We woke up the next morning to the alarming sound of no rain dripping. Looking out the window, it was finally possible to see the bay, where unspoilt yellow rays of sun were caressing several large, business-looking boats. There was no traditional Hong Kong junk to be seen (That's the name of the ship form; I can't help it.) but at least it was possible to imagine one sailing on these waters.
"That's it. I'm going to Victoria's Peak," Orit announced promptly.
On the flight, on the way to Hong Kong, a tourism film instructed us to head to Victoria's Peak (which is to Hong Kong what Central Park is to Manhattan) on our first clear day, because from the summit one is able to have a spectacular view of Hong Kong in all its glory.
Here's what Orit saw when she got there:
The moral of this story, of course, being that even if the rain has stopped, it doesn't mean the cloud cover is gone, and that no rain now doesn't guarantee no rain twenty minutes from now. As it stood, Orit was in for a goodish amount of water. I, on the other hand, spent the morning in bed, where I was right up to the time in which we had to clear the room.
Checking out from the room, however, was only the beginning of the trouble. Our flight was late in the evening, and I had no idea what to do for the remainder of the day. Right up until roughly four p.m., until Orit came back from Victoria's Peak and joined me, I was over in the train station, eating at the Macker's place and increasing our stock of glassware. (Our suitcases were by this point all overflowing, and I had no idea where to even store these.)
But, ultimately, no amount of delaying was enough. We had to go out to see at least one thing in Hong Kong. To put it quite bluntly, until that moment, I was never technically even in Hong Kong, as our hotel was on the island of Kowloon, and Hong Kong island was on the other side of the bay.
We finally agreed on the one item we found in the brochures in the hotel lobby that seemed mildly agreeable. It was the annual Hong Kong magic convention, and was situated conveniently in Hong Kong island. I pulled on a rain poncho (gave up on the umbrellas altogether) and we were on our way.
When Orit asked the lobby attendant in charge of tourist information what the best way to reach the convention center is, she pointed us to a ferry service that was a walking distance away (at least, when it's not raining) from where the hotel shuttle lets people out. To this plan I said "no, thank you", and we headed on our way to the subway station.
The subway ride cost three times as much as the ferry, but you got there faster and had the added advantage of not having to set foot on a boat in this rotten weather. I had enough boat-time during our whale-watching adventure in Sydney, thank you very much.
Having made our drenched way into the subway station, what greeted us were a bunch of large LCD displays all announcing rather animatedly that it is "Typhoon Warning - Condition Yellow". We tried asking about this, in order to find out what Condition Yellow was all about, what other colors there are, and what we were supposed to do if conditions ever change their color to something more ominous. We never got any answers. The people we tried to speak to were all quite fluent in Cantonese, but we were not. In the end, judging by the hustle and bustle of the station, we decided that Condition Yellow is probably nothing to worry our minds about, and we just went ahead with the plan. Secretly, I was wondering whether this was what our cab driver meant, on the way to the hotel, when he said that we were expecting a "maybe yellow storm". I suppose it could have been.
Well, I won't keep you in suspense: the magic show was a big flop. All it was about was small cubicles, in each of which a sales-person was supposedly performing magic tricks, but was actually trying to sell a box of accessories. The tricks were performed in Cantonese, but this didn't make it any harder to see exactly how they were done. There was nothing there to write home about. Also, they had there a "central stage", where the main act was - surprise - a juggling act, and also a "magic tent", which cost extra money to enter, and we had no inclination to fall for that one, too.
I was trying to be thorough, though, in order to be quite certain that no one, in any of the cubicles, was displaying anything that was of slightly higher standards. This wasn't trivial to do, due to the large number of little children clustering around each cubicle. One had to break through this siege in order to see anything at all. Orit decided she didn't need to join in, and chose, instead, to watch the juggler (who performed in English, spoken in a southern U.S. accent, putting in a local Cantonese word every now and then. This never ceased to make the crowd laugh).
I asked her: "How will we find each other afterward? We need to set up a meeting place."
Smiling, she answered: "How hard do you think it can be to find a blond guy in this place?"
"Pretty difficult, I would say," I retorted, "I've been looking for one for three days and still haven't found any."
In the end, we did find each other with no problem, and made our way out of the center (where the magic convention was just one of many things going on, and was difficult to find even once you were inside the building complex), out of Hong Kong island (It was three blocks to the subway station, but luckily all of it was through sheltered passages two-stories up in the air), back to the hotel (to get all our luggage, of which there was by then a whole lot), and to the airport.
At first we thought to take the hotel shuttle to the airport, but this was so expensive, we decided to opt for a taxi, instead. We fished out the business card we got from the cab driver on the first day and phoned him up to ask him if he wanted to take this ride. He answered that he'll be happy to take us to the airport if we give him a 24-hour heads up on the matter. We decided against. So, finally, we just took a regular cab from the hotel and made our way through the various islands of Hong Kong and the complex of large bridges connecting them, to the airport.
Roughly a month after our departure, the Hong Kong Disneyland was scheduled to open, and already the road-signs were all pointing to this fact. This attraction is situated a stone's throw away from the airport, so we saw quite a few of these road-signs. They generally look something like this: on the green background of the sign, you see a white arrow pointing the way. Under this arrow is the white silhouette of an airplane, and under that, three slightly overlapping white circles, forming the silhouette of Mickey Mouse's head.
Goodbye, Hong Kong. If we ever come here again, you can count on it being after carefully checking the season and researching the projected weather.