certainly eventful in that boats and ships of every size imaginable were usually within, what would be for a Hong Kong newbie, an unusually close proximity. In the space of about eight minutes we dodged other ferries, about a dozen small boats, a tugboat towing a floating oil rig, and a 1,000 foot long cruise ship.

Hong Kong is certainly an interesting city. Lots of unique architecture, people everywhere – all on cell phones, a Tesla passing by what seemed like every five minutes or so, and if you want to buy a suit, I can attest that Hong Kong is the place to do it. I had something like 6-7 different guys, all at different places, thrusting their business card at me and insisting that I needed a new suit – like RIGHT NOW. “Just come in and we will measure you. Make you a new suit now. Come now. You must look good!”, they would say, all the while blocking my way on the sidewalk, with throngs of people flowing around the sidewalk blockage so that I couldn’t dodge the salesman without bumping into someone. The more I insisted that I didn’t need a new suit (not to mention that it’s not really proper cycling attire), the pushier the guy would get. When they realized they weren’t going to sell me a suit, they lowered their expectations and tried hawking their shirts and pants. I told them no on everything, but they just wouldn’t stop, so finally I just smiled, said no thanks, and walked away.

After the downtown experience, I caught the train back out to the airport and spent the remaining seven hours in The Pier, which is Cathay Pacific’s flagship lounge at Hong Kong International. Try it sometime.

Posted by Scott