Saturday, 8 March 2008, at sea

Another sea day, the second of three between Penang and Cochin. All around us is the commerce of the world, carried on enormous ships. At any given moment there will be several in sight. From my observation position in the Crows Nest, at one point I counted ten, ranging from a light blue-hulled Maersk container ship passing us eastwards, no more than three hundred metres away, to several faint white points on the horizon. Sometimes these points directly ahead would grow until they were right there beside us, ships with structures and names, details clear in the morning light. And other times they would diminish sideways, not seen again. But everywhere ships cutting across the Bay of Bengal.

Moderately clear at dawn, the clouds crowd in on us, and we eat our lunch with rain showers on the horizon. There is a seafood buffet in the other restaurant, and we few diners lunching in the Medina are caught with only a few waiters. One Indian chap hears my Australian accent and tells me with delight of an Indian victory in the cricket. I could care less, but he positively glows in triumph. “Well done!” I say and he twinkles.

One lady opposite, a keen bridge player, is anxious on the delays. Her lamb chops are held up in the galley, and she is counting the minutes until her next match begins. “You get better cards if you arrive early?” I ask, but apparently if she selects the north or south positions at the tables, you have them for the afternoon, whilst the late-arriving east and west chairs are movable feasts. This lady, large and elderly, prefers to take her position and hold it, letting those younger and trimmer move from table to table.

Me, I’m taking the stairs two at a time now. I go for a walk on the promenade deck, and for a few circuits I lap all others, before slowing to “warm down” and then go below for a shower. There are eight decks between my cabin on deck five and the Sun deck on thirteen, and I race up them to the Crows Nest and internet room. Often I outrun the lifts.

I’m going to need every ounce of exercise to outweigh the challenge of the food. I go to breakfast intending to have only a bowl of cereal and coffee, but three courses later, I’m wiping away the last drops of a glass of spiced tomato juice and feeling the chef’s special warming my tummy.

Lunch and dinner are special treats and in between are elevenses and high teas and snacks galore. The Cafe Bordeaux runs through the night dispensing gourmet sandwiches and hot chocolate to late night revellers. On this ship, there’s a restaurant for the wicked.

After lunch, a nap, some more reading. I’m hitting Stephen Ambrose again. He wrote Band of Brothers – and I’ve got the miniseries on my iPhone – which is just one of many microlooks at history. He does it so well. This one is called The Victors, and it’s Eisenhower’s Crusade in Europe retold. I’m loving it.

It’s from the ship’s library, full of excellent books. Mid afternoon and half of them are likely to be found in the hands of people in deckchairs on the various public decks. And doubtless on private balconies as well.

My book release for today was a novel about people on an ocean liner from England to Australia. I registered it this morning and left it on one of the wooden benches on the Promenade Deck.

I had a brainwave this afternoon. I’ve got a limited supply of books with me, but there’s a constantly changing paperback swapshelf in the library, and it strikes me that I can register up as many of these as I want, return them to the library, and I may see a few catches that won’t count against any baggage limit.

The fly in the ointment is that I must use the internet room to register them and make release notes, and the satellite internet on this ship is slooooow. And expensive. The poor lass who runs the computer room is fed up with having to listen to passengers tell her that it’s slow. She makes excuses about geographic location and so on, but I figure that the middle of the Bay of Bengal is about as good as it gets for communication satellites, being so near the equator and everything and that the true answer lies elsewhere.

My guess is that during the day and evening there are a lot of users of the internet, and many of them would be crew members doing their legitimate ship’s duties, preparing the newsletters, making tour bookings, ordering up supplies and so on, and many crew members would be pursuing their private business. There isn’t much incentive for P&O to give passengers more bandwidth, not when they are paying $18 an hour for internet, and it takes a minute or so for each page to appear.

This is especially painful to me, now that my laptop is out of action, because I have to login afresh each time I go to a site, and I’m only allowed one browser window at a time. To do anything takes a long frustrating time, each minute costing me 30c.

I might see if it’s any better at three in the morning.

Monday, 25 February 2008, Hong Kong

Breakfast was easy from then on. Just send someone down to the bakery outlet for packed sandwiches. Quick, easy and cheap.

We ate them in our room, looking at the sliver of harbour and watching the inhabitants of the grey concrete towers across the street take in their washing from the lines strung outside their highrise units. I wondered what happened on a windy day. Doubtless there were pants flapping and flying away, whilst pegs rained down upon the heads of people in the street below.

Everywhere we looked there were huge apartment towers, often extremely plain and worn in appearance. The occupants were occasionally visible, doing exercises on the rooftops, doing their shopping in a a myriad of tiny shops on the ground floor frontages, chattering down the street. The city was never still, and with seven million people on the island, small wonder.

Three in the morning and it was moderately quiet, save for a roar of high-revving engines outside as a couple of young locals took advantage of the empty road outside.

We’d arranged a tour of Hong Kong as part of the package. One problem was that our hotel wasn’t one of those in the central area from which the tour picked up, so we had to get ourselves to the Causeway Bay area for pickup from the Excelsior Hotel at 0845. We looked at the various options available, and getting a taxi seemed the best. The driver would know where the hotel was, and providing traffic wasn’t too thick, it would be quick and cheap.

Turns out that at eight in the morning, Hong Kong traffic is pretty light. I sat up front with the driver, admiring his technique. He ran one red light very close, about as close as I would, and changed lanes with an adroitness that I would find hard to match, though maybe after the years on the road that his displayed taxi licence showed, I’d be pretty good too.

He had a liquid sort of cough that I didn’t care for, and I was glad when we drew up outside the hotel, a turbaned Indian doorman already marshalling a new fare towards the cab. Fifty-five dollars on the meter. I had two twenties and a five hundred, and a handful of coins, maybe another twenty worth. Ooops. I hadn’t put the coins in my pocket, I suddenly realised. They were back at the hotel in my bedside table.

I offered the cabbie the five hundred dollar note, and he snarled it away. Fair enough. I can always break a fifty back home, but two in a row generally wipes me out, and five hundred dollars Hong Kong is about the size that would clean me right out.

I looked to the back seat, but apart from another couple of five hundreds fresh from the ATM, all we could come up with between the lot of us was about ten dollars in small coins.

“Not enough!” snapped the cabbie, spittle flying, and we looked at him helplessly. This was the best we could do, short of getting out of the taxi and hunting down some smaller notes. The doorman was holding open the door and glaring inside.

The cabbie gave up, took the coins and my small notes and gestured us out. Very angry. Five Hong Kong dollars is maybe eighty cents Australian, and I’d laugh away such a trivial amount. I’ve cheerfully waived major shortfalls in fares in the past and something like this, especially where it was genuine, just wouldn’t bother me. I’d smile at the passenger, tell them it was fine, and be all the happier to get a smile back.

But this bloke cared and I felt bad about inadvertently shorting him. Five Hong Kong dollars might have been a big part of his day’s earnings. He’d obviously been feeling sick to start with, and something like this would have made him feel upset. Maybe he’d take it out on the next passenger and set up a domino effect that would ripple through his shift. Cranky driver usually equals unhappy passenger, and unhappy passenger equals unhappy driver.

Oh well, not much I could do about it. With a million cabbies in Hong Kong, the chances that we’d meet this one on the return trip were about zero, so we wouldn’t be able to set him right with a fat tip.

The cabbie’s efficiency gave us a good half hour of time, which we filled with a coffee at Starbucks to break down one of our big notes. More waiting in the lobby before a tour bus pulled up and a cheery young Chinese lady started ticking names off her sheet, passing out stickers to put on our shirts.

She told us her name, Angelina Wong, and various Chinese words for greetings and so on, all of which we promptly forgot, except for the word for “good”, which is “Ho”. “And if you want to say ‘Very Good’”, she informed us, “you say ‘Ho Ho’. If something is extremely good it’s...”

“Ho Ho Ho!” we replied, sounding like Santa.

There were maybe thirty of us in the group, and the first item on the itinerary was a trip up Victoria Peak. I’d been wondering about this.

“It a bit hazy today,” Angelina said, answering my thought, “so we go up to the Peak later. For now we go to Aberdeen. Not like your Aberdeen in Scotland, but named after British governor. We go on sampan ride through floating village. You pay the boat driver ten dollar.”

She kept on talking all the way, a cheerful stream of information. At one point we went past the famous Happy Valley racecourse, a huge grandstand overlooking a tiny oval of track. “Hong Kong people love to gamble,” Angelina said. “This the only place in Hong Kong where gambling permitted. Many people take ferry to casino in Macau. Casino very busy place.”

Aberdeen turned out to be a tiny port between high residential towers. “These buildings, they first Hong Kong public housing. Very crowded. One window, one family.”

Sampans lined up to take us on a short cruise, ten people at a time, five each side of the wizened old lady driver, who deftly handled the ancient craft away from the jetty, through collections of fishing boats and tugs and other small vessels. Not too many of the famous houseboats remained, but we saw a few. We also saw the “Jumbo Floating Restaurant”, a four story affair, very grand at the front, very seedy behind. Overhead, kites cruised the thermals, ducking between high rises, posing against the high mountain sides.

All too soon, we were sliding back in and the lady was collecting our fares. A bargain for a fascinating close up of Hong Kong life.

Next stop was a jewellery factory, which was a thinly disguised method of parting rich tourists from surplus money. No bargains here, but we enjoyed the complimentary cuppa and sought early refuge in the bus outside. The driver, double-parked in a narrow lane, gave in to the honking pressure from behind and took us on a tour around the block – light industry and about as charming as you might expect – before we drew up at the factory’s entrance once again and Miss Wong led the rest of the group aboard.

“Now we visit Stanley Markets,” she announced, giving us a brief rundown on what we could buy there – everything – and where the best bargains were to be had. I contemplated getting a chop made of my name. Sky Ring. I’m sure it would have been very pretty, but what sort of practical use would it be?

We had an hour at the markets. A light meal at a coffee shop and a browse through stalls full of trinkets and knick-knacks. A good place for souvenirs.

Back on the bus, with purchases in plastic bags, and we then took the long winding road nup to the Peak. Some incredible buildings on the way.

“This house belong to number four wife of Mister Ho. Mister Ho own casino in Macau, and very very rich man. Number four wife name is Angelina. Maybe I should change my name, not Angelina Wong, but Angelina Ho?”

Ho ho ho. But awful jokes are the stock in trade of a tour joke, and the best part is that each day brings a fresh audience. As a taxidriver, I have my own favorites, delivered time and again to each new face.

The high point of the tour is the view from the Peak. Our bus follows a road just wide enough with a couple of centimetres to spare up the side of the mountain. Some places we can gaze almost straight down steep slopes, others we are nearly scraping vertical rock sides. Other tour buses pass by on the opposite side of the road, and I am glad that we have “the second-best driver in the company”. The best driver, Angelina smiles at us, is in hospital.

We have half an hour at the Peak. There are several buildings, the most distinctive a brand new building, resembling an anvil, or possibly a noodle-bowl supported by chopsticks. Even diminished by haze, the view is still awesome, looking down on ranges of skyscrapers and narrow segments of harbour, with yet more skyscrapers on the far side.

I release a book I’ve been reading for the past month in breaks on my shifts. Suicide Charlie, and I leave it on a leaper’s position near a spectacular drop. A few pictures of RingBear. My son is concerned that he might fall off and be swallowed up in the forest below, but I make sure that he perches on railings where he is not too much at risk. A gust of wind might carry him down to a lower observation level, but not entirely out of my reach.

And then it’s time for the tram ride down. Angelina dispenses tickets, and we line up along the platform. It emerges into view and there is a rush for the choice positions. I’m disappointed that there are no forward-facing seatrs and that I will have to crane my neck around to see where we are going, but when the tram moves off, I see why we all face to the rear. The incline steepens again and again, and if there were any seats facing forwards, the occupants would slide right out of them.

It’s a fascinating descent, and there are cameras pointing out in every direction as we move steadily down. A couple of tiny platforms inbetween sky and land, but there are no passengers waiting here.

Our bus is at the bottom, cramped into a narrow lane, and we climb aboard for the final step back to the hotel. Goodbyes all round and the beautifully uniformed Indian doorman finds us a taxi for the ride back to our own hotel. We make sure that we have plenty of change this time.

We leave the kids in their room. I’ve got an appointment for a fitting at the tailor’s shop in Sheung Wan.11a Hillier Street, it is, and the taxidriver leaves us at one end rather than try to find one shop out of many in the narrow, crooked street.

The numbering system doesn’t seem to match logical practice, but Kerri recognises the tailor’s name, and we enter the tiny shop. He has my suit ready, or at least ready for fitting. It’s very much unfinished, with chalk marks all over it, no hems, and seams loosely stitched. I change behind a curtain at the foot of the interior stairs, and emerge to be poked and measured, chalked up afresh, and eventually released with a promise that it would be ready on Wednesday. This is the day we join our ship, and it should be no hassle. I’m looking forward to owning a tailored suit.