The Adventures Of Susan & Lars "Where are we going?" said Pooh... "Nowhere", said Christopher Robin. So they began going there...

What a difference 150 years of British rule makes! Hong Kong is awesome, everything Shanghai isn't but desperately wants to be; modern, energetic, diverse, clean, entertaining.

We had a great introduction to the city by taking the super efficient Airport Express Train and free connecting shuttle to our hotel. We landed just at sunset, so the train ride in provided a view of Hong Kong's skyline across the water. Beautiful and futuristic with all the lights and neon and giant animated displays. The skyscrapers come right up to the edge of the water, such the better to see them without the masking of sprawl low-rises blocking the approach.

Outside the bus window, the city at street level; people everywhere, but these aren't the drab mobs of Shanghai dragging themselves to and fro, these are again the dynamic go-getters of the big city. It's funny, but you really can see a difference that quickly; people hold their heads up, use their hands in lively conversations with their companions as they walk, and smile as they move about. The dress is snappy but also varied. Quite a number of South Asians are dressed in bright Saris, and there are the headscarfs and even a full Burqa for the local muslim population.

We're staying in Kowloon, on the peninsula across the water from Hong Kong island (but still part of the former British colony). Our building is old, more tenement than tower, but the place is clean, the A/C works, and we have our own bathroom with hot water, all in a great location. This part of town is hoppin', with three stories plus of retail everywhere lots of neon and touts. These guys are mostly selling “custom suits” and see me coming from half a block away. “That is one big piece of fabric” they must be thinking to themselves, and I can see the Hong Kong Dollar signs in their eyes. I could have had a different suit from a different tailor for every day of the month before breakfast. We started thinking of creative ways to say “no” and head them off, with Susan's winning proposal “Oh man, I just bought ten suits from that guy over there”. It's funny to us, but maybe not to anyone else... Anyway, we thought it would be too mean anyway. But the way they approach you sneaking up from their perch on the street corner, muttering “custom tailor” under their voice like they don't want to be overheard, it makes them seem like pushers. Though I knew better, my American urban instincts kept insisting this “custom tailor” was a euphemism for some local vice; a drug brand perhaps, or hedonistic pleasure still unavailble in the less liberalized mainland.

It rained a bit that night, we dashed to dinner, and along the way, huddlng under the overhangs waiting out the rain we saw such a mix of people; South Asians, Africans, Philipinos, Europeans, Chinese, Middle-easterners... It's very cool, especially after the relatively monochromatic places in Japan and China. More even than Kyoto with it's tourists, here you hear a babble as you walk the streets, but more than anything, English (not Cantonese, which is for all practical purposes the second official language).

Our first full day in Hong Kong we walked around Kowloon, crossed over to Hong Kong proper via ferry, walked about and then took the second furnicular railway of our trip to get up to the top of Hong Kong.

I had had the misconception that HK was a complete city-island. In fact Hong Kong has very large areas that are completely jungle. The highlands here are very steep, much to steep to support modern skyscrapers without impossibly damaging earth works that would welcome landslides. As a result the whole spine of the island is dense with semi-tropical forest. This effectively divides the island up, as the transport around or across is inefficient. So on the flats opposite the Kowloon peninsula is clustered the famous skyline of modern steel-and-glass giants, but the rest of the island has a more varied architecture and lower density.

“One country, two systems” is the official China motto for Hong Kong. Susan has amended “one crappy and one good.” At least compared to Shanghai, Hong Kong is the best of China and the best of England. It's China, but with queues and no spitting. Even the food is better. Granted it's a totally different regional cuisine, but also we have had no trouble finding obviously fresh ingredients. Also, counterintuitively, it's cheaper than Shanghai. The long plan for China is to build up Shanghai to rival or replace Hong Kong, to have a more “home grown” jewel. But I can't imagine it could ever catch up. A city is more than a skyline, and everything about this place; the service, the friendliness, the energy... man the energy – I can't imagine anyone living in Shanghai if they had this as an option. The brain drain alone will starve Shanghai. Mark my words, I bet a furlong to a fathom that apartments in Hong Kong are still more expensive than apartments in Pudong 40 years from now when the next big change in Hong Kong's administration removes it's “special autonomous” status.

We've also decided on the trajectory of our trip. Tibet is still not open to foreign tourists, and we're getting nervous betting with increased openness in advance of the Olympics. We're also worried that additional restrictions would seriously impede the nature of a trip to Tibet. So we've decided to accept the fact that our Tibetan ambitions have been dashed. Instead we're moving up our trip to Bhutan by a month, and as well to abbreviate our time in China. We're cutting out Guilin, Yanshou, Chengdu and Xi'an. We've chatted with a number of fellow travellers and the verdict on Guilin & Yangshou are mostly apealing as a break; “nice-for-China” but not “nice” in an absolute sense. Chengdu is really about Pandas, but ultimately there are other things I'd rather do, ditto Xi'an where the principal draw is the Terra-Cotta warriors and a few intact artifacts of history. So Friday we're off for Beijing. We'll then head up to Mongolia for two weeks of desert, steppe and mountain lake time that should provide a welcome change after all these cities and be cleaner and more active than Yangshou. After that, Bhutan, then... maybe Laos, but certainly a solid 2-3 weeks (or more) on Borneo. Basically we're trading pristine jungle and primates for the polluted cities and pandas (hear that? Environmental protection pays!)

I'm disappointed in a manner, but not that I won't see these places. Rather it's that these places are not what they could be. Much has been written about the environmental and historical damage wrought by the boom here, but it's hard to capture the qualitative sense of it. Both Susan and I adore travel in Asia and the developing world.

The challenges of transportaion, food, lodging and language are all part of the adventure, as much a part of why we travel as the sights you eventually take in. But when the very air you breath causes discomfort, and there is no way to carve out a little home, however modest, where you can retreat then it ceases to be an adventure and instead simply becomes a chore. Certainly, for another person or another trip could be magnificient – travelling through the countryside, seeing the country beyond the choking cities crowded by economic and environmental refugees. But this would require far more time than we can give, with weeks or months to spare to manage missed connections. It would require small packs specializing for China and not the tonnage of an 8-month 'round-the-worlder. It would call for more Mandarin language skills than we've picked up thus far, and most of all, it would require recovery time afterwards to reflect and rest. China cannot be crammed into two months between other tentpole destinations.

Our second day in Hong Kong we went over to Lantau, another island of the former colony and special autonomous zone.

It's a festival week here, celebrating Buddha's birthday in the lunar calendar, and we took in a show of Shaolin monks doing kung fu and Chinese acrobats at the monestary. There was also a “face changer” which I can't begin to explain. At first I was nonplussed as the masked performer danced about, first in one mask and then another. But suddenly I saw... well they change their “face” instantly, with no perceptible movement even from 3 feet away. It's very cool. It was also very hot. Susan channeled her father; “I'm shvitzing!” I was also burning, dummy, and had a nice scarlet forehead afterwards. D'oh! Thirty years old and no smarter, *sigh*.

For the return trip we took a bus and a ferry, the ferry nice but predictable. The bus ride however, wound through the rural side of Lantau. It's poor, and I was as surprised as the first time I saw the impoverished areas of Hawai'i. It's subtropical and lush, but too steep for large scale cultivation. A few shanties had some small rice plots, but most we're clearly squatters carving out what they could from some undesireable land and salvaged or improvised building materials. It was a side of Hong Kong I never imagined existed, but whatever the net wealth, like everywhere else there is disparity here.

At this point, after more than four weeks of no TV, no movies, and really no Internet except emails and posting this blog, I was in media withdrawal. We decided to go to a movie while we could get an English language option and In a moment of weakness Susan agreed to see “Iron Man”. It was big, loud, dumb and AWESOME. Susan hated it.

Somewhere along the way here I had read an IHT at a coffee shop, including some news about an environmental protest in Chengdu. Reportedly peaceful, it would be a non-event anywhere else. Here it is a sign of both the rising tembre of cries for environmental protection and how the spread of cell phones, text messages and Internet access is empowering dissent and activism at the grass roots. This genie will not be going back into the bottle. I remember when the term “flash mob” was a neologism, now it's a political force.