Witchboy Goes to Honk Kong
Day Five -- Travel Day
I had breakfast with Holt (by accident), then went out for some last minute shopping
before packing. I wanted to go to Sougo(?) to hit a place referred to as the
Japanese Megastore, but I ran out of time. I had a good time talking to Holt
and spent a lot more time at breakfast than I would have otherwise. (Eventually,
I would make my airport gate in HK with 11 minutes to spare before "gate
closed" time.) So, rushed, I used the hotel shuttle to get back to the
airport and skipped the megastore. (Damn. I've been looking for this particular
pair of shoes...I dragged Doug and Bernie into a dozen shoe stores across HK.)
The shuttle bus wove through downtown through the corroded, peeling buildings away from
the convention center, stopping at other hotels. I finally saw someone walking
a dog on a leash.
If I had used the train, as I initially wanted to, I would have missed yet another awe-striking
view -- the HK dockyards. The shuttle bus crossed two bridges and passed near
another, and I thought all three were nearly as impressive as Golden Gate. Just
as I was wrapping my mind around that, I noticed the dockyards. It seemed to
go on for miles: Massive freighters and thousands of colored shipping crates
(the ones pulled by eighteen wheeled trucks). Sometimes the crates were stacked
20 high, towering like buildings. Just as I was wondering how the workers stacked
them, I saw a fleet of bizarre orange vehicles. They consist of four tall, stilt-like
legs of rusted metal. At the top, there is a small cockpit for two drivers.
A crane can be dropped from the belly of the cockpit down to grab the crates
and life them a hundred feet off the ground. The stilted orange loaders are
mobile too -- there are wheels at the base of each leg. Jules Verne came to mind
as I watched. (Someone later told me that these cranes inspired Lucas to include
the AT-AT in Empire Strikes Back.)
Words cannot do justice to this dockyard--Houston is a city of something like four million
people and it does a significant amount of business, including a lot of petrochemical
industrial shipping stuff. But the dockyard that gives access to HK's Victoria
Harbor just completely dominates anything similar that I've ever seen.
It's really rare to be presented with a view that just defies experience. In HK, this happened
three times. The word city is inadequate. The place is unbelievable.
Vibrant, chaotic, yet weirdly ordered, vertical
beyond belief, ancient, yet ultra modern, and completely
jammed with activity around the clock.
I'm really thankful that the GTEC staff invited me to HK. Their conference could eventually
be very important. Special thanks to Doug and Bernie, who (like Jason in Montreal)
were psyched to show me around.
P.S. The final hours of the trip home were grueling. The in-flight movies were
Tomb Raider, Planet of the Apes and Serendipity. (I watched the latter, which
was interrupted like 23 times by bad turbulence warnings from the captain.)
HK's airport was a dream of clarity, well designed. Meanwhile, I now hate the
airport at San Francisco. As bad as it was, the airport at Phoenix should be
bombed from orbit. I could list about a hundred major 'bugs' that they should
fix. Also, I finally got searched: All my bags taken apart, removal of my shoes,
everything short of a strip search.
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