Waterford Estate

The highlight of living in Cape Town is not the mountain, as some would lead you to believe. It is not the sea which is too cold in which to swim. It is not even the way it conveniently manages to keep poor people out of the lines of vision of rich people. It is undoubtedly its proximity to the Cape Winelands – as good a reason to live there as any. In fact, if I were to start a city I would ensure that there was a plethora of possible vineyard sites within spitting distance beforehand.

While living in Cape Town, I visited plenty of farms in and around Paarl, Franschhoek and Stellebosch, and they are all so good that it became tricky for any one of them to stand out. Until I won a prize at a press conference to spend a night at Waterford Estate (Note: I was/am under absolutely no obligation to write about it).

It is one of the few vineyards in Stellenbosch at which one can spend the night in a large, beautifully furnished room on the second floor of its main building. Breakfast and six or seven bottles of wine are provided and the view out of the bedroom is so wide guests can see sunrise and sunset from the bed.

The lounge - contemporary decoration (apologies for it being out of focus).

The eye-watering view out of the bedroom window.

What the vineyards do offer, generally, is beauty, and Waterford Estate doesn’t disappoint. Although I arrived in a crap mood because the sign for the vineyard had fallen down and I’d covered most of the roads of the Western Cape finding it, the way it was set up from the gate to where guests park was incredible. I could describe it, but rather just look at these.

Both pics are of the main building at Waterford Estate. This is what is immediately presented to all visitors here. Pretty damn decent, I'd say.

That being said, prettiness is not something which necessarily differentiates one farm from another - you’ll rarely see an ugly one. There are two stark criteria which push Waterford Estate’s notability ahead of most others.

The first is the idea of a wine safari. I am not sure of other farms do this, but Waterford boast a concept in which you taste the wine while sitting sitting by the orchard in which (at least some of) its grapes were grown. Our guide (whose name escapes me) was involved in the whole wine production process from seed-planting right through to putting the cork in the bottle, so we were given a thorough explanation on every part of the farm which we drove through (and drank near). We were regaled with tales of how crops had been affected by massive winds and fires, how grapes are selected, how the quality is maintained and so on. All the while in a stunning setting.

This is a proper wine safari - this truck having arrived at Waterford for safari purposes from Singita.

The highlight of the safari was sampling Waterford’s signature wine, The Jem. This creation of this wine was a nine-year process with a plethora of concoctions attempted before Kevin Arnold, cellar master, and his team gave it the ok. We sampled this sitting on a hill with a view that stretched nearly the whole way to Cape Town.

The wines on the safari were matched with food – we sampled olives and nuts with the white wines and droewors and biltong with the reds. It all paired up beautifully, but it post-safari that Waterford surprised us again.

Three of Waterford's top red wines: a Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot and it's premier product, The Jem.

I am sure most of you who have traversed wine country will have sampled the nectar alongside food. Well, Waterford Estate pairs up wines with chocolate. Usually putting two things people like together is a decent recipe for popularity. Well, how’s about two things people absolutely adore? The secret is in the high-quality chocolate provided, flavoured beautifully. A deep dark chocolate, a brown rose-water flavour and a milk chocolate accompanied with four of Waterford’s high-quality wines. I suppose the message is that wine is not just a meal accompaniment, it is a leisure pursuit too – not something wine-producing countries like South Africa need to know, but the rest of the world could be taught a thing or two.

The chocolate-pairings and the wine safari do make Waterford stand out within the region. However, and most importantly, it still provides the main top-quality aspect that one would expect anyway: superb, well-thought out wines.

It certainly gets my stamp of approval.

This is a Simon travel pointer.

One of my favourites: Wan Chai

We live in Central Hong Kong – behind us is Victoria Peak, to the west is Sheung Wan and to our east is my favourite part of Hong Kong, the district of Wan Chai.

Wan Chai is a great mix of everything Hoingkongish. It comes with the shopping centres which this city is known for, but also creates a link between this city’s western and eastern communities. While Central has a plethora of British pubs, and Kowloon (the portion of Hong Kong which sits on the Chinese mainland) has very few, Wan Chai manages to host the most mixed crowd you’ll find here – local Cantonese, local British-sounding folks, tourists, long-term residents, people who work in banks (from executives to tea servers), those creepy old men with young Filipino girlfriends and so on, and it is because of what this district offers.

Although it is peppered with 24-hour strip clubs and a plethora of drinking establishments, the real charm of Wan Chai lies in its small cheap restaurants called cha chaan teng (which loosely translates to “tea restaurant”) where great Asian food can be found for only a few Hong Kong dollars escaping one’s wallet. There is also western food available but it is mostly of the chain variety – Subway, McDonalds etc.

Cha chaan teng generally look a bit grubby and cramped, but I am yet to be disappointed by one. There’s no fucking around when it comes to eating in these spots – no one has hung fancy tapestries all over the place or has a leatherbound menu. The menu is either a laminated piece of paper or a giant poster stuck to the wall – with a whole lot of complicated combinations (always in Cantonese, sometimes in English, often in a hodge-podge of both) which can allegedly save you money.

Usually there is enough English on the menu to work out what is going to come, but often a little understanding of how cheap restaurants work here is required – and I am not expert yet. Do not expect a vegetarian meal. Even if you order a meal without meat, it has probably been cooked in some sort of animal fat. Those of you that hate fish? Some random dishes are cooked in XO sauce. In fact, there is one cha chaan tang restaurant we often pass in Central which keeps beef brisket and some kind of sea sponge thing warm in the same pot. If a dish says “offal” avoid it like the plague - it means entrails (you may know it as innards). Outside these few points, one can eat great food for not much money.

Cha chaan teng have sparked off similar kinds of restaurants – same set up, different food. And our discovery in Wan Chai this last weekend – this post’s Serious Travel Tip – was a Filipino eatery set up like a tea restaurant in Jaffe Street, right near Wan Chai station called Mang Ambo. We had no idea what Filipino food would taste like, but for $30 each we got a grilled beef kebab (sosatie, not schwarma) with some amazing (kind of like basting, but with something awesome added) sauce on it, two kinds of beef curry, chicken and beans cooked in a peanut satay sauce, and two portions of steamed rice. If I was more of a foodie, I would be able to tell you what was in this delicious concoction of morsels. All I can tell you is that the food was superb, the waiter/chef/maitre de spoke English and talked us through another set of (labyrinthly-construed) combos which bypassed the usual guesswork involved. And did I mention that the food was good?

A stroll around the district afterwards revealed the largest and cheapest sweet-shop which I have seen in Hong Kong – a splendour of candy, chocolate, little fragments of goodness all over the place just waiting to be forced through my greedy jaws. Cafes, furniture shops, knick-knacks, some dodgy clubs and allsorts lined the streets all the way back to Queens Road before we began strolling home.

And towards Central, the roads became cleaner, the shops became classier, the buildings got higher and shiner, there was English everywhere and we couldn't afford things anymore. I missed Wan Chai from when we were about thirty metres out of it...

If you visit Hong Kong, Wan Chai is easy enough to get to. From the mainland you can take underground trains (MTR) to Central or Hong Kong Station and then change to the Island Line (the blue one) to go two stops to Wan Chai. A ferry from Tsim Sha Tsui will also bring you to Central and if you don’t fancy trains, trams or buses, it is only about a fifteen minute walk eastwards to Wan Chai, down Queens Road.

PS. Also available in Wan Chai: western egg.

An interesting... fight with the temperature and queue-jumpers

It's been a wild few weeks. After escaping the snowy USA where my heart actually started beating slower because of the mid-winter freeze-fest, I was looking forward to getting back to the lovely, tropical, humid Hong Kong to defrost. Well, Simon Gear, Derek van Dam and their bunch of pointy weathertwit cronies played a nasty trick on me. Hong Kong is freezing. The temperature has hovered around 10 degrees Celsius (about 50 degrees Fahrenheit) which may sound warmer than the fortnight we pranced around northern Pennsylvania, but America actually prepares for winter.

Turns out, this city is not equipped for anything below the temperature at which you'd serve soup. Our house is as airy as a fat man after a meal of beans, but without the required warmth thereof. The wind sweeps through here and the house in its totality provides about as much protection from it as a sieve would. As we arrived back here loaded with Christmas presents but with hardly any money, a heater was a luxury in which we could only invest come pay day. So there was a three-week freeze in this house where you couldn't sit comfortably without donning a jersey, jacket, beanie and scarf while sitting beneath a duvet. I am being dead serious.

We've had three guests this year already. Michelle was the initial visitor, and her first night here - you know the one where you are supposed to be jet-lagged and tired after a 13-hour flight? Well it was an absolute shit-show. She brought two bottles of wine as a thank you present for inviting her to stay here - we chugged them down by 10.30am. The two of us then set off to explore the city and after a stroll around one of the largest shopping centres I have ever seen (I am convinced that there are more square metres of shopping space than housing in this city) we ended up on the roof of IFC which is a building (containing yet another shopping centre) on Hong Kong island - right next to a bar serving gluhwein, with a view of the skyline on Kowloon. There we sat, beneath a heater powering through our warm drinks and Peter Stuyvesants when right next to us plonked two people we'd never met before. Within three minutes the four of us had started chatting merrily away and one of the new folks, a Hongkonger who has lived in Australia for everish ended up spending the whole evening with us (and the next night, come to think of it) - she's our first proper friend in Hong Kong. The already swirlish afternoon became a cocktail-infused chaotic evening in which I distinctly remember us having our arms around each other while belting out any song we could think of. How the neighbours haven't kungfu-d us yet is beyond my comprehension.

(L to R: Michelle, Donald Duck, Me, Mike)

As all of our visitors will undergo, we dragged Michelle to Disneyland which is probably my favourite place in this city. We also dragged our second visitor, Mike's best friend Nikki, there as well and spent a night in a Disney hotel. I don't really need to describe Disneyworld to you - it's pretty much exactly what you expect. I can't do the justice that the marketing promos do. But I do find that I have way more fun there than actual children. It was even more special when we visited with Nikki as one of the rides (a slow one thank god) broke while we were on it and we had to walk through the whole thing. It's way cooler than it sounds.

We also visited Macau (some people spell it Macao) for the first time while Nikki was here and stayed over on one of the casino hotels there called The Venetian. Turns out it is the largest casino in the world, in the city that makes the most money out of casinos. Yep, Macau overtook Las Vegas as the world's biggest gambling spot - largely due to bans on gambling in Hong Kong (where only horse-racing betting is legal) and China. And The Venetian is quite simply the biggest, brightest, over-the-top building in which I have ever found myself - it's like the size of a major European airport and makes Monte Casino seem like a dirty 5-cent coin. Even the garishly lit-up Sun Coast Casino (the second ugliest building in the world, after the SABC HQ in Jozi) can't compete with what the electricity bill for The Venetian must be. We listened to a live band, then watched the Aussie Open (which, now that I think about it, must have been a replay as we saw it at something like 2.30 in the morning and we're only 3 hours off Melbourne time) and then ate meat and noodles (the Chinese equivalent of a petrol station pie or greasy London kebab) before retiring.

The following morning we ate the best dim sum I have come across since we made the move to this part of the world. Dim sum is basically Chinese tapas (although I am sure a proper foodie could provide a better explanation than that) - lots of little morsels which are shared around the table. It does get a bit hit and miss, but you have to try to find out. Pork and cabbage dumplings - good. Stewed offal - not so much. Whoever comes to Macau with us gets dragged to this superb restaurant.

Milla, another one of Mike's buddies (but I have adopted her too) was our last guest - she was only here for two nights on her way to Bali - but we managed to squeeze in a visit to Lama island. Yadda yadda it was lovely and food was good, but one of my favourite Hong Kong experiences happened here. Now, people who live in this city have a severe inability to queue. It is a complete cluster-fuck every time any semblance or order is required (although strangely enough, not regarding queuing for buses) and as we waited to board the ferry to return back to Hong Kong island we were shunted each and every way by locals trying to get to the front of the line. Well when the gate opened and everyone tore through as if there were only three seats on the boat (there are actually about 200), officials suddenly realised they had opened the wrong gate and we all had to turn around and go the other way. So all the pushers and shovers whose manners live up their own arse got stuck at the back of the queue. Call it incredibly small and pedantic - I do not care. It is the day I got one over on Hong Kong and I very publicly and verbosely let them know as we got onto the correct ferry. However, none of them shouted back so it was far less gratifying than the commuter-rage in which I engaged back in London and Joburg, when other people let you have it in return.

Other than that, I am currently job-hunting which is going about as well as, and at the pace of, the State of the Nation address. The annual Christmas waistline increase is also yet to be conquered, but it's progressing, albeit at the pace of a blood clot.

And there's beer in the fridge. So all's well.

The terrible tragedy of the toilet

For the first time in my life I had to use an Eastern toilet. Myself and Mike went for a run down Bowen Road, a scenic, flat trail that runs from Central out to Wan Chai. Mike runs a lot faster than me, so I was trundling along on my own when my stomach suddenly did a backflip, and I was forced to walk half bent-over, squeezing my please-god-keep-it-inside muscles until they nearly spasmed.

Finally I arrived at the public loo with my bowels virtually overflowing (as if someone was repeatedly smashing me in the stomach with a cricket bat) ready to relieve the pressure cooker I must have swallowed. And what greeted me was this:


Well let me tell you, I have used many bogs in my life ranging from ones in snooty hotels to long-drops, and I have never in my life endured such an unpleasant toilet experience.

For starters, you can't sit down. You have to put your feet on the sides - where those lines are - and hover over it. I wasn't sure at the idea angle and tried half standing up - maintaining terror that I was standing too straight and the resulting excrement would land in my shorts, or squatting right down trying to quash the fear of falling backwards. I have never encountered a toilet where I had to aim. On a sitting-down bog, one merely lets it drop out in full knowledge it will land in the bowl... a privilege not extended to users of Eastern toilets.

Secondly, we also enjoy the luxury of having our personal waste sit in a little pool of water, hiding the smell, and because of the shape of the toilets we are used to, we don't need to look at it. This is not the case with this crapper as it sits in the porcelain bowl right below from whence it came - which is the user's rear end. It's really not my favourite part of how my body works and I would prefer to ignore it.

The next terrible thing about it is that, for some unknown Asian reason, the toilet paper is outside the stall. Now I have never budgeted toilet paper. I have no idea how much I use so I grabbed as much as I thought I needed, then doubled it and went in with that.

I wasn't even close. After half-wiping, I hoped to blinding hell that no one else was in the bathroom and squat-hopped my way over to the toilet paper dispenser to get more. This is a lot easier said than done. Think leap-frog with your pants around your ankles.

Once again, there is no simple way to just pop the used bogroll into the can. The first time I tried throwing it in I missed and it landed on the floor. Needless to say, I left it there. I wasn't wasting any of my precious bogroll supply picking it up. (I eventually felt guilty and, resisting all temptations to just run away, kicked it in post-flush.)

Bear in mind you also aren't wiping at an angle you're used to, and you've been hovering over the toilet for a few minutes now. Your leg muscles are killing you but you cannot move until you've finished.

It was the grandest form of torture under which I have ever gone.

Next time I go running I'm taking a bucket.

The Language Barrier of Cantonese

Admittedly, I struggle with accents that aren't South African. Give me an Indian speaking Afrikaans while trying to be respectful of the Zulu person he's talking to and I'm fine. However, my ears are stuck that way. Try as I might, I can barely understand the people in Hong Kong unless they speak decent English (my weakness, not theirs).

Whoever may have told you that Hong Kong was perfectly English speaking is communicating via the seat of their pants. While the signs around the city may be in Cantonese and English, the population does not speak both lanuages equally. In fact, dear Britain, this was a pretty weak attempt at colonialism all round, if you ask me.

There is no easier way to find this out than to go and try and buy something.

In the last week, while shopping, I have had to act out dustbin bags (make circle with arm and use other arm to point inside), lemon juice (squeeze pretend fruit in the air and then make sour face), moisturising cream (rub arm repeatedly), toothpaste (this one is easy - just pretend to brush teeth and it's the first thing you get taken to after the toothbrushes, floss and whitening products) and toilet paper (the easiest one of the lot).

I have also been given Coke when I asked for Diet Coke, been told Red Bull is called "cocaine", been given after-sun cream when trying to buy tanning cream (not for me, I swear), had my name spelled Williamsa and exchanged many shrug-shoulders-and-grin looks... which is cute and funny at the beginning, but gets tiring later on. Ordering something by telephone is a nightmare as the constant presence of fast-food oddities testifies. If we get exactly what we order we run to church to give thanks.

The peak of this was using the realtor expertise of a man called Mr Wong who didn't speak a word of English. Now, bear in mind you can't even write things down here because the scripting isn't A-B-C-D. At Mr Wong's shop, to ask for a flat with 2 bedrooms in a building with a lift within a certain price I had to pretend to sleep while holding up two fingers, then use my hands to make an oblong, act like I was in a lift and then use my fingers to spell out the rent price. He looked at me like I was insane (not altogether untrue) and phoned someone who could speak English and told her in Cantonese what I had been trying to do. "Mr Wong doesn't know what you mean" she spat down in the phone in that typically polite Hong Kong fashion. And I used to be good at charades... I also had to draw a clock to tell him what time I would come back to his office and point to the date on his calendar.

Trying to buy tickets for the Hong Kong Sixes was much the same issue but I, once again, had the added joy of trying to organise over the phone - an exercise in total futility as I couldn't even wave my arms to try and explain myself. There was also a problem on their website which I tried to point out but, as things stand, it's still very much there.

There's only so much frantic arm waving and sign-language I can do in a day. It was exactly the same when I lived in Italy. My brain goes to sleep at night utterly exhausted. Of course it's not Hong Kong people's fault. And they do speak more English than I'd imagine we will find in China or other countries around the place, so the challenges shall continue.

But it's time to pull that Cantonese for Dummies out of the bag, methinks.

The Island (which is called Lantau)

(Click on picture thumbnails to see a larger version)

From what I understand, Lantau is the largest of the islands in Hong Kong, (bar Kowloon which is on the island of Asia - somewhat larger. At least three times as big.) and provides the one thing you cannot get on Hong Kong Island: space.

On Saturday we tootled off to the pier to catch a ferry to Lantau (all of R30 to get there) which is about a half an hour journey. As we were both suffering immense hangovers, it became a 30-minute exercise in not hurling as we bounced from wave to wave caused by the multitude of boats traversing around Hong Kong harbour.

We were glad for the presence of these, even though we didn't have to use them: We landed and found a map to take us to a certain beach we'd read about in the guide book. After doing a small and accidental loop we realised we were on the wrong road and realigned our compasses to get us on the right one (what we really did was look at the signs which pointed us perfectly in the right direction).

And so our 5-kilometre walk began. Up a goddam hill. After a quick whinge session I began following Mike (who has been blessed with gazelle like abilities - gravity doesn't actually have much of an impact on him so hills are just like normal ground) on this road, which slunk through the island forest.



Lantau is beautiful. It is large and pretty devoid of buildings, with trees gracing the interior of the island and beaches denoting the exterior. We walked for about 7 kilometres (turns out someone read the book wrong) with regular stops so I could smoke in hangover peace while Mike bounced around like someone had just replaced his batteries.

Here are our attitudes to walking 7km in the most humid place in the world:
Him:

Me:

Nature was to avenge me though. While I am terrified of creepy crawlies and rats and stuff like that, Mike (possibly more sensibly) is scared of big things that can break you when they stand on you, like cattle. And as we rounded yet another bend in the road, a bull shaped like a battering ram appeared right in front of us. We were both a bit startled so we forgot to take a picture, but it was a short and squat - almost in proportion with a buffalo, only smaller. Mike leapt across the road like someone had stuffed his backpack with Superman's cape which had accidentally turned on. To be fair I wasn't far behind and, dodging the fastest buses known to man (seriously, I am sure Hong Kong buses are driven by Nikki Lauda), we retreated behind a gate on the other side as this pit-bull like bovine walked on by.

What seemed like 20km later (was actually like 1.5km) we finally came upon what we sought: the beach - a stunning barrier separating the forest from the (surprisingly) clean seawater. We finally got to kick off our shoes and walk barefoot across the fine sand which scattered beneath our feet as we strolled down, passing Die Stoep, a South Africa-themed restaurant. Now, what makes a restaurant South African, you may ask. Well, Castle Lager, bobotie and a steak dish with chakalaka were about it. Considering I usually drink Hansa and have never once had a steak with chakalaka, it was surprising that I still felt all proud about being there, but I suppose one does when away from home. I liked and ate bobotie though - so shukria (spelling?) to Muslims in South Africa for creating it, and dankie and xiexie for those South Africans and Hong Kongers for exporting it to these wonderful parts.

One thing about this beach which I have never seen before is cattle residing upon it. I swear, it was like walking through the Transkei - but on a Chinese beach. Yes. Real cows! On a beach! (um, outside a steak restaurant. So we're banking on them selling fresh meat).


Drinking on the beaches in Hong Kong is illegal, but much like in Cape Town, I decided to ignore this ridiculous law created solely for braggarts and sat and (responsibly) slurped on a bottle of red wine while Mike ran up and down the beach.

It then got dark and, rather than risking being hit by a psychotic Hong Kong bus in the shadows, we decided to actually board one. Now, picking the correct bus in Hong Kong is not as simple as it looks, as we have no idea where the bloody things go. And the one we boarded went nowhere near where we wanted to go. In fact it went in the exact opposite direction. This was Mike panic-strickenly finding out where the hell we were going.

Which, luckily, was a route that ended at a tube station (the public transport here is amazing. I am planning a whole post on it) and we were home in about 15 minutes (after an approximate two-hour delay because we wanted to watch a movie).

Some great pics we took in Lantau:

Hong Kong news 21 October

Image from The Washington Post.

There is only item of news that realy concerns Hongkongers today, and that's the big ass typhoon/hurricane/storm on its way here. Yep, the self-same one that just gutted the Philippines and killed 19 people: Hurricane Megi.

According to CNN, it is already raining cats and dogs (insert appropriate food joke here) in Taiwan and 170 000 people h ave been evacuated from Guangdong Province in China. Hainan Island (in China as well) has also prepared for the storm's land fall and it seemed, while it was destroying Filipino land, that it was heading directly towards Hainan. It now looks like it's going further north and much closer to Hong Kong, and is due to arrive on Saturday at 2pm. Inconveniently cocking with my lunch plans.

This is not the first time Hong Kong has faced such troubles. According to the South China Morning Post, 31 years ago Typhoon Hope bedonnered this city and killed 12 people and injured nearly 300. Guangdong has fresher memories: in 2008, Typhoon Haguit smacked it to the tune of 22 deaths and 12 billion yuang (ZAR 12.5 billion/HK$ 14 billion) in damage.

Yesterday the Observatory raised the number 1 standby signal. This indicated that there is shit on the way, from what I can tell. At 6am today, number 3 standby signal went up, which means said shit is closer. If it reaches number 8, people do not go to work - they batten down the hatches and wait the weather out. So this fucker would arrive on a Saturday, wouldn't it?

Workers in Hong Kong have cleared all drains and pipes to ease the risk of flooding. In Hainan, 50 000 fishing vessels have returned to shore and are sitting in the harbour, and the railway has been suspended. A Taiwanese vessel has already disappeared with its crew presumed dead. The state disaster relief commission in China has prepared teams to enter Hainan, Guangdog, Guangxi and Fuijan and waves of around 7m are expected to bash into the coastline.

I have no medical aid at the moment so I am hoping that our building here in Honk Kong stands up fine and well. I also hate getting wet, so I may, conceivably, get injured AND irritable.

Wish us luck. And look out for me on the news.

Simon.

Hygiene supreme

Think of your most anally retentive friend. You know, the ones who wash their hands 20 times a day, who disinfect everything, who don't want their kids touching anything outside the house, and very few things in it due to risk of germs. Well that is the attitude to hygiene in Hong Kong, and I am sure it has got a lot to do with the SARS outbreak that hammered this city not that long ago.

There are not many ways to get attention in Hong Kong. It is an already loud city with people who keep to themselves most of the time, but cough in public and feel the room look at you out of the corners of their eyes. Sneeze, and expect to feel the daggers of one thousand death stares. I haven't yet had the gall to do both lest someone throw something at me, but I am sure I will one day get drunk enough to substantiate the goodness and social discovery intents of the idea. Everyone who is sick walks around wearing face masks (which must really screw with smoking) and there are notices up announcing every public facility which is disinfected. @StephChev, a Hong Kong based tweeter announced that she did not see the reason for a disinfected carpet, and attached this picture:

These signs are everywhere. On escalator handles, lift buttons, ticket machines, carpets - you name it. There are machines offering free hand sanitiser all over the place and signs up in the MTR (metro/tube/whatever you call it) trains and stations calling for good health practices to be observed - meaning wash your hands and cover your face.

Civil servants cleaning the streets and cleaning dustbins understandably all wear gloves and facemasks, but so do many waiters and waitresses, shop assistants, random people walking around and the guy who drives the Victoria Peak Tram - evidently terrified of the germs left behind by whoever drove the train before him.

So when you come and visit here, bring a hanky or a tissue or something to sneeze into, lest you get held under a sanitizer dispenser by a softly baying crowd who believe the germs in your snot may have wafted across the room.

Graham Street Market

(Click image thumbnails to see a bigger version)

Just down from where we’re staying is the Graham Street market: a sloping street with every kind of food you can think of, and many you can’t. Alongside its stands of fruit, (very alive) fish, meat, bread and a whole lot of stuff I don’t recognise – seriously, they have these things which look like apples but they have spikes sticking out of them and I am not sure if it is from a tree or the sea – you can also buy slops, children’s’ clothing, toys and behind the stalls are restaurants and more shops selling food.

A view down Graham Street Market. Photo by Simon Williamson.

It’s a place raging with a bit of controversy as the market, where many local Hongkongers do their grocery shopping, is going to be razed so that residential skyscrapers (who are we kidding? That’s an average Hong Kong building) can be built.

I usually walk to work with my significant other in the mornings and his office is right at the bottom of Graham Street, where the market starts. So I always walk back up it. It is a fascinating set up – a complete balls up from the outside, until you stroll in and join the throngs wrestling their way to where they are trying to barter. The only thing I really buy here is fruit. I far prefer a quick visit to a market than a squish in the teeny tiny aisles they have here in grocery shops, and our closest decent grocery shop is about a 10 min ride up the escalator. According to a few touristy reports I have read, these kinds of markets are the real Hong Kong. The cynic in me finds that hard to believe after our experience in Mong Kok and I have a feeling that places like the Graham Street Market can help rich snooty Hongkongers feel like they are part of their own city – such as Soweto does for urban people in Joburg and Mzoli’s does for Capetonians. I certainly don’t scoff at places like these – the three listed I very much enjoy (ok I finally confess: I actually don’t like Mzolis all that much).

Above: Fish being kept alive, waiting for someone to come and buy them. Below: Fish after this process is complete. Pics by Simon Williamson.

What I cannot deny is that it is closer, cheaper and a far more enjoyable and interesting experience to buy goods in the Graham Street Market than it is in the 7-11 across the street or the Park ‘n Shop up the hill. The first time I saw live fish in the market get their heads lopped off as soon as someone wanted to buy them, or saw a crab being removed from a tank and be systematically tied up, alive, for the customer, I was grossed out. Totally. In fact it’s still something that doesn’t sit so well with the little part of my stomach that tries to prevent nausea. But here in China it is how people buy food. When in Rome... you know?

I do not believe that I am joining in some cultural recess of Hong Kong that no one outside locals manage to permeate. But I do feel like a have a foot slightly further into the East than I would have. I’d be lying if I said that grappling over a price with someone who can only speak Cantonese didn’t thrill me a bit – I’m still convinced I’m being ripped off though. I smile as they yak out words I can’t understand, and we make hand signals to each other amongst a lot of pointing and acting like the animal I wish to buy. Really though, putting my thumbs in my arm pits and clucking like a chicken is not the most absorbing way to buy food as I am one of those people who likes great distance between what is on my plate and what runs around a farmyard.

So when you people do come and visit, take your valloids before we go grocery shopping.

PS. Can anyone identify these things on sale at the Graham Street Market? I'm no foodie so am not sure.

Finding a flat

The average size of a Hong Kong apartment.

As you know, Hong Kong is full of lank tall buildings - many of which are shoddily-built, cheap, crap accommodation - due to the ever-neccesary need to house the 7 million people dwelling here. Think 10-story buildings with no lifts, 200sq ft studio apartments (divide by about 10.7 for sq metres) going for HK$10 000 (about R9000) per month because flats here are hard to come by and so the price is quite ridiculous.

It's not easy. You are not going to live in a big flat, you will not have a garden. Buying a flat solely on space... well that philosophy will disappoint you - and your prioroties need changing. That being said, you are going to be looking for property amongst the glinty lights of one of the most beautiful skylines in the world, so there are, of course, definite benefits in living here.

It does mean that your factors which decide whether a flat is good or not change. As I mentioned, throw space out of the window. What you want in that sense is storage and place to store furniture. We want a 2-bedroom place, but there's no point in two rooms if one of them is too small to put stuff in (which is the case with plenty). We want one bedroom where we'll sleep, and to use the other as an office and guest room, so it will need a desk and sleeper couch to fit snugly - problem is that with an open sleeper couch in Hong-Kong-number-two-bedrooms is that the bedroom door won't close. I swear, these apartments are that small.

Kitchen space also seems a concern for many prospective renters, as every estate agent we've come across tells us about the size of it. Well, from our point of view, if the house has a microwave in it, a place for the cleaner to wash the dishes and somewhere to keep the beer cold, we're quite pleased.

Furniture in this city is as cheap as chips. Second-hand furniture is, obviously, even cheaper. We are going to check out some oke's spread of stuff this evening, where for about R1000 we will get a couch, tables, chairs, wardrobe and some useful extra appliances thrown in like a rice cooker (hahahaha) and a shoe rack (collectively, Mike and I own six pairs of shoes). It does mean that we don't need to find a furnished place, which we expected we'd have to do when we arrived.

Getting out of this tiny studio "serviced" apartment is goal number one. We're both getting a bit antsy living in such a tiny space - I am starting to be able to empathise with the Chilean miners - and we have way too much stuff to fit in here (and four boxes which are being shipped, currently en route to Hong Kong). We are out of the flat regularly - running every night, eating out, testing out the plethora of bars in this district (we're right near Soho), I often meet Mike for lunch during the day, exploring other parts of Hong Kong as well as planning our first Asia trip, which, currently, is looking like Seoul, but we're not really sure yet.

Hopefully when we do decide to go, it's from a base which we can call home. We're pretty close to choosing one now, so cross your bloody fingers. It's where you're staying when you come and visit.

Wan, two and free

Well it's 6am here in Hong Kong - midnight, South Africa time (at the time I began writing this) and I am officially nowhere near dealing with this goddam jetlag. The closest we've come so far was the first night we spent here where we made it up at 1pm. The other two "mornings" have been 2pm. It's tricky as Mike has to be up and at them on Wednesday when he starts his new job, and I am going to have to start keeping Hong Kong office hours to begin getting my life in order: work permits and all that malarkey. And I'd like most of my day to actually be in the light hours.

It's been an action-packed few days. We sedated ourselves into oblivion for the flights over here, remaining awake for meals (like anything is chemically strong enough to separate me from food) and the landings on our Emirates flights from Joburg to Hong Kong via Dubai. Annoyingly, out stopover was so short I didn't have time for a smoke and we were rushed around by some dwarven airport official who insisted we board our Dubai-HK flight immediately, which, again, thanks to sedatives was spent drooling while snoring, rather than the usual panicky, white-knuckled terror which regularly accompanies my every air journey (irony in a travel writer being scared of flying noted).

The first thing one notices about Hong Kong is that it is humid as all bloody hell. It makes Durban seem like a Johannesburg winter. We're currently heading into winter here - we're kind of just in the northern hemisphere - and there is so much moisture in the air combined with a 28-30 degree temperature. I can hardly put the beer in as fast as I sweat it out. And we've exercised, walked and explored so much that by god, there is barely any moisture left in me.

We are currently in the smallest apartment in which I have ever stayed. It's a studio, so it has two rooms. A bathroom, and a kitchen-bedroom-lounge-entrance hall. The front door virtually opens into the bed and is next to the kitchenette. Should you trip over the bed on your way in, never fear, the couch is between it and the wall on the other side. Our luggage takes up more floor space than there is available, but it's actually quite awesome and is being filed under "experience".

Hong Kong's main island has a similar make-up to Cape Town in that it has a mountain and the city is squeezed in between the peak and the sea. The major difference obviously being the fact that seven of the world's tallest buildings (amongst hundreds of others) have to fit in here for the incredible mass of people. The mountain is called Victoria Peak and highlights one of the quirky features of Hong Kong - the leftover British colonial names which sometimes permeate places. The area we are currently staying in is called Sheung Wan, but our road is called Hollywood Road. The roads running parallel to ours are Robinson, Caine and Queen's Road Central, yet the cross roads are Tai Ping Shah, Shing Wong and... erm, Chancery Lane.

Interestingly, the steep slope on which the CBD and suburbia on the main island are built is counteracted with a long-ass escalator which stretches virtually from the harbour to about two-thirds of the way up to as high as residential properties (read: 60-storey super luxurious buildings) are built. Loads of people call it the Mile Long Escalator but I doubt it stretches quite that far. Victoria Peak is about 550m above sea level and we climb it as exercise (twice in three days). Well, Mike runs up it (and halfway back down, then back up to the top) while I walk up it, sweating like a donkey praying that the muscles in my leg manage to stay fastened to the bone and each other. It is steep as all shit and gives me a decent work out though - added to a never-ending diet of noodles I should be nice and thin by Christmas. The view from the top is quite incredible but I refuse to put a camera in the pocket of my running shorts, lest it become sweat-logged (really, it is THAT humid. I was wringing the sweat out my shirt two days ago after jogging (ok it was a fast walk (ok it was a moderate stroll))).

So the beginnings of our lives are starting to fall into place. We know where the grocery shop is, shopping districts are, where the cheap bars are not (we're yet to find a good affordable one), where to exercise and all that jazz. We've also realised we want to live in Sheung Wan which is on the main HK island and kind of has a foot in old China and a foot in the modern-day first world. It's clean and safe and hosts a whole lot of trendy crap, but has a whole range of markets, really old people and dodgy (cheap) restaurants as well.

Oh, and the subject line? When a shop steward tells us something is free, we think it costs three dollars. That's not a joke. It's happened twice now.