There’s snow on the ground outside our house in London and it’s so quiet that the smallest noises catch my attention. Everyone else is sleeping early on this Saturday morning. Not me. Having just returned from a whirlwind trip to Hong Kong and Singapore, my internal clock is still eight hours ahead. Sadly, I was sans famille for this trip; there was too much work planned to be able to take J and M along. A lack of company can make the days a bit longer, but also has its own charms. I grew up in rural northern California and only once travelled outside the United States during my childhood, so the ability to wander solitary around unexplored bits of some of the world’s great cities is a privilege I fully appreciate.
Commuting on the Mid-levels Travelator, Hong Kong
Hong Kong is truly wondrous in this respect. It is in many ways a modern titan of commerce, with gleaming office towers lining the streets of Central, the main business district. It is also a city of extreme verticality. Built on an island peninsula facing Kowloon, the city slopes quickly up on the rise of Victoria Peak behind it. Streets running north south are steep indeed, and peppered liberally with steps set into the concrete to ease the climb. The city’s mid-level travelator is uniquely Hong Kong–a famed system of escalators and moving walkways (the longest such concatenation in the world) it transports people to work down from the “mid-levels” to Central. If you’re in the area, you can see people standing on an escalator reading a newspaper as it whisks them along on their daily commute.
Vertical Hong Kong, from Victoria Peak
Space is at a premium, and this has led to another type of verticality– Hong Kongers tend to build narrow spikes of buildings that soar straight up off a very narrow base. They also build their scaffolding out of bamboo, even for the very highest projects. It is–owing to its high strength and light weight–an excellent material for the purpose, but to see a bunch of bamboo poles lashed together up the side of a fifty story building is something that fairly well takes your breath away.
Gauge Street Market, Hong Kong
That almost casual juxtaposition of old and new is repeated countless times in Hong Kong. Stepping out from a hotel onto Aberdeen Street one only has to walk a few yards and turn left onto Gauge Street to be in the midst of a bustling Hong Kong street market. On Gauge Street, you’ll find everything from fresh produce to live eels and New Years decorations, all being hawked from carts that line both sides of the road, leaving only a narrow strip for pedestrians to thread their way through. At night these markets turn into sheer spectacle, with red paper lanterns hanging overhead casting their warm flares over the goods for sale and hawkers grabbing at you to offer deals. These small markets can appear around nearly any corner, tucked away where you wouldn’t expect anything of the sort.
Clarke Key, Singapore
Sands Casino with roof-top garden, Singapore.
Such frequent encounters with the unexpected are to me one of the great joys of the city. Singapore, however, is a different story entirely. Some locals derisively refer to the government as “Sing Inc.” and one can see why. The city feels more like a large shopping mall than anything else. Chinatown still has some charm , but the rest of the place is built for business and has little interest in anything else. Entertainment areas such as Clarke Key feel like Disney-produced attempts to encourage people to have fun. There, is however, something a bit off. About 80% of Singaporeans live in government subsidised housing–typically large, bleak looking blocks of flats, so all the focus on commerce appears to have rather circumscribed benefits in this respect at least. Moreover, the government is notoriously heavy handed. Spitting on the sidewalk can famously garner you a heavy fine. A huge new casino (photo at above right shows the casino under construction at 29 January 2009; for a rendering of the completed project, click here) going up in the Marina will offer free entry to everyone but locals–they will have to pay 100 Singapore Dollars every time they enter. The government wishes to attract high rollers from Asia, but doesn’t want its own citizens to develop a gambling habit.
