Hong Kong and China with Heather

The first time I went to Hong Kong was for work back in 1996. I flew business class on that occasion - as we all did when travelling for that company - I was very lucky, and somewhat out of my depth, really: I could handle all of the technical questions, but the social aspects of meeting the owner of the company that owned the company I worked for, and being taken out for dinner by his nephew were such that thirty years on I only vaguely remember the trip.

• Looking out the window to see people's washing on the apartments as we flew into Kai Tak airport
• Looking down from my 68th floor hotel room to see people practicing Tai Chi in a misty, mountainous jungle landscape
• The boardroom table covered with a cheap plastic tablecloth while we ate fried rice for lunch
• Walking around in the rain for a day after all our meetings were done

That was before digital cameras. Before I carried a camera everywhere. Before cellphones. Before everyone carried a camera everywhere!

Fifteen years later I visited Hong Kong again, with a Nikon D700 and a willingness to walk everywhere. Also visiting for work, but by this time I'd travelled a lot more and when people couldn't figure out which day we were all going to be there for our meeting I just quietly booked my hotel for ten days and when my Miami-based co-worker also had one spare day I was able to lead her all over the island - top to bottom, breakfast to dinner - finishing with a walk (and photos) on Tsim Sha Tsui waterfront. After she'd left town I even managed to wangle an amazing day out sailing on a yacht through a friend's introduction.

After moving to Ireland in 2014, Hong Kong became a reasonably common airport to pass through on visits back to New Zealand, and then - post-pandemic - when I was working remotely, I managed to work from Hong Kong for a few weeks and really get to immerse myself in the place. It's changed pretty dramatically since my first visit in 1996, of course, and also substantially since that week in 2013.

Despite all that history of my own visits, Heather had only ever stopped over in the airport for a few hours so I suggested we should do a proper visit together.

Arriving in Hong Kong

We landed at around 5pm Hong Kong time and I'd worked out the best approach to get to our hotel in Tsim Sha Tsui was to get the airport express to Tsing Yi, then the Tung Chung line for one stop to Lai King where we would switch to the Tsuen Wan line the rest of the way, and this worked well. The only tricky bit was getting to ground level at Tsim Sha Tsui where our hotel was literally across the road from exit D, but exit D was stairs, so I had to lumber up them with both suitcases.

As ever with Air New Zealand we'd eaten pretty well on the flight, so we didn't need much in the way of dinner - we walked along the Tsim Sha Tsui promenade and back to the hotel and afterwards just crashed, both sleeping very well, though still waking a little early with the 5 hour time difference.

I'd installed the various apps needed for a china visit:

• AliPay
• WeChat
• 12306 (China Railways)
• Amap

I was unable to book tickets from Hong Kong to Shenzhen through the 12306 app so we decided to make our way over to West Kowloon station to (a) figure out how hard it would be to get there with our bags the next day, and (b) buy some tickets for that. It actually was pretty straightforward, walking underground from our hotel to the East Tsim Sha Tsui MTR station, MTR to Austin and then walking to the ticket office where we purchased the tickets without issue. Afterwards we looked around the mall over near there until I suggested we go into central Hong Kong to look around, so we did that, and caught the mid-levels travelators up to the Old Victoria Prison which had some interesting exhibits and galleries and kept us amused for a couple of hours, then back to Kowloon and a look around Kowloon Park before dinner and bed.

Shenzhen Day One: Huaqiangbei, Nan Tou and Debianista!

With China's new "30 day VISA on arrival" policy I had thought it would be nice to visit Shenzhen for a day trip in our two week visit also, but after some friendly contact with Xiao Sheng Wen - a local Debian developer in Shenzhen whom I had met last July at DebConf 25 in Brest - I was persuaded to add three nights in Shenzhen and a couple of nights in Guangzhou.

So the next morning we retraced our steps to West Kowloon station and caught the train to Shenzhen where we met up with Xiao. First on the list was a walk through the tech markets of Huaquiao Bei. These have a decidedly different flavour to tech markets I've visited in Hong Kong or Taipei, in that they were much lower level - selling electronics components and services to assemble rather than the assembled electronics. There were still stores selling electronics, but I think I'd need to live there for a month to start to figure out where to go to buy the sorts of things that I would have been interested in - and probably another year to develop the skills to negotiate the price! I was tempted by some 4TB SSDs, but the price wasn't so different from New Zealand in the end.

Our first impressions of Shenzhen, were of the peace and quiet, after the noise of Hong Kong. Despite the eight-lane "stroads" around Shenzhen, there are usable pedestrian ways, and the ubiquitous silent electric scooters (all e-mobility devices seem weirdly illegal in Hong Kong, where cars go everywhere almost as ludicrously as they infest Gibraltar). Even on those stroads the cars are sensibly electric, so when a light goes green there is no roar of traffic

After Huaqiangbei we were introduced to Tingting, the wife of another Local Debian enthusiast. Tingting would have been formidable, if she weren't so personable - she achieved her proficiency in english in the course of getting multiple degrees and is also the mother to two young boys. Tingting had freed herself up for the next couple of days to put herself at our disposal and to show us around museums and cultural exhibits. First stop was lunch! A venerable institution had been selected for us for this purpose, but the wait would be over an hour so we all decided a simpler dim sum would be a much better use of everyone's time.

After lunch we spotted "HQB Museum" which none of our friends were actually familiar with, but it was worth a quick visit, providing some historical context for how the area came to be so intensively involved in the electronics supply chain. Next we all caught the subway to Nan Tou Ancient Village where Jin joined the group. He had come over from Zhongshan for the afternoon and evening, and we chatted as we strolled around the historic village, modernised and reinvigorated with small museums, temples, food stalls and small craft shops. Afterwards moving on to meet up with the local Debian community for a lovely meal outdoors in a modern restaurant in the local style, including the standard keysigning and ID exchange rituals.

Shenzhen Day Two: Museums

With Heather's birthday coming up during our visit, and her being born in the year of the horse (also the current year in the chinese zodiac), there were many horses on display around the city as well as in the museums. Today we started with a visit to the Shenzhen Museum and there was an excellent exhibition specifically of horses, as well as some kind of horsiness within most of the other exhibitions. It's a lovely building, and I think we must have arrived at the perfect time because it was a lot busier when we left than when we arrived! Jin also joined us in the museum, and we were told off several times for talking, though mostly we weren't horsing around, but just talking about the exhibits!

Leaving the museum we walked through Lychee Park where I saw a robot boat in action tending to the pond. One of Shenzhen's super-tall skyscrapers towered over the park - and everything else in it's vicinity. Jin had to head home, but before we parted he persuaded us that we should really spend an extra night in China and that he and his wife would show us around Guangzhou, before we returned to Hong Kong.

We went to Victory Restaurant for an enormous lunch - the tendency for ordering Dim Sum from a modern paper menu reminds me a bit of the process of "bring a plate" dinners where everyone imagines the need for a bit more food than they need just for themselves, and so an enormous feast shows up and you spend hours going through it. Dim sum is designed to take up as long as is needed though, so that's alright.

After lunch we walked down to that super-tall skyscraper and the inevitable metro station in it's basement to go to a second Shenzhen Museum, this one focused on more contemporary art, and in a much more contemporary building, too!

Late afternoon we moved on to "Splendid China", a folk museum which apparently most foreign visitors to Shenzhen are taken to see. We walked around through their lantern festival and saw a few of their spectacular shows, while we ate snacks for dinner - not that we needed much after the enormous lunch. Our friends were being very frugal, and doing as I would have done when faced with the jacked up tourist prices of the restaurants in the "village". The shows really were spectacular, too, with many moving stages, including fountains, flames, incredible costumes and many lighting effects.

Shenzhen Day Three: Gardens and Lights

Tingting couldn't join us for saturday - there were two little boys seriously missing their mum! Xiao was determined to take us to the restaurant "Fan Lou" that had been too busy our first day, so returning on saturday morning for dim sum breakfast was the perfect time.

With that excellent start to the day out of the way we headed to Fairy Lake Botanical Garden, seemingly along with everyone else in Shenzhen - if we had our time over again, I think we would have switched the botanical gardens to the Friday when I'm sure it would have been a lot quieter, and taken the museums on the Saturday where it is less important to wrestle your way onto a bus to move from one part to the next.

Not to say Fairy Lake isn't spectacular - it sure is, and we first saw many interesting plants and learned much about traditional chinese medicinal herbs before moving on to visit the Hong Fa temple (still within the gardens) where the phrase "the air was thick with the smell of incense" developed new meaning for me! Our final stop was the Bonsai Garden before the press of people, and the stress of having to walk too many kilometres finally got to Heather and we headed back into town for a brief rest.

Late in the afternoon we met with Xiao and his friend (a surgeon who had done some part of her training in the USA) to walk to the top of a hill in Lianhuashan Park, where we watched the daily light show. Really, this is a must see if you visit Shenzhen - ideally arrive at the top of the hill an hour before it starts and stake out a good vantage point. Also, if you're not fit don't try and walk up the steep part of the hill to get there - that climb was unfortunately too much for Heather: she made it, but it reminded her very much why she won't walk to our home from the local railway station. which is a similarly strenuous 90m ascent. I was fine, but I've been working on keeping up some regular physical activity since my stroke back in 2018.

After the light show we walked (slowly) downhill and got a taxi to a recommended restaurant (which was excellent, like all of the food wehad in China). After dinner another taxi back to our hotel, because Heather really could not go any further!

Visiting Guangzhou

The next day we had a leisurely start, repacking everything and catching the train to Guangzhou - around 60 minutes - and then the subway to our hotel. In Guangzhou, shortly after we arrived at our hotel, we were met by Jin, with his wife Niannian, who were determined to show us around Guangzhou in a similar style, so we dropped one night from our Hong Kong stay and booked one night in Nanlang, the town near Zhongshan where Jin and Niannian lived. First we had to visit Guangzhou though, which is apparently the foodie capital of Guangdong province. We had a quick tour of the central pedestrian area around our hotel and then a lovely evening walk around the Yongqing Fang area, including Bruce Lee's house and the Canotonese Opera Museum.

After the museum we walked a little more around the area until it was time for the nightly opera show. It was a beautiful setting, but it was standing only, and without seats it was very tiring to try and concentrate on the action (no subtitles in English, of course), so we didn't stay long before heading back to our hotel.

Guangzhou Day Two: A Market, An Ancestral Academy, Gong Fu Tea and the Canton Tower

Next morning we went to the local Fangcun markets for breakfast. We couldn't properly breakfast on market food because Heather's braces don't allow for unplanned snacking, but the markets were really a place to see some local colour. There was plenty of that though, and I sat down with some of the locals who were playing cards and I had my photo taken with one of them while our hosts chatted and everyone was amused. In Guangzhou there were vastly fewer foreigners in evidence than there had been in Shenzhen (where we did see a few), so we were something of a novelty - and perhaps I'm a bit of a novelty most places I visit, if we're being honest!

Next we made our way to the Chen Ancestral Hall where we learned the function of the ancestral hall and other such academies. It was really interesting to learn how this place was a temporary hostel for people with the "Chen" surname to stay while studying and getting ready for the chinese public service exam. Afterwards, walking through the nearby streets to find somewhere for lunch, we flagged down a street vendor heading to his spot and bought some Mangosteen from him. Circumstances like this really work well with the payment processing systems in China: I scan his barcode and enter the amount, and it's done! Some street vendors have their phone read out the amount they receive on a bluetooth speaker, so they know that you have paid without having to stop cooking.

After our lunch - various fresh fruits bought at the market, and from the street vendor - we went on the subway to YuanYuan, another part of Guangzhou, where we looked around some shops, comparing the

things available in a typical chinese department store with what we would have found back in New Zealand... and the prices... later we returned to buy an extra suitcase because we were accumulating "things", especially a present for our daughter who was at home looking after the cat!

Here we also stopped for "Gong Fu Tea" in a small garden tea house where we spent an hour or so discussing the virtues of free software and other philosophical topics at length. The tea experience was very interesting, with a tiny teapot filled to the brim with finest oolong (well, perhaps not finest, but very fine indeed) and then filled with simmering water and then immediately emptied out into a jug from which it was distributed to the tiny tea cups. Any time someone needed another shot of tea they would refill the pot, empty it into the jug and refresh everyone's shot glasstea cup. With several refills of the boiling water (kept hot on a small hotplate next to the table) we each had countless cups, with the tea flavour still evolving even 90 minutes later, the fifteenth or twentieth time the leaves were doused.

As the sun lowered we got a cab over to Ershadao Island along the banks of the Pearl River for a walk towards the Canton Tower and eventually another evening light show.

Guanghzou to Nanlang

The next day we checked out of our hotel early for a drive to the very modern "Baihua Ancient Temple". Despite it's name, the temple has only been built very recently, complete with underground parking, elevators, and extensive LED lighting schemes: in this part of the world Buddhism has no inherent bias against technology, and seems happy to accept these new things as a normal part of life, alongside the rituals and such. Perhaps this is normal for Buddhism - I don't suppose I actually know many buddhists beyond that one curious friend who claims to be a "buddhist atheist", stating that there is no contradiction in that.

A highlight of our visit to the temple was to sit down to a silent vegetarian lunch with the other visitors and volunteers at the temple. A very contemplative lunch, and we followed others outside afterwards to wash our dishes and cutlery, in the manner of volunteer organisation lunches everywhere. We surely stood out though, and as we were sitting down outside after the lunch a monk came up to us and gave us some fruit "for luck" which was unique. Refusal was not an option, so we ate the fruit a few days later in Hong Kong and it was delicious.

From the temple we continued on to Nanlang, a small city (population 38,000) about the size of our home town in New Zealand where we checked into our hotel, went for a brief walk up and down the main street before Jin returned to take us to the museum/park which is Sun Yat Sen's birthplace. It was interesting to see how Sun Yat Sen has seemingly been co-opted as a founder by both the Chinese Communist Party as well as by the Taiwanese, each highlighting different parts of his life work in the histories they present. It does make one wonder how different the world might have been if he hadn't suffered from illness so young and had lived actively for another ten or twenty years. What neither would dispute is that he was a powerful force behind the removal of the empire though.

Moving on from Sun Yat Sen we visited a small and very pretty nearby village - Qixi - where we strolled around the streets and bought some delicious home made drinks from a street corner vendor. This was very pretty and even seemed perhaps to be something of a destination for people from Zhongshan to come for a bit of quaint rural picturesque scenery - all the signs were there that at times thousands of people descend on the place, so thank goodness we were visiting on a weekday in the winter!

Return to Hong Kong

Our last day in Guangdong we were instructed to be up early to meet Jin and Niannian for a tour of the local market. This was a fun experience again, and much bigger than the one we went to in Fangcun, despite being in a much smaller city. A lot of fish, as one would expect so near the coast, but other stuff that was a bit eye-opening for us. Live poultry that would be sold dead and plucked on-site. Similar for fish. We were talked into buying a decayed duck egg delicacy (I forget the exact name) that had been left for some time. After walking around the market we went to a favourite breakfast restaurant where we had rice noodle pancake somethings stuffed with meat or eggs. They were delicious, of course, and everyone in the restaurant watched our reaction as we sampled the ancient egg... In truth it was quite edible: the white was a sort of brown jelly, and the yolk had some of the consistency (and richness) of foie gras, although with a slightly sulphurous taste.

After breakfast we said farewell to Niannian who had to look after her sick sister and went back to check out of the hotel. From the hotel Jin had one final rural village he wanted to take us to see, where we wandered around for an hour before heading to the local (near new) ferry port to take the ferry back to Hong Kong.

In Hong Kong we had some work to drag our (now three) suitcases from the ferry terminal to the MTR, and then from the MTR to our hotel. We rested for a while and eventually went for a walk to soak up the local atmosphere around Victoria Park and Causeway Bay where we now found ourselves, and a light dinner after all of the fantastic food in Guangdong.

I'll end here and write separately about our final week in Hong Kong - I think this is long enough already!