Fast Pace

‘I Feel Good’ read the sign in front of me. I was sitting in Victoria Park, a haven of tranquillity away from the busy streets adjacent to a children’s playground. I'd come to the end of the time of my original booking in the Budget Hostel and Jackie had a full house, so I had made my way to Causeway Bay and the Wang Fat Hostel on Honk Kong Island. The journey was a struggle with my backpack – I had committed the common backpacker mistake of having brought far too much stuff. In retrospect, it did seem silly to have two towels and three varieties of footwear and more T-shirts then underwear. It was far too much weight to be carrying especially with the humidity. A quiet day was needed, resting in the park and considering what could be dumped.
The Wang Fat Hostel was run by a guy called Sam with the assistance of some helper girls. On first instance, he appeared to be somewhat of an unconventional fellow.
“How much you pay?” he asked me as I was booking in for my initial few nights. It was nice of him to give me the option but I was slightly taken aback by being given the choice. I quoted the price of $150HK per night that appeared in my travel guide and he seemed quite pleased with that. He beckoned one of his poor little helper girls who struggled with my backpack down the stairs to the room. She seemed eager enough to carry it despite my protests that I should do it. I’d asked to be put into a dormitory to save a few dollars, but with few hostels around and demand growing by the day it was a single room with a shared bathroom or else a trip to Chungking Mansions. The helper girl who by now I realised knew almost no English showed me around the threadbare converted apartment, largely by pointing at the important features. It didn’t take long.
Later on I bumped into my bathroom mate, who was of oriental origin, and I attempted to strike up a conversation with her. "Are you on your own?" I asked after we exchanged hellos. She thought for a moment and then held up two fingers in a peace gesture. She must mean that she was in a room with a companion in the room next door to mine. "Do you speak much English" I tried. She looked at me blankly. I tried again - a little more loudly, but got no response. Then a thought occurred to me. "Pasha?" I said as timidly as I could muster with a stupid grin. A look of alarm came over her face. After a moment of us staring at each other, she said "No, no!" and waved her hands in dismissal. I took my leave before she could call the police to have my hands chopped off. On the next day I was moved into a three bed dormitory room. The helper girl took me up another two stories to the apartment made up of three such dormitories with a shared bathroom. There was kitchen area that was devoid of any thing useful for food preparation or storage and a fold out camp bed I was later to learn was the sleeping quarters of one of Sam’s other helper girls.
My dormitory mates turned out to be Travis, a tall slender young man from Brisbane who couldn't work door locks, me finding him struggling and cursing at the thing as I arrived, and an American named Ricky who was to be a bigger sleeper then even I was. Of average height and dark complexion, his thick jet-black hair curled behind his ears at a stage of growth that suggested a significant time spent on the road.
We made our introductions and arranged to meet later for drinks. I hoped I would bump into the two charming Scottish girls that I’d got talking to on the previous night after they took an interest in the dragon pendant I was wearing on my wrist and invite them to come along. They were at the age where they would talk endlessly about getting drunk, but I found them to be good fun. Life did indeed feel good.
After the relaxing day in the park I decided it was time I began to experience some of the local cuisine. The noodle soup I bought at the small café in the park didn’t really seem to count as it tasted like any cheap Chinese food found in the UK dumped into a bowl of water. I walked around the Causeway Bay area in the evening, looking for something suitable. Along one street I passed windows with puppies in small glass tanks on display. I really hoped it was a pet shop sitting in amongst the restaurants. There were stalls with people selling treats such as silkworm and snake skin. I wasn’t feeling that adventurous.
I eventually came across a restaurant that looked respectable enough to get a good meal from and yet had a menu with prices that didn’t cause a sharp intake of breath through gritted teeth. I ventured in and played it safe, ordering pork with egg fried rice. I was pleased with the tea that was made with coconut milk, which was delicious. But then the food arrived.
Within one bowl was the pork, chunky strips of the meat marinated in a dark reddish sauce. I had no problem with that. In another bowl sat a portion of rice, of generous proportions. I didn’t have a problem with that. But sitting on top of the rice was the egg, the feature that made the boiled rice into the egg fried rice that I’d ordered. I did have a problem with that.
The egg was a green colour with faint white colouring showing through like the effect that marble has. I cut into it revealing the centre, the yolk, long since hardened into a sickly powdery dark orange colour that looked like it could have been dug out of someone’s ear. The smell wasn’t as pungent as I thought it would it be, but it was still pretty nauseous inducing. I remembered reading my guidebook, a passage in the food section coming to mind. It mentioned that one of the delicacies was the 1000-year-old egg, a normal everyday egg that’s been buried in the ground, pickled for in fact just 100 years. I guess after that amount of time you’d give up waiting and be more then ready for supper. The Hong Kong version of Ready Steady Cook must be rubbish with those sorts of preparation times. One can only guess at how and why this delicacy was discovered.
I didn’t want to appear rude or ignorant. The pork looked good and went down nicely with the perfectly fluffy rice. But I do like some flavour with my rice. And how many times would I get the chance to try something as unusual? I cut off a corner of the yolk of the egg, making sure to add a good helping of the rice and shovelled it into my mouth. It tasted of, well, egg fried rice, just without the grease and a much stronger sense of egg. How disappointing it must have been for the chefs to wait 100 years when 3 minutes and a second egg could have had the same effect. It wasn’t too bad at all, though I only picked at the remains, the egg’s appearance making me reluctant to eat more of it the more I looked at it.

* * *

Roughly half an hours train ride from Kowloon is Lo Wu and the border with main land China. Over the border is Shenzhan, a Special Economic Zone which - as far as I could tell when I visited a few days later - was basically there to fleece money out of people coming from Hong Kong by fair means or foul. I eventually got a visa for China by going direct to the visa office and at first it seemed a shame I only had the bottle for a day trip, as being British, the cost of a visa was much higher then for other nationalities for some reason. Bizarrely, only Brazilians pay more as far as I could see. Maybe they fart more or something. After my experience at the tourist information office and a subsequent failure to uncover any other means, I was left with little option but to turn up at the border and see what was there. Within a few moments of crossing, the few white faces that I had shared the train with had disappeared. After walking barely a couple of hundred metres, I was approached by a scruffy looking woman who was offering god knows what, the bombardment of syllables that she was delivering being utterly meaningless to me. She produced a slip of paper and wrote down $200. I managed to haggle her down to $150 and then to $100 though for what I had no idea. It still didn’t sound like a good enough deal though, so I continued walking. I supposed that appearing so obviously as a tourist, being hassled was to be expected, but just a few moments later a man came up to me and offered to shine my shoes for $1 in very passable English. I was wearing suede boots. After I said no, his mate ran up and threw something that worryingly resembled bird shit over my left boot while the first bloke crouched down and grabbed hold of my laces, saying “I clean that for you, one dollar!” I had to physically push him to the ground to get rid of him. They clearly hadn’t got around to learning the word ‘no’. I hastened away from the streets that were in proximity of the border, the thinking being that this would be the hotbed of these hard sellers. I followed the crowds and arrived at what was the retail area and began to feel more at ease as I browsed around the exclusive looking retail outlets selling incredibly cheap goods.
I found a public square with people dressed casually enjoying the sunshine alongside workers dressed in suites having their lunch. It looked like a good spot for people watching, so I found a bench and dug out the ham and cheese sandwich that I had bought in Hong Kong on the way. Fears of the spread of disease obviously wasn’t an issue, the locals happily spitting away all over the pavement like it was the national sport. It was enough to put me off my last triangle of sandwich. Many of the people just did their own thing, but I was also intensely aware of the many pairs of eyes staring at me. There was also the occasional bit of finger pointing and the sharing of whispered jokes as I felt every bit the outsider. It was intimidating though I didn’t fear for my safety at that point. I continued wandering around, trying to decide if I could actually fit anything more into my backpack let alone carry it, when I acquired my very own stalker. I'd inadvertently walked into a super market. Walking around the basement floor, there didn't seem to be an obvious way back out. I walked around the floor three times but still couldn't find an escalator back up to street level. On the floor were green arrows with Chinese writing, one of which I followed to a door. It looked like a staff door but with all the green arrows pointing to it and my growing sense of desperation I gave it a little shove believing it would be the exit that would lead me to freedom.
The alarm that went off didn't attract as much attention as I thought it would, only a few faces glanced up to look at the dick head Brit. I quickly closed the door, the alarm stopping straight away. I started to move sheepishly away. However, I'd done enough to gain the attention of what appeared to be a respectable man in his white shirt, black trousers and shiny shoes. He was a good few inches shorter then me and looked like he was in his early twenties. I assumed he worked at the supermarket as he weaved his way around the fruit stands toward me. He began gobbing off in his native tongue and it sounded friendly enough. He seemed to want me to follow him - he must have seen my predicament and was going to lead me out of the store. I followed him.
We moved through the crowds, around parts of the store that I hadn't even noticed were there before. I attempted some small talk about how hard it was to find your way out of the place while he just grinned away at me. Suddenly the upward escalator presented itself. He rode with me to the exit of the store and the street. I exited but he continued to follow. I said my thanks and turned to walk off. At that point I concluded that he mustn't have been a worker at the store after all as he walked off in the opposite direction.
I continued my explorations, stopping to browse in the odd shop when I noticed the white shirt of my new best friend whilst in a sports store. I was standing over what seemed to be a bargain bin and looked up to see him standing on the opposite side. I wasn’t 100% sure if it was him until he gave me one of those grins and then distracted himself with a stand of replica football shirts. I wasn't convinced he was a Man Utd supporter. I left the store and went straight into the adjacent one, heading straight to the back of the place that was selling more casual wear. I watched the entrance and sure enough in he came looking around, clearly at the people and not the knitwear.
This was getting spooky - what did he want from me? I had to get rid of him. I waited for him to move up into one of the aisles and then I was off. Straight back out and across the street and into a mall entrance taking a few turns to give him more options should he have seen me heading into the mall. I found a side exit and took it, heading across the street again. I looked around and I saw the white shirt amongst the crowd moving at the fast pace that I had taken up. I turned down one street and then again at the next so as to be coming back on myself on a parallel course. Another mall. I went in and then straight back out of the next exit, turning down the next street I came to. Surely that was enough to have lost him? I looked around. He was coming around the corner, smiling as he saw me. He was loving it; the grin that a few minutes before had seemed so innocent was now taking on a sinister look. I carried on down the street that was leading away from the main hub and back toward the border with Hong Kong, it was time for plan B.
The crowds eventually thinned but I kept to the main roads in case Mr Smiley was fancying his chances at taking my Hong Kong dollars and left over sandwich. I took a few deep breaths and then whirled around to confront him with my best snarling nasty face.
"What do you want?! Why the fuck are you following me?!" I shouted. He didn't break his step and continued grinning as I bawled at him. He calmly carried on walking down the street as if I'd just said hello, barely nodding his head in response to my tirade. I stood there and watched him disappear - he didn't even look back. I’d had enough of Shenzhan by that point and continued to head for the border.
Near the border, I ran the gauntlet of the border peddlers again. A little girl of no more than six years old ran up to me shouting "Hello! Hello!" grabbing hold of my hand.
Cute.
That was until she started to try and slide my signet ring off of my finger. She made no attempt to hide her disappointment when I realised what she was trying to do and pulled away. She stood there, swinging her arms with a frustrated grunt, looking over to the woman who I assumed was her guardian. I made straight for the train station, checking I had all my things as I made the crossing back to Hong Kong where I could feel at ease once again.