Hong Kong visits
It was a jittery night after the whole pot of Wulong tea I drank over a nice dinner at a Soho restaurant. Instead of lying in bed waiting for sleep to come – which I sensed wasn’t going to happen soon – I listened to the weekly show of The Archers and to another radio programme. Time passed pleasantly and eventually I fell into a slumber.
It’s Sunday today, my last full day here, and I’ve planned to explore some of Hong Kong’s streets by walking to Central, rather that take the tram. It’s quite a distance, but not at all an unpleasant walk.
This district is not as crowded as some Kowloon areas. There, I saw tiny shops and in such numbers, all so close to one another, that the absurd query came to my mind about how their respective owners could possibly thread their way to their workplace without getting lost and in the evening head back to the right n-th floor of their tenement block. It’s a stupid question, but maybe the same that you’d ask yourself observing close up an anthill with bustling insects, each knowing exactly where to go in what looks like a disorienting mess.
I am ready and willing to break out of the golden cage of Hong Kong and start with rough China. All my papers are in order to enter the mainland and start the Sichuan adventure. My 30-day visa was obtained in a flash and at reasonable expenditure compared to the now costly procedure in Italy that requires applicants to go through a service centre, which levies a hefty handling fee.
Getting to Kangding was a trial of 10 and a half hours, as opposed to the stated 8 hour standard time. The bus was held up three times for long hours, with the rest of the traffic, because of massive roadworks. The last stop, that intervened when the bus had already picked up some speed and made me hope the delay could be partly offset, preceded tens of kilometres of a gigantic upheaval in the landscape, due to the building of a dam. What had looked like fairly idyllic landscape until then, was soon turned into havoc and destruction.
The flight from Shenzhen to Chengdu takes about 2 hours, so I arrived at the hostel at about 8 pm where I got a dorm bed in a stuffy room for two nights. I was glad they served some food on the plane, because I hadn’t had lunch at all owing to my precipitous rush to the airport. At least the fight I was waging against time helped me repress the hunger cramps that were ravaging my stomach.
The weather looks like rain in Kangding this morning and I don’t know exactly how I’m going to spend my time here. I walk uninspired to the centre, to the meeting of the two streams, watch the housewives buy vegetables from the peasant women sitting on the pavement; the traffic clogging the high street, surges of water rushing downstream between the banks. All of a sudden I have a brainwave: I’ll walk out of town toward the hot springs.