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Today was our last day in China. We decided to spend most if our day touring the city of Hong Kong itself. We spent a large majority of our time here in the city of Kowloon, just across the water from HK (which is actually an Island).

We were both awake by 630am local time, I’m guessing due to jet lag. We left the Guest House for the last time around 745ish, bags packed and nothing on the agenda.

We started our day by heading to Starbucks. We had almost 2 hours to kill before anything opened up, and by anything, I mean anything. The city is pretty much dead until 10-11am, with the exception if coffee shops and a few places to get food.

At 845am we started our ventured toward the Hong Kong Museum of History. Along the way we took a stroll through the Kowloon Park. In the middle of a large metropolis city, they have a walled park (one of many) which is open from 5am to midnight. This one contains a mosque, water fountain, a large public outdoor swimming pool, and bird avairy (not sure how to spell this) along with a few other things.

While my father used the free government provided wifi to call home using skype (I signed up for their pay service, $3/month to call any phone [cell or landline] in north america, more the worth it) on my iPhone, I was taking pictures of some fairly exotic looking birds. While I’m video taping a ‘rhinoceros’ named bird (had a huge single horn in the top of it’s beek) I thought I heard a Chinese women down the path calling to me.

‘Hello, hello, hello’ the voice repeated. ‘goodbye’ the same voice says even before I can end my video clip and see what is going on. Turns out it’s a large green parrot/macau with an amazing vocal ability. I attempted to communicate with the bird but unfortunately my attempts went unanswered. As my father walks over to figure out why I’m talking to myself, I explain this amazing animals ability. ‘hello’ my father says, no reply. ‘wanna get stuffed’ he calls next, ‘goodbye’ replies the bird. As we break out in laughter, the bird continues speaking to us. ‘oh no, ok, hello, goodbye’ it says in a matter of seconds. Simply amazing!

We leave the park and make our way over to the museum. Wednesday is free admission, so we are joined by 300 elementary aged kids… Oh goodie!

As we wander the halls and exhibits of the museum I learned more in 2 hours about the history China then I have in my previous 28years. From pottery styles of the Ming dynasty, to the evolution of the banking system from silver/bullion to paper notes. Some of the most interesting stuff was about the Japanese intrusion and hostile take over of Hong Kong during the early 40s, by interesting I mean it’s something I figured I would know about by now.

Heading over to Hong Kong, we decide to tour the central district. Markets and shops for the locals, no more tourist areas for us. As we wander up and down the cobblestone paved hills, we find some very unique vendors.

We walked through a costume section where you can buy different masks and outfits from Richard Nixxon to Chinese parade dragons.

Following that we enter the local food markets. From fruit and vegetables, noodles of every variety, to nuts out the yang, they have a shop/stand for everything. Naturally they have meat markets, and these things are not for the squimish.

First I notice the bbq’d ducks and chickens hanging in the windows, bodies fully intact, golden brown on the outside. As I take a closer look, I see numerous other animals all prepared in a different manner. I see pigs hung from hooks in the back, legs and feet displayed on the front shelves as if to trigger an impulse buy. As I pull out my camera I notice beside the feet/legs they have the livers, yummy! They seem to be a favorite of the flies, which I can see swarming the freshly hung organs. ‘What else do the flies like’ I think to myself, as I look a little farther down the chain, I see a pair of hearts. Now as I’m sure many of you know a pigs heart looks a lot like a humans, well I’m going to tell you it looks exactly like one. I’ve never seen a live human heart in person, but I’ve watched enough National Geographic channel and Greys Anatomy that I think I can tell you how close it really is. The valves, ventricles, and everything is exactly like the diagram you’ve all seen at one time or another.

Ok ok, enough about pigs and chickens, let’s go check out some seafood.

As we walk a short distance down the street (15feet), there it is. What looks like a flower at first, as my eyes begin to focus I realize it isn’t. What I am looking at is the fanned out gills of a very large salmon. These colourful red gills stretch about 10inches across, I got a sweet picture of it. Nothing else on this guys table seems picture worthy, we move on.

The next shop is a fruit shop and there is nothing entertaining to write about there, however the one following is the inspiration for the title of this post. It took me a while to get here, but we pack a lot of things into our days.

A filet fish lay on the front display counter of this shop. Not a north american style filet, but a HK market style filet. This two and a half foot fish was pulled from the water and split down the middle. If it was his lucky day he would have been knocked out first, but chances are no. As I stair at this fish, I notice his heart is still beating inside his headless split in half carcus. I can’t believe it. It’s like a car accident, you don’t want to see it, but you can’t seem to look away. The only thing that was able to draw my attention away from beating heart is the head which is 6inches away. I see it convulse out of the corner of my eye, I begin to watch it intently, it happens again. The bodyless head is still gasping for air, eyes and gills still moving. It was time to leave this part of town, and so we did.

As we travel farther away from the mainstream, I see the 2nd most disturbing boutique of the trip. In a 20×20 shop on the west side of the central area of HK, I see 50+ shark fins on the wall of a barely decorated storefront. As I take a closer look, rice bags full of them fill the floor of the store. It makes my heart sink. If you’ve ever watched a documentary on long-lining and shark-fining, you will understand.

I walk up the two steps to take a closer look, and picture, the attendant ushers me away. We are in a part of town where I wouldn’t press my luck, or expect anyone besides my father to step in if something were to go down, we walk away.

I’ll apologize now for the R rating of this article. I’d write a disclaimer at the top of it, but what fun would that be :)

You’re reading this to follow me in my adventure… Well there you are.

Turns out it’s rather difficult to a ‘pub’ in Hong Kong. You can get a beer at pretty much any restaurant, but when you’re wearing shorts, sandles, and a tshirt with sweat stains due to the humidity, you’re pretty much just looking for a place to sit down for a cold one.

Although I have been off the booze since March 6th, I have no problem joining my father to an Irish pub called The Shamrock. This pub is located on a dead end street and this area is one of the few places you can find an actual pub in town.

As we sit there, him with his Guiness and me with my Ginger Ale, and we decide to order High Tea.

For those of you who don’t know, High Tea is an afternoon event mainly done in British colonies. You have tea (obviously), and normally a 3 layer plate is brought out with finger sandwhiches, cookies, biscuits, cakes and more. Our High Tea is a little different.

For starters, the guy running the pub looks to be from India. An Indian guy running an Irish pub in Hong Kong… Anyone else this a little odd?

With our High Tea we get a mini-cheeseburger, fries, 6 small vegitarian eggrolls, 3 finger sandwhiches (processed ham with processed cheese, a BLT, canned salmon), caesar salad w/ corzoni, a piece of carrot cake and a piece of chocolate&walnut cake. What a wonderfuly diverse meal for a mid day snack. It ain’t no Penninsula (posh hotel down the street with quite an upper-class High Tea), but it did the trick.

Aside from the odd High Tea food selections, I’d recommend this bar to anyone. Newly renovated, clean, friendly staff.

More to come…

My grandfather once told me ‘you can always tell if a Chinese restaurant is good by the number of Chinese people eating in it’. Using that logic, all Chinese restaurants in Hong Kong are good??? I think not.

After visiting a Buddhist monastery with over 10,000 different statues of Buddha that is 460 steps above street level, we find ourselves in what looks to be a half decent restaurant.

As we sit, eating our dim sum, I believe I have found the trick to eating rice with chopsticks. Use your soup spoon! As I look around, I notice no one else is struggling to pick up their rice grain by grain with a pair of MSG covered chopsticks. I notice we are the only table actually having a conversation, the rest of the people are busy shoving their faces full using mainly their spoons. So the next time you see me dive right into a bowl and food and not come up for air until it is done, I am not being rude, I am sharing my authentice Chinese dinning etiquette with you.

Wow… What an adventure.

So this is round 2 of this post. I just spent an hour writting one of the best articles I have ever written, to have an error occur during the saving process which ended up in it being lost. Let’s try this again.

We leave the hongkong airport around 10am and head to downtown Hong Kong on the express train. We wander around downtown for a bit and soon find ourselves at a starbucks discussing the differences in drinks between countries. My caramel machiatto is pretty much the same, his extra hot latte could use a little work.

After visiting a historic tea museum in ‘Hong Kong Park’, seeing tea pots and cups from pretty much the beginning of time (early 17th century) and learning how the process of tea has been refined over the centuries, we hop on the subway and head over to Kowloon and try to find our ‘guest house’.

We find out our hotel is only about a block away from the subway station we come out of. That block is quite the trip in itself. Does it look like I want a custom tailored suit? Do you think I need a Rolex? We must have ‘tourist’ written all over us, even though we are not the only Caucasians in the street. It seems as though every hustler in the city is located on the same block as our guest house, I guess things could be worse.

As we find the building, the entrance is pretty much a hole in the wall. Amoung the electronic and Asian cooking shops it looks like an exit at a casino, not ment to be found unless you know what you’re looking for.

We enter into the depths of the building and come to the elevator. We don’t see the name of the guest house on the list. We ask the security guard, in his crisply pressed white collared shirt, walky-talky in hand, ‘where can we find The Maple Leaf Guest House?’, he replies with a grunt and motions to a desk down the hall with a fairly unfriendly looking individual at it. If we got this much help from someone who looks like they were here to give out assistance, you can understand why I was a little apprehensive to ask the next gentleman for help. The man at the desk pointed us in the right direction. One isle over, down the hall on the right. Turns out multiple buildings all share the same entrance. We find a sign which says ‘Maple Leaf Guest Houses – 12th floor’, this must be it.

As we waited in a cramped hallway with 7 others for one of the 2 elevator doors to open, I began to realize this was no Ritz. The doors opened and a flood of people came pouring out. As quickly as they exited, we entered. Squished to the back, I began looking for the 12th floor button. There wasn’t one. I realized there was only odd numbers, ‘this isn’t our elevator’ I yelled to my father as I made a push for the door. As the 2 of us spilled out into the hallway, I started looking for a sign to tell us which elevator we should be on. I looked at the security guard and said ’12’, he gestured to the opposite of which we had just boarded.

As we ride the correct elevator up to our floor, one of our fellow passengers needs to get off on the 10th. As the doors begin to open I expect to see something like a shitty Holiday Inn, maybe a shady motel from Chilliwack. What was on the 10th straight out of a Saw movie. Wall to wall, and floor to ceiling tiles giving it an industrial appearence. Flickering florescent bulbs, stacks of random boxes in the hallway. A rats nets of cables running across the roof that looks somewhat similar to the back of my stereo cabinet, times 100. ‘dear god, I hope our floor is better then this’ I think to myself.

Turns out floor 12 is far better than floor 10. As we enter the guest house we find a typical elderly Chinese clerk attendant at a desk. 4 feet tall, 100lbs, well past the age of retirement with a mole and a long grey hair growing from it. ‘gagne, party of 2’ says my father. The man holds out his clipboard with a hand written list of names expecting us to point out ours, but it wasn’t there. ‘gagne, party of 2’ my father repeats. The page flips and the expression on the clerks face was that of ‘maybe here’. Still no. I let out a chuckle. We toss the reservation confirmation from asiarooms.com on the desk. The clerk picks up the phone and speaks to someone in a dialect neither of us have a chance at understanding. He hangs up and tells us ‘sit, manager come soon’. My father does not look amused.

The manager walks in, a lady by the name of Ms Lee (I suspect her real name is something other than Lee), ‘we have a suite for you in another building’ she says and motions for us to follow her. As we wait for the same decrepid elevator to take us back to the lobby, my father jokes ‘moving us to the penthouse?’. She replies ‘ya’, both of us knowing she has no idea what he just said we break out in laughter. I look at him and say ‘we aren’t on a trip, we are on an adventure’, he has no reply.

As we enter floor 8 of a building a half block away from the first, things seems a little better then before. This building has a proper entrance, the elevators are clearly marked, the overall appearence is not so sketchy.

As she opens the door to the suites, it looks quite similar to what you would see in a cruise ship. Wood panel covered walls, hallways about 8inches narrower then they need to be, the door of each seperate suite looks exactly the same (some even have the same number, with an additional one added in pen).

Suite #87 is the one we get. That’s an official 8, with a penned on 7. Whatever. As she opens the door my father says ‘atleast there is beds’. The suite itself is half the size of my bathroom back at home, but who cares. The beds are on either side of the room with a 18inch walk down the middle with a doorless cabinet at the end seperating them. The water closet is exactly that, a water closet. Ever been in a bathroom on a boat between 18 and 28 feet? Pretty much the same. Toilet, sink, shower head. You can do it all at the same time, if you’re a good multiple-tasker and hygene isn’t a big concern of yours.

We have a clean place to sleep, shower, and brush our teeth in the morning. It will suit our needs.

If you need me I’m at the New Kowloon Guest Houses, Suite 87 – #62 Nathan Road, Kowloon, Hong Kong, China. If you’re coming to visit I’d suggest calling first as it’s a little tricky to find, although I don’t have a phone so on second thought, just stay home.

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Arrived at the hong kong airport in one piece. Put our trekking lugage in storage, we’re now ‘backpacking’ it for the next 3 days.

Longest line at the airport was immigration, took about 30minutes to get through. I have no idea if the clerk actually spoke English. He took our passports, gave us our stamps(my first passport stamp EVER!!), and tossed them back across the desk. Nothing like JFK in New York a year after 9-11.

We’re on the airport express train heading to hongkong. The airport is essentially the same distance outside of HK as YVR is to Vancouver.

Ah the journey begins. It amuses me to report that I haven’t even left the airplane and I am writting my first little snippet for you all to read. As I write this, it is 735am (pst). While some of you may already be awake, I still haven’t gone to sleep. Now I’m sure some of you are thinking ‘sheesh, you party animal’, farthest thing from the truth.

I’ve never been on an international flight before, and I sure don’t plan to be on many after this one. Although the creature comforts Cathay Pacific has provided us can can only be described as… well, comforting, one of my fellow passengers is essentially throwing a stick into the spokes of my travel bicycle.

At not even one year of age, this little guy(or girl) is sure making one hell of a racket 2 rows up and across the isle. Dinner was served shortly after 4am, our stuff was cleaned up at around 445am. At 515am the band struck up. As if someone had stolen this childs bottle, he/she began to scream as though the world were coming to an end.

Now, me being the prepared guy (and light sleeper) that I am, I’ve obviously packed some ear plugs for my trip. Unfortunately, they are packed for my trip and not my plane ride. So for those of you that are reading this, be warned… Bring some ear plugs for the plane ride!!!

Sitting here in the airport, lugage checked, security cleared, waiting to board. My excitement has dwindled, and I haven’t even left. I am now a visible minority, and I’m still in Canada. I can’t listen to anyones conversations, I can’t even read the newspaper over their shoulder.

I am happy and sad at the same time. I’ve never spent more then a week away from home, ever.

I am sad for my girl, she sleeps solo tonight for the first time in over a year. It is difficult for her, and it is difficult for me. She knows I love her, but that is little comfort while she’s home alone.

I am happy for myself. For working so hard to make this possible. It costs a small fortune to fly half way around the world, and hike half way up the worlds tallest mountain.

20minutes until we board, it can’t come quick enough. Let the journey begin.

Holy, time is going fast. The sun is out, my bags are packed.

Passport, check!
Camera, check!
Foreign currency, check!

I doubt I’ll get much sleep tonight, but I could care less.

Such a beautiful day in Vancouver. 8 degrees and sunny, not a cloud in the sky. I almost don’t want to leave, except it’s 27 degrees in Kathmandu!!!

4 and a half till I leave. The days are long, time is standing still. There is not enough hours in a day to get everything done, life is full if stress. I can’t wait to hop on that plane and leave it all behind. I will miss my family and my friends, but I will miss my girl the most.

My excitement grows with each day, hour, and minute. My bags are packed, my camera is charged. There is nothing left to do but wait. It’s killing me.