I don’t get sentimental when travelling. I like to inhabit the place I’m in, deny the exotic, enjoy it as a place not a novelty.

So i was surprised at my response to boarding the ferry from Kowloon to Hong Kong. I guess I’d always expected to get to Hong Kong one day, but never thought I’d be in Kowloon, let alone pay 37p for a ferry across Victoria Harbour.

Kowloon at 7.30am is busy. By evening standards it’s deserted but this merely means you can see the pavement through the crowds. Far fewer families and very few non Chinese people – I’d walked a kilometre before seeing my first and he was sat in McDonald’s. I despair. As bad as the snippet I heard while walking past someone last night.

“You know where you go for ice cream?”
“Yeah?”
“Up there. There’s a Starbucks up those stairs”
“Oh, up there? Great!”

Yes, that pretty much defines being culturally bankrupt.

I was awake long before that and got up just after 7am. Decided to walk to the ferry even though it took me down the same street I’d walked up yesterday. At least I did find a better view of the harbour. On a grim overcast day it isn’t looking its best, but I like the moodiness.

The ferry is awesome. It has reversible benches.

It’s also designed for rather more people than use it at 8am on a Saturday. There was another deck downstairs, but the other four passengers and I managed to somehow find a seat on the upper deck.

Wi-Fi in Hong Kong is a rare commodity. Sat waiting for the bus to take me to Victoria Peak I only had a choice of 8 open hotspots. Apparently in Hong Kong you must go to Victoria Peak, and take the tram to get there. The tram opened in 1888 and at times travels at 45 degrees, so I’m not sure what makes it a tram and not a funicular.

I didn’t take the tram. There’s a bus from the ferry pier that goes all the way up the hill, so I went to find it. Luckily I read the sign on the bus stop that told me it doesn’t run until 10am, so I walked across Hong Kong to find the bus station it does go from. Hong Kong feels weird, everything is closed behind doors and there are walkways instead of footpaths – high enough up to drive a bus under. Half a mile along a walkway I found a sign telling me to turn right for the bus station so I turned right and found another walkway.

The bus once I did get onto it was all of $9.80 to get up the hill. I sat at the front, on the upper deck, and enjoyed the views of Hong Kong that the journey offered. I’ve now seen most of the island, albeit mostly from a distance. Maybe it’s just that part of Hong Kong but there were a lot of cars going past and the cheap ones were the Mercedes E class and the Lexus saloons. Only two Ferraris but the average car on that bus ride costs more than my house. There were also small communities with no Chinese signs, even the school named only in English. You can rely on expats to refuse to mingle.

At the peak there’s a park in which a race was being held, small athletes getting cheered as they finished. There’s also a large building with a 360 panoramic viewing platform on top. I took about 14 escalators to get there and found a sign telling me it would cost $52 to access it. Unfortunately the man refused my money and told me to buy a ticket at reception, so I took 14 escalators back down and left.

On the way down I did find a side door that led to an odd balcony. You can see my hotel in this one:

You can also see how murky the skies above Hong Kong are. I wasn’t going to get nice photographs even if I had gone back up.

I used $37 of my saved dollars to catch the tram back down. A man was hammering then using a grinder on the tracks but he stopped to let is past. It was a much quicker journey than the bus and at one point my brain had normalised the tram as level, causing serious mental confusion when a bus went overhead (on a bridge) leaning over at a 45 degree angle.

Once off the tram I decided that having no map, no clue where I was and no clue where I was going was a fine excuse to just wander, so I had a wander. To cross a very large road I took a subway, about 700m long and a good 20-25m wide. You could only walk down the centre though, both sides were lined the entire distance with cardboard, and on the cardboard were Asian girls. Only girls, sat there in groups of one to four, on their phones, eating, chatting, mostly lying in a relaxed way on the cardboard. It was weird but I did wonder if it was just cheap entertainment.

At the harbour I found hundreds of people arriving in Hong Kong, a lot of them clearly foreign tourists. Targeting them were the people selling tickets for the open top bus tours. I was open to doing this so let one approach me, and she tried to convince me of its value. Apparently it included three routes, travel up to Victoria Peak and the ferry crossing to Kowloon. After I pointed out that $10 to get to Victoria Peak and $3.70 to cross the harbour on the ferry made $580 for a bus ride feel a little excessive she completely blanked me and started trying to sell to other people. I was disappointed, I didn’t get to say, “I want to travel on the ferry, not buy the damn thing.”

Instead I visited a museum. They have a lot of nice models of old boats. Chinese boat design from a thousand years ago is.. interesting. More generally their boats seem to be flat bottom designs and better equipped for shallow waters than the ocean going vessels developed in Europe. The museum only entertained me for an hour but it cost less than £4 to get in and I did like the boats. So I got on one.

Back in Kowloon I was accosted by Jehovah’s Witnesses. I may have actually rolled my eyes at them. I took a different route back to the hotel, found even more grotesquely expensive shops, including one selling Rolex watches. Then a second, and before I reached my hotel a third. Kowloon is not short of money.

Interestingly nobody in Kowloon is selling poppies. I saw multiple groups, a couple of them a dozen people in size, mostly in uniform, selling poppies and collecting money in Hong Kong. I did pass quite close to the Cenotaph there, although I didn’t know it at the time. Divided by a few hundred feet of green murky water Kowloon and Hong Kong do feel very different places. I think I prefer Kowloon, it’s more overtly alive even if it’s flat, built up and too damn crowded. It’s like Manhattan except with good food.

By noon I was back at the hotel. The shop I’m buying water from (because it’s just outside the tourist areas and so 2/3 the price) wasn’t open when I went out which thwarted my plan of buying water for the day on the way. Instead I walked 11km in humid heat without a drink, so a chance to rest and rehydrate was welcome.

After too little sleep overnight I took the chance to have a nap and got woken up by housekeeping. They’d already done the room while I was out; this visit was because, “We have heard screaming.” I went back out, wondering if the hotel would be full of police on my return.

I didn’t stay out long. The Jade Market is five minutes from the hotel and this time it was open. 60 market stalls all selling jade bangles, literally half the stall owners encouraging me to try one on. They’re designed for Chinese ladies, might fit me as a cock ring; I didn’t try one on. I didn’t haggle for the price of anything, bought nothing. That’s partly just the amount of time I’d have to carry it before I got home, partly because only a couple of pieces even attracted me. There were plenty of elephants, buddhas and dragons, but the dragons were (unsurprisingly) the Chinese style of which I’m not a fan. Some dainty travel chess sets, but £35 for a chess set is too high to even start haggling.

I stopped at the chemist that sells sensibly priced water and brought another four and a half litres back to the hotel, then back out again. I wanted to find the Goldfish Market, as it sounded awesome. It’s also in a part of Kowloon renowned for some quality food, so Mong Kok it was.

To get there I ended up going through the whole of the Ladies Market. I pity the people with storefronts on that street because you can’t see them, can’t get to them, the entire street for several hundred meters is just two rows of stalls selling things, a gap between them wide enough for maybe two people side by side. Less than that if they’re British and have an archer’s shoulders. So I crabbed my way down several hundred metres of market, ostensibly all selling things needed or wanted by women. Apparently women in Kowloon buy everything a household could need, including security cameras, drones and tourist tat. I didn’t buy the glittery fridge magnet someone offered to me for $10. Despite its name I didn’t see any ladies for sale either so missed out on buying one of those too.

Two streets further on, both unusually pedestrianised, a haven of space to walk properly without hunching up, I found the Goldfish Market. Lies! It’s just a street full of normal shops.

They do sell an awfully large number of goldfish though. And rabbits, mice, gerbils, larger fish and two shops selling some delightfully cute kittens. I didn’t go into any of the shops and took no photographs, just strolled past admiring their living displays.

After all those markets I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that I found myself accidentally walking through the Temple Street Night Market, looking for food. I was surprised, it’s two kilometres from the Goldfish Market, the other side of my hotel, and I hadn’t planned on heading that far. I picked another place for food with English on the menu, something not many of them offer. I don’t know if the place even has a name; it had Chinese people sat outside and when I went in, they found me a table in the doorway, showing off their white man.

It worked too, more white people coming to check the menu while I waited. I went for a fried chicken hotpot and, since this was my only meal of the day, beef fried rice. My rice arrived first, brought over from a competitor. I’d wondered why they pointed me at one part of the menu, there must be a collective thing going on, or maybe they’re just a distributed restaurant.

They’re a terrible restaurant. My own fault, eating in the tourist area. The chicken had been prepared by plucking it, removing the head and feet then using a cleaver to dice the rest. Every bite was a gamble on how much skin and bone you’d get, and ocasionally there’d be some chicken meat too. The beef was boneless but I doubt it had ever been near a cow. Twice the price of last night’s meal, a tenth of the quality.

After dinner another wander through crowded streets. I finally had the chance to buy a lady, every hundred yards there’d be a young Chinese woman wearing more make up than clothes trying to entice me up unlit stairs for “a massage”. Maybe they were just selling massages but I politely declined anyway.

I made it back to the hotel, the night still young but in need of some quiet and solitude. 19km walked today through heaving crowds of people. The Chinese in Kowloon can’t walk properly either, so it’s hellish trying to get anywhere. They meander, move sideways, stop for no reason, hesitate continually through uncertainty or idiocy. It’s like trying to move through a crowd of people all focussed on a small screen in their hand.

Then of course there are those as well. Turns out that walking like that without a phone doesn’t make you twice as obnoxious when you do have one. No, it’s a power function, at least squared. As for crossing the road, they stand there, packed tighter and deeper than a student bar on Freshers week, blocking the entire pavement. The crossing light changes, the crowd pauses, nothing happens, then finally they start to move. Obviously on the other side of the road another mob are doing the same so halfway across it resembles a 200 person game of British Bulldogs. I’ve given up and now watch the traffic and cross when it’s clear. A small minority of Chinese people will join me, the tourists look confused and the rest of the locals seem to be in awe. I’m probably now on a secret Government checklist, forever blacklisted from using public transport in Shanghai. They should be thanking me, all I have to do is walk normally and I’d have half the population in Kowloon in hospital, trampled underfoot. Not even on purpose, I really am putting that much effort into not crushing the fools.

Back in the same hotel as yesterday. Nice view from the lift.