Day 23

25 September, 2003

I sleep fitfully, wanting to wake up for the six o'clock sailing. I do, and am on deck for the last few containers to be loaded. We sail out for the three hour trip to Hong Kong. I set up camp (chair, binocs and radio) in the lee under the flying bridge, windless, in the shade and on the side of the land as we head south along the mountainous coast. At one point I get this overwhelming smell of garlic, like we are passing the Gilroy, California (garlic capital of the world doncha know) of China, either that or I am having smell hallucinations. Here and there are gaps in the mountains behind which hi-rise building clusters peek out and beckon. The volume of shipping grows exponentially in both volume and variety as we approach the entrance channel to the harbor.

We join a conga line of ships up the southwest side of Hong Kong island, picking up pilots at Aberdeen (the original sight of the settlement) and into the outer harbor. Arriving in a city by ship, especially a shipping city such as this, is the only way. You have the time and perspective to get the lay of the land.

The outer harbor is awash with boats. Many of the small-mid to small containerships anchor out here where they are serviced by lighters designed to hold a large primitive crane and up to twenty-five containers. These lighters come in both powered and towed variety, but either way, they are blessed with the Chinese ship design that says “why live far from work”? They have small apartment buildings on top of the ship, usually in the rear as with junks, usually with some hanging wash and the smell of cooking floating by. This harbor makes Singapore look sleepy, with hydrofoils and ferries of all sorts whizzing about. A madhouse of commercial maritime. The city of Hong Kong is a magical looking line of high rise buildings strung along the thin space between the sea and almost vertical mountains. The real space is on the mainland, Kowloon, side and after taking a right hand turn into the harbor proper and not going under the largest suspension bridge in the world (which goes to the new airport), we dock in the largest container terminal I have seen to date. It is 1300 when a bunch of us pour out of the ship. Shore leave expires at 2200 (we sail at midnight).

First stop, the Mariner’s club, which our berth is close by. A very cool bar and restaurant (decorated ala maritime, big neon sign on top) with phones, internet, books etc. I check my various e-mail and phone machine (it is the wrong time to call California or Europe), all is clear. I have a couple of cokes with the guys. This is the normal sign on- sign off point for the Kiribase. Two whose contracts have finished (lead tenor and guitarist gulp!) have decided to stay on for an extra month. These men sign on for a year, three hundred and sixty five days to come home to around seven thousand dollars US (the payments are made directly into their accounts at home).

In leaving for the metro (MTR) in a strange city, in a semi-deserted industrial area, an old friend, fear, arises in my stomach area. All my senses go on alert. This has a slight heightening because of my standing out racially and culturally. Of coarse in a Hong Kong or Singapore with their British past, this is really unnecessary (although English as a language is slowly disappearing). This is all a reflex from my youth, when roving cars of crewcut, white American trash would beat people like me for sport, all the time yelling “fagot, hippie, why don’t you get your fuckin’ hair cut you look like my fuckin’ sister fer christ fuckin’ sake!. You fuckin’ peaceniks make me sick, love it or leave it you fuckin’ fagot”! These experiences coupled with my family’s natural paranoiac bent has made me someone who is careful and hyper-alert. One of the joys of aging is that as I have grown out of sexual competition, and the world and myself seem to have met at some happy middle ground as to appearance, I am not seen as threatening by these roving bands of scared testosterone fueled males. The downside is that women don’t notice me either. But it does allow me the pleasure of watching my fellow humankind go about its business in a way that I can love them en mass. But I am a little embarrassed to report that I still pay attention to my pockets. Left front wallet, right front passport. My hands stay near those areas, my antennae are still a bit up. But it is not a racial thing. I am the same in New York or London!

Off to the metro, known here as the MTR, a ten minute walk alongside a giant expressway to the Lai King stop. I buy a one day tourist pass for fifty HK (about six dollars). I ask the information guy where I might go to find a sightseeing bus. Apparently they do not have them, but he tells me a stop I should go to and ask there. I do. The MTR is maybe twice as wide as the metro or tube of London or Paris. Very clean and labeled. I have to admit to that certain little panic I feel for a minute when I realize I am the only white person in this vast sea of humanity. It is good for me to experience.

The people of Hong Kong are really cool. They have a certain sense of style that is undeniably hip. A mix of the same as in the west with a twist of it’s own. The women seem particularly delicate and lovely, but then I do tower a bit. The men are varied, serious and intelligent looking. Much, polite and respectful life is going on here.

The stop I had been directed to, is famous for it’s street markets. Running off the spine of Kowloon’s Nathan Road are all sorts of narrow streets jammed with commerce. The sky is black from jostling huge signs, some neon, most old, competing with each other from both sides of the street. If you look further up the many storied buildings (maybe ten to fifteen stories), you see that the commerce doesn’t exist only on street level, but up and down these raggedy, laundry drying, museums of air conditioners are signs from large and ornate to small pieces of scrawled on cardboard in dirty windows. This is one of the pictures one always sees in movies of Hong Kong. The streets are filled with people. An incredible intensity of purpose, but it is not obnoxious. Maybe because there still seems to be few tourists in this part, this is a local way of life. I found that it was several miles down Nathan Road, at the southern end where all the smart hotels, art museum and Star ferry terminal are on the bay facing Hong Kong. There were the hawkers pushing their leaflets in my face and trying to take me somewhere to buy knockoff watches.

The intensity of the street commerce kind of felt like Mexico, but it was much cleaner. Although Singapore is famously clean, I hadn’t expected so much of Hong Kong. I imagined people spitting etc. But the streets were clean, the transportation well organized, the restaurants inviting. The dirtiest part was the air, which I realized later when I coughed up the results. But I remember London’s air being just as dirty fifteen years ago. L.A. has air whose poisons are less visible.

I had wandered several miles, had bought a lovely Chinese stringed instrument in a music shop, found a Herald-Trib and Wall Street Journal, ate some food by pointing in a restaurant. It was getting towards 1700. Mr. Ong from the ship had said he knew a Chinese restaurant and some shops, near the ship, he was going to after he got off duty at 1700. And if I wanted to meet him at the Mariners Club at 1730 I could go with him. I figured as he was of Chinese ancestry (half - Filipino and his Chinese father died when he was very young) he might have a certain insight, so I crammed into the rush hour MTR (no more crowded yet more polite then Paris and London) and went back to the Mariners Club.

A bunch from the ship were drinking beer there. It was fun to meet with them in a different surrounding. Basically, the officers don’t socialize, either together or with the crew on the ship, even on the “barbecue nights” there is a certain natural grouping by race/nationality and rank.

Around 1900, Mr. Ong and I headed back to the MTR. But we walked through the station and up the high steep hill behind it which was covered in the typically towering twenty-five or more story building blocks that modern suburban Hong Kong lives in. These, with the additional advantage of being on a hill, dominate the sky over the container port. The lower-middle class people were pouring out of the MTR and up into the buildings which have various shops on their street levels. We ate in a pan-asian (it was mostly a japanese style, but also Chinese and thai) sort of fast food sit down restaurant. It turns out Mr. Ong is as strange to all this as I am, but I find the food good and easy. I had a sizzling plate special, a fajita sort of arrangement of chicken and bean curd with a bowl of rice, a plate of the ubiquitous cabbage, a bowl of mushroom-miso soup and a thai iced tea for around six US. This was a part of town where I did stand out a bit. It was interesting being looked at curiously, but not uncomfortable.

After dinner we went in the supermarket across the way, where I bought a bunch of strange fruits I have never seen before as well as some plums that, I discovered later on examination, were from California!. I wander the isles noticing that otherwise the experience is the same as in the west. We then went to the Seven-Eleven (also everywhere in the far east) to buy some video CD’s for two U.S. dollars a piece including one of the same Assassination File. We are back on the ship by 2100. There are no immigration checks, neither in or out, in Hong Kong.

I watch Saturday Night Fever and get wowed again. It is somehow, a cheap and cheesy film at some level pandering to a youth audience, and yet so good. I remember the wild presence of Norman Wexler, the writer of the screenplay, in the L.A. bars of the seventies. By the time it is done we are ready to sail. And admist a still maddening level of maritime traffic at 00:30 we start that silent acceleration sideways from the dock. Hong Kong is spectacular in the dark, and it is not until we are back in the teeth of a strong northerly wind bearing threatening clouds, having dropped the pilot in Aberdeen and passed back into the Pacific, or South China Sea that I get to bed, maybe 0200

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