Rising to the challenge
Last year at the Hong Kong, Singapore and Thailand seminar held at the World Travel Market, I challenged the respective tourist associations to show me how I, as an agent, could sell Hong Kong and Singapore as anything other than the stopover en route to elsewhere, and how I could convince clients that Thailand could make an alternative long-haul family destination.
To my surprise and delight these challenges were taken up and I was offered the opportunity to put my money where my mouth is by visiting the destinations in question with the mission to ‘Go See and Say’.
To help provide balance and the holidaymaker’s perspective, I also bought my husband a ticket.
Cathay Pacific Business Class to Hong Kong equals 11hr 30mins of comfort and luxury. The flight was full with rugby fans gearing up for the Hong Kong Sevens tournament but the Cathay staff remained cool, delivering an elegantly unobtrusive and efficient service with a genuine smile.
The biggest smile belonged to a stewardess named Chin who made a brave attempt to cure me of my dry cough with copious drafts of champagne (far preferable to Hill’s Bronchial balsam).
As we landed at Chek Lap Kok Airport I glanced across the aisle to witness a young girl struggling unsuccessfully to shove her swollen feet into high fashion boots.
Her agent clearly hadn’t warned her long-haul flights and swollen ankles don’t mix and comfort should be a priority. The poor girl was forced to make her impression on Hong Kong soil in stockinged feet.
Happy landings
Chek Lap Kok is Hong Kong’s new, ultra modern airport and I was immediately impressed with the sheer scale of the place. It is a vast, state-of-the-art airport with none of the claustrophobia-inducing aspects of Heathrow.
The next revelation was the Airport Express Line, a fast, clean, safe and speedy (23mins) link to Central Station on Hong Kong Island at a cost of HK$70 one way.
Staying at the Madarin Oriental we, along with all the other guests, were afforded the red carpet treatment and I have to confess I wallowed in the old-style service and attention to detail which included the provision of a pair of high quality binoculars for use in our harbour-view room.
At a lunchtime meeting with Brenda Poon and Cecil Wu of the Hong Kong Tourist Association we established what could reasonably be accomplished in the short time available to us.
The amount and variety of tours and the related literature was potentially overwhelming but having previously consulted Cath Allen from HKTA in London, I had a rough idea of what was unmissable.
It may have been the dim sum but I may have been some dim to think that I could do all that was on offer over three nights,
But nevertheless we did our best and chose tours from a mix of culture, shopping, dining and day and night sight-seeing trips.
Back at the Mandarin I met up with Annabel Jackson, the Mandarin’s Director of Public Relations who introduced us to the hotel’s Vong Restaurant. Annabel is an authority on Asian cooking having written three books on the subject. She made us aware of chef Jean-Georges Vongrichten (after whom the restaurant is named) and his innovative blend of East/West cooking.
I particularly enjoyed his sensational raspberry and chilli ice cream! The Vong Restaurant, on the 25th floor, could become a mecca for foodies.
Playing chopsticks
All the tours we did lived up to expectations – including an awesome dinner cruise around Hong Kong harbour at night, which was like sailing in a kaleidoscope of twinkling lights.
One cultural trip to the New Territories was memorable not only for the sheer amount of information imparted by our guide Joffe, a former government-employed historian, but also for the sight of local women at Tai Po who were dressed in traditional head gear, shovelling cement into a hole in the road while laughing all the time.
For me they epitomised the Hong Kong spirit of working hard and getting things done.
We had some special meals, but I found that we could eat well and cheaply at many of the eating houses used by local families.
My determination to experience Hong Kong at all levels coupled with a desire to get off the tourist track led us to one of these establishments where the two of us dined for around a fiver.
Another restaurant we visited was near to the highest outdoor escalator in the world. It was all right going up but we had no choice but to use the stairs to come down, which left me with knees like rubber bands.
Turning in to a Coward
In an attempt to return them to something approximating normality I agreed to take part in a 7.15am open-air t’ai chi lesson.
These lessons are held in a public park and are free to all tourists. As fate would have it, the heavens opened and the lesson was rained off – much to my disappointment (and secret relief!).
As the teeming streets proved, tourists are returning to Hong Kong after a brief estrangement following the handover.
Whilst the Queen’s head no longer adorns the postage stamp, this city of life still fires the noon-day gun just as Noel Coward’s song suggested in the ’30s when ‘Mad dogs and Englishmen’.
Thankfully those Englishmen are still going out in the midday sun, along with many visitors from the rest of the world.
To suggest that Hong Kong is only a stopover is not to do it justice; my adventures here have confirmed for me that it is most certainly a destination in its own right.
n Maureen Hill works at Wessex World Travel, Gillingham, Dorset