Category: Travel

Rio de Janeiro feels more familiar to a babe like me who knows from tropical Christmases. Heat, sweat at the hairline, linen clothes, palm trees, coconut water. And at breakfast papayas, pineapples, oranges, mangoes, guavas fruits, full-flavored bananas and jack fruit. Yes, yes, yes. Adding to my throb of nostalgia is that the street trees are spreaded tropical almond trees with their lush oval crowns, the occasional dying leaf a vivid bull-fighter red.

Many of the beautiful baroque buildings in Rio have a faded kind of gentility. The long stretches of beautiful, well-used beaches? Clean and wide and inviting. Because it rained every day of our visit, the ocean reflected the pale, disappointing gray sky instead of the rich indigo and marine green I’d anticipated. But it won’t be easy to think about Copacabana without remembering the brown, athletic men playing soccer volleyball in black, tight Speedos. Maybe what I meant to say was I won’t soon forget the undulating black and white mosaic sidewalks of Copacabana and Ipanema.

A party lies just beneath the skin of most everyone here, I’m sure of it. More than three times at the first sound of samba drums, Cariocas spontaneously stood up, hooted, danced. Even our very professorial-looking guide with his thick lenses. It’s not hard to catch a glimpse of how outrageous the pre-Lent Carnivale must be. Of course, for a small fee you too can have the opportunity of trying on some of the actual costumes deep in the gift shop of the Sambrodromo, the long parade strip with its luxury boxes and spectator stands.

I’d be so lying if I said I got a true sense of Rio de Janeiro. There never was an overt sense of menace, ever. But it was strongly “not recommended” to walk after dark—even with the heavy presence of tourist cops. Neither was it “recommended” to take the local bus three or so miles in a straight line to Ipanema Beach. The metal detectors at the entrance to the bank and the ATM machines were also just a little intimidating. So was ostentatiously-armed guard watching every twitch. We’d planned on taking an escorted tour of a favela, a shanty town high on the hill with a million dollar view. Lost our appetite for adventure, have to say.

Yet, you know, I’m looking forward to going back in a couple of years. Locals report the threat of crime has already eased significantly. Rio may not be ready for prime time without escorted day trips. But I’m confident things will change eventually. Besides, in Rio, nobody stole my new camera.

It was also interesting to me that I have all along had a Brazilian in my novel. Now that I’ve been there, I think my character’s looks wrong. I also must remember to try and use the two little Portuguese words I learned—Oi. A casual word for “hello.” obrigato: thanks. And, of course, Ciao!

Some photos:

No, I’d never heard of the Iguassu Falls before this trip either. It’s the Eighth Wonder of the World, don’t you know. Impressive and thunderous, it straddles both Argentina and Brazil. These falls come in only second to Africa’s Victoria Falls. With more than 200 separate cascades, it’s taller than Niagara Falls by far. In fact, the tremendous amount of rushing water plunges from a height of a 24-story building. Try and stand before Devil’s Throat, and not feel its thunder to the core.

Add to that the green smell of the rainforest which teems with wild bromeliads, and Tarzan’s rainforest vines, ferns, delicately trembling orchids, and full-throated cicadas. Vividly-colored butterflies perch and preen, short mud-colored alligators try to hide, raccoons try to shepherd their young, lizards work their throats, iguanas stare, a rainbow peacocks over everything. Look for birds, birds, birds. Wheeling vultures. A silly flock of giggling green parrots. Toucans!

Buenos Aires, as you might imagine, is a smart, cosmopolitan city. Walking about, there’s a nagging feeling of familiarity. Even mildly jetlagged, it’s easy to forget where in hell you are. For it looks like any European city—Paris, Milan, Madrid. New York, even. Except there are purple-flowering jacaranda trees, Banyan trees with their elephant-foot roots, and healthy, towering ficus. The same temperamental ficus benjamina that right now might well be shedding curled leaves in your very own living room.

We dodge homicidal Porteños drivers. Jesus, if you think crossing the streets in Athens and Rome is bad. It just sheer madness here. And don’t even think it’s possible to cross Avenida 9 de Julio(allegedly the widest avenue in the world at 400 feet wide and six lanes one way) in a single traffic light cycle. Look out or get squashed. No pedestrian right of way regulations here, dude.

Most striking to me, and not hard to miss, are the very passionate lovers. They kiss and kiss in the streets, in parks, in porticos; they give slow caresses to faces and hair, to backs; their eyes tango. Something else that’s immediately apparent is that there’s no cleaning up after any dog. And it’s hard to ignore the young mothers with filthy babies and small children begging at the entrance to subway. No exaggeration—only the women’s teats are clean from breast-feeding. Also, on two separate occasions, beautifully-dressed women have sidled up to me and told me not to wear “that watch” in Buenos Aires. They tell me about the thieves on motorcycles. My watch is a mongrel Seiko.

Instead they should’ve reminded me that you don’t wear your camera bandoleroed across your chest in the damn subway. I used to have a lovely Canon Sureshot until some fleet-fingered ládron picked it clean from the closed case. Ai. Lástima. Undeterred, we continue with the tourist things, although it took me a day or more to let go of that angry, ripped-off feeling. (All my photos! Gone.)

If you go, do not miss a trip to the ritzy La Recoleta Cemetery to visit the iconic Evita Peron’s grave. Follow up with trip to The Museo Eva Perón. Buy a snack at the small restaurant run by Madres de Plaza de Mayo and feel like you’ve contributed a little bit to support human rights. Kick back at an outdoor cafe and watch sidewalk tango dancers perform and sell sidewalk photo-ops to onlookers. Reach for your camera, if you’ve GOT one.

Here are a handful of photos I scavenged from my husband’s portfolio:

Can you talk like an Australian? What are sunnies, Eskies, helies, pollies. (Sunglasses, Eskimo coolers, helicopters, politicians.)

Got it? So then, what is sosh, or goss, or satched, or mackers? (Social, gossip, saturated, McDonalds hamburgers.)

No worries, mate. You’re all right. Which means, “You’re welcome.” Roight.

Australia offered us the very best vacation we’ve had in a long time. I’ve only just recovered from 9 flights in 16 days. Incidentally, I will never have anything to great to say about Qantas airlines. There’s no alternative but to take them across the country. It’s this monopoly, I think, that makes the service so cavalier. The agent at the check-in desk insists that we’ll have to speak to customer service if my husband and I prefer to sit together. This after having had reservations for 3 months. The customer rep instantly finds us adjoining seats. “She didn’t spend too much time looking, did she?” he commiserates.

Checking in at the Melbourne airport, the woman at the counter points us to new QuickCheck in machines. The machine directs us to the service representative. We go back to her. She points to another counter with the wand from her lip gloss. She says with irritation, “That’s what happens when you have old tickets.” A roving floor manager eventually directs us back to the same woman who makes her feeble apologies.

I’m not right behind my husband when we are checking in at the departure gate because I turned to apologize to an older woman for cutting in front of her. The agent taking our tickets, his face ferociously furrowed and condescending, spits out cold and hard as an angry cop: “Stay close. Stay close!”

Perhaps we’re just used to a gentler customer service in Northern California?

At the Alice Springs Desert Park the ticket taker is absent from the window. We can see her attending to a woman who’s gotten off our van and has pushed through the turnstile into the gift shop. We push through to get our tickets taken too, and get scolded for not first dinging the retro service bell.

When we stop off for lunch at the Apollo Bay Hotel on the Great Ocean Road, we don’t get our food for 20 minutes. People from on our Grayline tour have all eaten and are leaving. My husband goes up and asks if our food will be coming soon. The sour cashier says she’ll check. She doesn’t report back. Five minutes later he goes again to get an update. She tells him he’s annoying and to go sit down. When he demurs, she says she’s going to get the manager. Please do, he tells her, losing his native sweetness. Apologies all round. But, God Almighty. The customer as enemy?

Tired of my whining yet? Let me rant a little more, though. I need to.

We are in the elevator at the top of the Sydney Tower. Five laughing British teenagers, rowdy, hopped-up on group mentality and testosterone turn to me. One of them, guffawing, asks if he could take my photo. They’ve mistaken me for an Aboriginal woman. Their manner changes the instant I tell them I’m also a tourist from America.

The Aboriginal people. It’s a sad story, really. We see more of them in Alice Springs than we’d seen previously in our trip. As with all indigenous peoples, they suffer from poverty, disease, alcoholism, illiteracy, malaise. They seem to hold fast to ancient ways. Because of their very pronounced sense of family, we see them walking in groups, in their unhurried way; we see them sitting placid on the ground everywhere, not even plucking at the blades of grass. They just stare out as if they’re waiting for something they know will not be coming any time soon.

My sense is that the population around them treats them like children. Sees them as wallpaper. Or some ancient, irrelevant tribe. The hotel clerk at the Alice Springs Resort looks away from me as if I might singe her eyes. Aboriginal fatigue, perhaps. We arrive before check-in time, as is always the case. Unlike other many-starred hotels, we wait, and wait, and wait, for our room to be ready; we have lunch before we force the issue and ask her if she knows when a room will be available. She goes and consults with her supervisor, and, oh, miracle des miracles, we are checked in immediately.

But you can run into bad and prickly service anywhere. Right? Right?

[tags] Qantas, Apollo Bay Hotel, Aboriginal, Alice Springs Resort, Australia, Photo Gallery[/tags]

The Outback. Here we fancily stay at “Sails In The Desert,” a hotel that sprawls over some acreage. It’s a gorgeous place where the staff is young, fervent, effervescent, wonderful. They are, literally, a sweet oasis in the usual nippy Australian service we’d become almost accustomed to.

The shot below is of a stand of Ghost Gum trees in the hotel’s courtyard. What’s interesting here is that the barks of these trees are covered with a fine dusting of white powder. According to the guide, the Aboriginal people used this white resin as a sunscreen.

Ghost Gum Trees

Now. Why Aboriginal people would need sunscreen on their dark faces, I’m sure I do not know.

But, to continue. The Outback is high desert, of course, and operatic. It’s hot as the gates of Hades by day, and cold as Satan’s heart at night. The tourist industry has manufactured a “town centre,” which is a cluster of hotels, a restaurant, a cute shopping center with shuttle service that you will never need to get around.

And, here, at night when the cloudless blue desert sky turns black, the sky is littered wiith stars. They take their bold stage turns in the absence of city lights. Unbelievable as it is, to me, we see the milky way with our naked eyes. By telescope we see stars powdering stars.

Nevertheless, the absolute star of the show, and the whole point of being here, is to see, Kata Tjuta, a/k/a “The Olgas” and Uluru a/k/a “Ayers Rock.” We are happy that in private we scoffed at the driver in Melbourne who told us that if he were a travel agent, he’d never even mention Ayers Rock: “It’s just big rock in the desert.”

First View of Uluru

Is it any stretch of the imagination to understand why the Aboriginal people regard this great, red monolith as sacred, really? I mean, just look at the changing colors in my point-‘n-shoot photos. But first, some instructions: Navigating the photo gallery may be confusing. See “Help,” if you need it, at the bottom right hand corner. Toggle F11 for a bigger screen.

We were only two of the hordes of people pulled up on Grayline Tour buses to toast, with champagne, wine and finger food, sunset at “The Rock.” To be sure, the changes were so subtle, so gradual, that people didn’t applaud as they do the last sizzle of sunset on Ocean Beach in SF, for instance.

I’m telling you, these changing colors are why fools, like me, set the alarm for 5 am — on vacation — and stand hungry and freezing our bits to see exactly what color sunrise would paint Uluru. Madness. But I dare you to find the rare tourist without Red Rock fever!

[tag] Australia, The Outback, “Sails in the Desert”, Ghost Gum Trees, Melbourne, Aboriginal people, Kata Tjuta, Uluru, The Rock, Ayers Rock, The Olgas, Photo Gallery [/tag]

If you’re anything like me, here’s what 25 straight hours of traveling and the complete disappearance of a whole day, will do for you:

1. You will ask yourself, so what in hell is fun about vacations anyway?
2. Your body will have a deep-bone fatigue in which you think your legs could not ache any more if they were being amputated.
3. Your husband will suggest a ride in a helicopter and you will think: yes, my husband needs another, more intrepid wife.
4. You will tell yourself that it is better to die with your beloved in a helicopter crash than to be a surviving spouse.
5. You will see yourself from all angles in a multi-faceted hotel mirror and you will think: this is how I look to other people. And you will want to die in a helicopter crash.
6. You will sleep for 10 hours. You will wake up singing. You will sit out on the balcony overlooking the blue-steel ocean, you will amble through the rainforest of the hotel grounds, you will have an enormous breakfast, and the excitement of being in Australia will totally overwhelm you. Depressed? Who? Me? Nah.

It’s winter in Cairns, Australia. Sunset comes early. But it is wildly tropical—as tropical as Hawaii, or Singapore. It’s perhaps 70 degrees and stunning. It is, of course, the jumping-off point to visit the Great Barrier reefs. It’s also a good place to take a day trip to Green Island with it’s lush rainforest, or Fitzroy Island where you can see fish swimming over the coral reef. See photos here.

From Cairns you can also hop the Kuranda Rail and Skyrail tour. You take this very pleasant antique train ride to Kuranda, stop off at Barron Falls, la, la, la, get off all happy like a fool. You visit Birdland, have a little lunch. And then it’s time to take the skyrail. Now, I’ve done this before in Singapore, and not without event. Yet, here we are again. Again riding a fool cable car high, more than high, 90-minute, panic-high over the rainforest where I and the other two women I’ve only just met, pretend to be brave and end up singing “Whistle a Happy Tune,” to calm ourselves. We might well have been in that helicopter. We end up at the Tjapukai Aboriginal Park which, if we’d gone by car, would’ve been a 10-minute drive. All that tsouris for nothing. Well, Jesus H.

So, here in Northern Australia, you’ve got your basic tropical flora:

Banyan, er, Fig Tree	Waist-High Scarlet Salvias

Sweetsops! – “Custard Apples”	Tropicana From the Hotel Balcony

Then there’s the beautiful, curved, newish Esplanade. A great, wonderful, safe, recreational treat for both locals and tourists. For here you can:

Make Like a Matador Near Sunset	Swim in the Huge, Shallow Pool

Crab a Yard from the Shore	BBQ at a Free, Gas Barbie

Form a Human Pyramid at Dusk	Or Just Sit. And Watch

Or Sit. And commune with:

Twilight Blue	Evening in Cairns

[tag]Cairns, Esplanade, Birdland, Kuranda, Tjapukai Aboriginal Park, Banyan [/tag]

I’m guessing most people will know where these photos were taken? If you don’t, though, c’mon, Boonoonoonoos, let’s have some minor fun. Three things:

1. Without looking at the last photo, where’s this?
2. The photo pairs might have some commonality? Um, visual puns?
3. Guess which photo subject I absolutely liked best!

a . Smoking Heart of Volcano	b. Sizzling Lava Meets the Ocean

c.Newly Cooled Lava	d. Ancient Lava

e. Ancient God & His Weapon!	f. Nouvelle Garde

g. Petroglyphs	h. White Coral Graffiti

i. Rest in Peace	j. Rest in Peace

k. Feminine?	l. Masculine?

m. Flameless Overwintering Tree	n. Boasting Green Giraffes

o. White Falls	p. Red Falls

	All Photos Taken on the Big Island, Hawaii Easter, 2006
q. Dancing Women, Airport	Aloha

a.-d. Hawai‘i Volcanoes National Park
e. Aki‘i, guardian of the place of refuge, Pu‘uhonua o Honaunau National Historic Park
f. Handcarved Tiki at the Hawai‘i Tropical Botanical Garden
g. Puako Petroglyphs
h. Coral Graffiti along the Queen Ka‘ahumanu Highway
i. Roadside memorial to accident victim on Highway 19
j.-k. Exotic “blooms” at Hawai‘i Tropical Botanical Garden
m. Poinciana (Flame) tree. In season the vivid scarlet flowers overrun the delicate foliage.
n. Coconut Trees at Hilo
o. ‘Akaka Falls
p. Heliconias (“Lobster Claws”) at Hawai‘i Tropical Botanical Garden

Singapore is clean and green. A relief from Bangkok. The road from the airport is a boulevard, an allee with mature flame trees, flowerless now, to be sure, in this rainy season. Palm trees line the median. Everywhere it is rainforest lush. It is also the season of frequent afternoon and early-evening thunderstorms.

The city itself is clean and orderly and efficient. In Bangkok getting through immigration took 45 minutes. In Singapore, 5. This is the Singapore where the immigration form issued on the plane reads: “Warning: Death for drug traffickers under Singapore law.” Here there are steep fines for littering, for jaywalking. Chewing gum is prohibited; (we looked – they don’t even sell it in the 7/11.) People stand behind designated lines on the subway platform and allow disembarking passengers to, well, disembark without pushing.

I feel like I have to tiptoe here. And it gladdens my heart to find, in an underground passageway, a place where clots of teenagers hang out. They practice intricate hip hop moves to beats from tinny boom boxes. They yell and laugh; the melancholy play guitars cross-legged and watch. They ignore the no-skateboarding signs. They leave food wrappers about. But absolutely no graffiti tattoos any wall. Above ground, the only other sign of slight disorder is the drying wash hung like banners from poles from the balconies of the deliberately- integrated, clean, and ugly-hued public housing buildings.

Interesting how this polyglot city comes together easily. Signage comes by government mandate in a quatrain of English, Mandarin, Malay and Tamil. On the subway, I eavesdrop on adolescent gossip that dips in and out of English. When I turn around to see their faces, I’m surprised that one of the girls is Chinese, another Malaysian, the other Eurasian.

Sign in Malay, Tamil, English, Mandarin

We cram our 3 days here. We visit the historic Raffles Hotel where the Singapore Sling was invented. I don’t knock one back — too sugary, I assume. But, I genuflect in the Writers Bar where Noel Coward, Somerset Maugham and Rudyard Kipling allegedly hung out. In the evening we hop on a tram and cruise through the dark on a night safari accompanied by a Disney-chirpy narrator. The exotic animals ignore us, really. The lions, the tigers barely looked up, deer, aloof giraffes look past us, hyenas put on a fightfest for us, bullfrogs give stereod bass choruses.

Next day we visit the Sri Mariamman Hindu Temple in the heart of a pristine Chinatown (yes, Chinatown.) We buy beautifully embroidered linens in Little India, we eat Turkish food a pebble’s throw away from the spectacular Sultan Mosque on Arab Street. We sweat through the extraordinarily lovely National Orchid Garden. We go to Sentosa Island by cable car way too damn high over forest and water. We admire giant species of butterflies; we walk through an acrylic tunnel and watch sharks, stingrays, thick-lipped fishes swim overhead. We endure the cartoony Musical Fountain – Dance of Fire and Water Show, while we get soaked by a sudden hard rain.

The next day we cruise and try to photograph the colorful shophouses built by early Chinese immigrants on the south side of the River because it resembled the concaved belly of a carp – a guarantee of wealth and prosperity. Comfortable on the boat, we admired the contrast of the restored godowns with the towering skyscrapers, lazed briefly. For, mercy, there’s so much more to see, to do. We visit the financial center; we admire an outdoor Botero, an unexpected Dali sculpture in a courtyard. We walk and walk.

And through it all, my feet are pieces of raw meat. My camera hisses, Woman, put me down. The waist of my loose slacks? Not so loose anymore. Way different for me, too, that I could actually be looking forward to resting on the marathon flight home. We leave Singapore at 8 AM and arrive in San Francisco at 9 AM on the same day. Yaaay, for business class. Our first.

[Click on photos to enlarge]

Grand Palace

14-ct Gold at Grand Palace

Close-up of a Chapel

Monkly advice at Wat Phra Kaew Wat

Another Close-up View

We Rode one of These Elephants!

Nectar Drips from This Coconut Bud

Boiling Coconut Sugar

Floating Market

I find myself reluctant to write about Bangkok. Cause who am I to talk? I’m a Third-World Girl. And it slashes my heart when people comment to me about Jamaica’s poverty. Or the pestering flock of folks trying to sell them touristware.

But, Lord. Bangkok. Sure, our luxe hotel room looks over the Chao Phraya River with its beautiful night glide of lighted long boats, but just steps away the poverty starts. So does the noise of tuk-tuks, the endless high whine of motorcycles, a misty exhaust that chokes, rubs throats and eyes raw.

There’s also the smell of scam. (A taxi driver tries to persuade us that he’s taken us to the restaurant the concierge has written out in the embroidery-like Thai script. His friend, the restaurant owner assures us that it is the place. But they’re busted by an unwitting waitress.) A vendor tries to persuade us that the price of one set of place mats is 180 bhats, the price for two identical sets is 450.

I’m sad that I feel disappointed by the look of Bangkok. Years of soot cling to old, unloved buildings. Disorderly electrical wiring sway heavily from overburdened poles. We take a leisurely cruise in a worn motorized boat along the canals. I fear the water. For it is a member of the Thai family. Makeshift houses line the river in which people bathe, wash clothes, go potty.

It’s the cooler rainy season, yet the 3-H’s still rule: hot, humid, hazy. Now factor in the unrelenting rot dtit (traffic jam). Service in restaurants is way more leisurely than any country we’ve ever visited. Not so fun. Food’s cheap and terrific, though, and the a/c works like a sumbitch.

Yet the tourist buses pull up and disgorge expectant people. So do the taxicabs — each having their undercarriage inspected by pole-mounted mirrors. And, I think to myself, how strong the sexual impulse is, really. Our same scammy taxi driver couldn’t shut up about taking us to a sex club, telling us, when we decline his offer, that it is very popular tourist attraction. It’s also hard not to notice how many male American couples there are. That’s 14 or more hours on a plane. You just know that the Thai sex scene has to be white hot. The 3H’s.

We had a decent time, nevertheless, you know? We spent Christmas Day sightseeing two wats (temples): The stunning Grand Palace which was the seat of the court of old Siam, and the adjacent Wat Phra Keo. We forget to miss Christmas it is so beautiful, so ornate, so magnificent. See photos below. And later in the day, I get very satisfying Christmas presents: jewels, opulent raw silk stuffs. My poor husband is relieved; I’d balked big-time at holiday traveling.

The next day, I learn that in Thailand they make sugar from the nectar that drips from the cut flower buds of coconuts. Come again? How is it that with all the coconuts in Jamaica this is news to me? Tastes double-yum, like Jamaican coconut drops.

On this same day, I ride an elephant. I breathe deeply, talk myself down from my snake phobia when there’s also a monster boa constrictor around someone’s shoulders. I gaze fondly at florid tropical flowers. We spend several humid hours cruising the floating markets, as we had the night before in the night market. We shop with our eyes; we find nothing we must have. But, I suck coconut water from the green husk with a straw, and I discover after one bite that those egg-sized brown fruits, La-mut, are naseberries! My childhood comes full-rushing back.

Hey, what pollution, what traffic, what grime, what noise?

[Click on photos to enlarge]

Grand Palace

14-ct Gold at Grand Palace

Close-up of a Chapel

Monkly advice at Wat Phra Kaew Wat

Another Close-up View

We Rode one of These Elephants!

Nectar Drips from This Coconut Bud

Boiling Coconut Sugar

Floating Market

[Click on photos to enlarge]

Christmas Lights on Victoria Harbour

Hong Kong. Oh, could it be any more stunning than it is right this minute, decked full red, gift-wrapped and Christmas lit? Red and albino poinsettias mass, are bunched, are grouped, crowd window boxes, line avenues and streets, storefronts.

Christmas is secular here, of course, unless you want to count the lit stars suspended from invisible wire in front of the ritzy Peninsula Hotel. But there’s no Baby Jesus. The joyous lights on every building for a mile or more wink, tic, tic, race as you would expect, but also cast long festive trails on Victoria Harbour’s night water that links Kowloon on the mainland to Hong Kong Island’s business center. I had no tripod so the photos posted are execrable, but you’ll get the picture. Har.

Interesting how the thin skyscrapers reflect the aesthete of the people, thin as cigarette boats, cosmopolitan. See the daytime photo too, taken from a sampan belching diesel fumes. Yin and yang here, right? The moneyed soaring skyscrapers, the poverty of the houseboats on the jade water, some of the folks living on them, the guide says, are eighty years and older and have never come ashore. Could be tourist hype, no doubt, but one look at the mild faces and I could so believe. I put my camera down when they stare out at yet another set of tourists; I wave instead.

On the city streets I realize I’ve lost my New York walking skills. I dodge and weave the sidewalk hordes. Maybe we should be walking on the left, I say to my uncomplaining husband, England’s handprint still hardpressed in the way they drive on the left. Switching to the left side of the street doesn’t really work. I dodge and weave, I shake my head no, thank you, no thank you, no thank you to the Indian or Pakistani men who hand me their flyers, I can make you a suit; I’m good at it, come and have a look. Watches, Madame? I dodge and weave, am one of the few black tourists, polite even though, Leave me the hell alone, I’m begging you, is caged behind my teeth.

We are good tourists. We go up to Victoria Peak by tram, funicular style, the spectacular skyline view hazed this day. We go shopping for cashmere and pashminas in Stanley Market, we take a double-decker tram around Hong Kong Island for the novelty, to see more of the city, to experience, man. Our hotel is luxurious and comfortable. Choice fruit in a swan-shaped bowl arrives because we ask a worker in an adjoining room whether they’d finished making up our room (half eaten in photo.) Only when there’s surprise on his face do we realize that perhaps they’ve left the folded spreads off the bed for our convenience. We assure him it’s okay. Really. But, do you think we could have an extra pillow? Not ten minutes later, here comes the burnished fruit. Yeah, baby.

I love Hong Kong. Our beautiful city guide, Kenn, is very fluent in this totally bilingual city, but apologizes for her “chinglish”, Chinese English. I look away and I know that’s a term I’ll not ever be comfortable saying. It’s way too close to a word that I don’t ever want to come out of my brain. I learn that the bathroom is “the happy room,” learn that they refer to themselves as Hongkongese; she mentions the Shanghainese. I don’t know why I’m surprised? People in Taiwan are Taiwanese.

In Hong Kong, the scaffolding on buildings is bamboo – even on skyscrapers. In Hong Kong there’s a queue 15 people long outside the Louis Vuitton, outside the Gucci shops on Canton Road. In Hong Kong teenaged girls walk easily for blocks, hands linked liked lovers; they giggle and whisper. In Hong Kong the fragile leaves of the poinsettias remain unquailed and tropical, even though everyone here is wearing light down jackets, the women yoked by their scarves tied in the same noosed style against 40-degree temperatures. Spindly boughs of bougainvillea still bow, purple orchid-like Bauhinia flowers still nest high on trees. We are all freezing.

On Lantau Island we stop at the Tai O Fishing village, walk through the long narrow alley lined with dried seafood of every kind, blow lungs hung like loofah, dried blowfish. I use my first squat toilet behind a door that only comes up to my waist. I take the requisite documenting photo. As I walk along the pathway the villagers cannot take their frank stares from me, even when I smile and nod to shame them. A four-year-old points at me, her index finger up to her little cheek. Later at the Buddhist Temple, where the world’s tallest outdoor seated bronze Buddha statue reigns with his enlightened smile, a broadly-smiling young woman, her hair pink-punked, poses with me for a photo, her head leaned closed to mine. Back in Hong Kong a seven-year-old spots me, looks back at me, prods her ancient grandmother to turn to look at me. What? There are knots of African men on the streets not four streets over; what’s the deal? I don’t know how to feel, really. Like a chicken geek in a traveling circus, like a film star, pawed at by people’s non-malicious curiosity. I just feel, like, I dunno, slimed?

Hey, stop gawking at me. I nod and smile, good morning, Zou san.

Peninsula Hotel

Purple Christmas – Harbour City Mall

Christmas Lights – Hong Kong Island

Architecture by I.M. Pei – Bank of China Tower

Pei by Night

Apology Fruit

Floating Restaurant

Fishing Village Houseboats & Skyscrapers

Squat Toilet

Dried Seafood

World’s Tallest Outdoor Seated Bronze Buddha Statue