Hong Kong harbor

A correction to my last post: we are docked at a Kowloon mall. Hong Kong is across the harbor and presents a terrifying metropolitan facade of glass-sided skyscrapers, many with gigantic animated corporate logos atop them. Some are tall enough that their upper floors disappear in the clouds.

Meanwhile, below, on the water, the green and white Kowloon-Hong Kong ferries take people back and forth. The Kowloon terminal is just past the end of the mall where we're docked, and I figured that I almost have enough energy to take a ferry ride and will never have the opportunity again. I hiked through the mall, past the glittering seductions of the Gucci and Adidas and jewelry and children's clothing stores, out briefly onto the street, and into the ferry terminal.

I stood, puzzled. I had $4 US in my pocket. The token machine instructions were almost completely in Chinese, and I couldn't figure out how much the fare was in Hong Kong dollars, which are 7.75 to 1 HK to US, plus there was no one to whom I could offer my greenbacks. A Chinese man in some kind of official blazer took pity on me.

"Are you a senior?" he asked me.

"Yes," I replied.

"Seniors ride free," he said, pointing me to the appropriate gateway, and I was off.

The ride itself was anticlimactic. We passed a tug pushing a barge loaded with cement mixers eastward. We passed a pretend sampan full of tourists motoring around the harbor. We passed another tug pushing another barge full of cement mixers westward. I'm pretty sure it was another barge. Other green and white ferries chugged off to our right (left coming back), garishly painted harbor tour boats motored past on our left (right coming back), black helicopters racheted across the sky, probably taking executives to boardrooms or government officials to top secret conclaves. It didn't have the feeling of happy anarchy that Sydney Harbour had, but there are probably fewer private boats, plus which Hong Kong feels more commercially purposive than Sydney did, judging on no substantive basis whatsoever.

My fellow ferry passengers ignored it all, engrossed in their own lives because they weren't Riding The Ferry Across Hong Kong Harbor, they were just going shopping or out on lunch break or meeting a friend for coffee. Being on a world cruise tends to capitalize even one's anticlimactic experiences.