notes from fragrant harbour (iii)

One of my Vancouver friends is in town and we met up last Thursday. We — a high school friend and I — took him to the Peak, an obligatory tourist destination when in Hong Kong, and took obligatory photos.

Victoria Peak is the tallest mountain on Hong Kong Island of just over 550 metres — hardly anything by Canadian standards, but quite tall enough for this little city. If you take the bus — bus 15 from Admiralty costs HK$9.8 as opposed to the Peak Tram which costs a scandalous HK$40 — and get off at the terminus, a short walk towards the shopping centres will also bring you to the Circle Walk, a fairly flat, pleasant walk of less than 3 kilometres which makes it ideal for families with young children.

The main attraction for tourists are the panoramic views you can get of the harbour and Kowloon side. There’s no point in going when it’s foggy out, as you won’t see a thing, but sometimes you can go on a fine day and still witness the smog that hangs over the city.

Or, if you’re lucky, you’ll see Hong Kong on one of its finer days:

When you wind back to the shopping centres, you may want to go to the Peak Galleria to get more views from their observatory deck. The Galleria’s observatory deck is free, whereas the shopping centre across from it charges money for just a storey more height. (As thrifty students, none of us were willing to even look at how much it charged, so I can’t tell you the price if you’re considering it.)

The rest of the day was spent revisiting old haunts my friend had gone to as a child when he lived here; we ended it off by taking him to the Star Ferry Pier and riding the ferry across the harbour from Central to Tsim Sha Tsui, which of course meant another obligatory photo:

In my last Things I Love Thursday, I mentioned wanting to see the nightly laser show. Well, that’s what we did, and maybe it was the smog that started hanging low again, or because we couldn’t hear any music where we were standing, but after about ten minutes of gazing at laser beams flashing across the sky, we all agreed we’d much rather do something else.

So no obligatory photo of lasers. Trust me, you’re not missing much if you miss this. Unless, of course, you have a passion for laser beams, in which case, go for it.

I’m off to Beijing tomorrow for a few days and since I don’t know how much internet there will be — there will be three of us fighting over one connection — this blog may be quiet for a while. I think I shall miss YouTube. Unlike internet-savvy China residents, I haven’t the foggiest idea how to get around the Great Firewall of China. Oh well, I’m sure the break will be good for me!