Hong Kong: The City of Dreams - Nury Vittachi Travel Adventure Series

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      Slick and efficient, the ultra modern Chek Lap Kok airport is a favourite among travellers. It has won numerous awards for passenger service since its opening in 1998.

      The Star Ferry offers passengers spectacular views of the harbour and Hong Kong’s cityscape. Still a timeless icon, the Star Ferry plies the harbour in wooden boats (and still costs almost nothing).

      If you miss it, there are the massed ranks of circling taxis, gliding around the streets like vultures; tens of thousands of them, the majority of which are bordello red.

      For the visitor to Hong Kong, the Zen-like adage that the journey is the destination and the destination is the journey is never more true than in this city, where you have a dazzling choice of funky and fun ways to get around. While many of the classic old buildings have been replaced by soulless towers, there thankfully has never been any need to replace the old transport systems (other than the sedan-chairs and rickshaws, which now exist only for fun). So the old Star Ferry still chugs across the harbour as it has done for more than 100 years, since it was started as a tiny boat service by a moon-lighting Indian chef from a Kowloon hotel. The funicular railway known as the Peak Tram still takes the same route up the mountain as it has always done, and you still lean back in your seat at an unnatural, dentist-chair angle as you are dragged up the slope by a thick metal cable. And the trolley-style streetcars that trundle along the flat parts of the island still move at a speed barely faster than walking, and cost so little that you think you have slipped back in time.

      All types of ships—from oceanliners to the venerable Star Ferry—ply Hong Kong’s busy harbour.

      An expertly-pedalled bicycle can easily out-speed a classic tram on Hong Kong’s busy streets.

      During rush hour, everything’s a blur.

      Still on a transport theme, Hong Kongers are justly proud of their airport. It is one of the few structures in the world which is so gigantic that it has its own internal railway, to whisk people from one side of the building to the other. (I would love to live at the airport, simply so I could say to my spouse: “Excuse me, but I need to catch the 5.15 to the kitchen.”) The airport is breathtakingly efficient. I use it a lot, and it takes me as little as five minutes to get all the way from the aircraft to the real world outside.

      But despite all the high-speed transport thundering over, under, around and through the city, there is one surprising fact visitors often comment on. Pavement traffic is slow and a short stroll can take ages. That’s because the population is so dense there’s no chance of sprinting anywhere. So grit your teeth and take it easy.

      Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a train to catch; if I miss it, I’ll have to wait a whole minute.

      Most homes are tiny, so Hong Kongers are always on the street and on the move, as this picture of the Central District attests to.

      The Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre features a seven-storey glass window that offers spectacular harbour views.

      Trams, once uniformly green, are now ablaze with colourful advertising (left). This one (above) tries to sell you noodles…

      While this one has taken on a rainbow of colours…

      And on this one, the spirit of a dragon appears to have hitched a ride.

      Hong Kong’s harbour remains one of the busiest in the world, bustling with cargo freighters, luxury cruisers and even floating casinos, which get past legal restrictions by quietly drifting out of jurisdiction.

      With sails like the membranes of giant long-extinct pterosaurs, the last few wind-powered junks can still occasionally be seen.

      Today, those old five-kilometres-an-hour rickshaws have been replaced by turbo-charged fuel-injected traffic jams which move at four kilometres an hour.

      THE CITY OF LIGHTS

      “ As soon as you have made a thought, laugh at it.”

      —Lao-Tzu 604 BC to 531 BC

      It was not a dark and stormy night. It is never a dark and stormy night. Such things are unknown in Hong Kong. We never get true, jet-black darkness here. After dusk, the sky over the city becomes a huge, opaque, shifting, gray ghost. Only the brightest stars can be seen. (We’re very discriminating in that way.)

      Let’s face it, our home is nothing less than one of the world’s biggest tributes to Thomas Edison. If the inventor of the light bulb were brought back to life and shown this place, he would surely be astonished, and would race to tell the Edison descendents to flood the city with billions of claims for residual royalties.

      The lights shine brightly here, and there are lots of them. With many of the residents coming from rural China or elsewhere in Asia, electric lights are still something to celebrate, and we’re delighted that neon blinks at us from every downtown corner.

      The poky boxes in which we live are much cheered by the rainbow of lights that flicker into them. I lived in one flat in which the neon-lit Chinese character pronounced “On” (from the department store Wing On) blazed into my front room. The character meant peace and our feng shui master saw it as a highly positive sign.

      I recall many years ago walking down Nathan Road, a glittering neon-lit commercial thoroughfare in Kowloon, and wondering aloud to a knowledgeable friend: “Wouldn’t it be incredible to own all the electricity in Hong Kong?”

      “Actually, someone does,” my friend replied. “His office is right there.” He pointed to a building on the east side of the road.

      It was an exaggeration, but not much of one. The electricity in Hong Kong is not owned by one person; it is owned by two. Utilities are not state enterprises in the city; power is provided by two commercial companies, the principals of which are very wealthy indeed.

      Yet in terms of rainbow-coloured eye-hurting super-cities, Hong Kong still lags far behind the kings of the genre, such as Las Vegas, or downtown Tokyo. There’s a good reason for this. For much of Hong Kong’s history, the main air strip was at Kai Tak, a piece of land bordering one of the most densely packed residential areas in the world. Descending aircraft used to skim so close

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