Limitless: Hong Kong's soaring buildings are intoxicatingThere are only two places in the world that do not disappoint when you first glimpse them. The first is Manhattan - I always tell my cab driver to make sure he takes a bridge rather than a tunnel, and the first sighting of the jagged skyline never fails to make the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.
The second has to be Hong Kong. I've booked myself into the luxurious Peninsula hotel and it has sent one of its fleet of vintage Rolls-Royces to collect me from the airport. Consequently, I doze in the back, lulled by its squashiness and smoothness, and so only get my first glimpse of the harbour as I enter my room - a penthouse suite.
The scene spread before me is like something out of the movie Blade Runner:
skyscrapers, low-flying helicopters (the hotel's helipad was used in The Dark Knight), and the harbour with its low-tech boats crawling to and fro. Every building is a light show and so every night at eight I make sure I am in my spa bath, windows on all sides, to treat myself. Much of Hong Kong is built on land reclaimed from the sea, and on money, but it's good to know it still, precarious in the midst of a recession, knows how to have fun.
What I like most about the Chinese is that they try to make everything beautiful: even a humble delivery of vegetables, which I find myself sitting next to on the green and white Star Ferry from Kowloon, is trussed up in Chinese newsprint, bound with pink raffia, and nestled in reed baskets.
The ritual surrounding afternoon tea at The Peninsula - an event that always seems to make those 100 Things To Do Before You Die lists - is like watching an elaborate dance: the waiters never hurry, despite the queue for a table that snakes out of the door and alongside the luxury stores outside. (Prada and Versace have numerous size zero clothes - here, it seems, and on Rodeo Drive, are the tiniest women on the planet.)
Just like Manhattan, the best way to see Hong Kong is on foot. And so I decide to take two very different guided tours: one relentlessly urban, the other romantically rural.
The first is an architectural walk through the glass-and-steel cathedrals in which is worshipped the biggest religion of the Far East: money. On Saturday morning, I find myself at the Planning and Infrastructure Exhibition Gallery. I love skyscrapers, the Machu Picchus of our own (probably equally doomed) civilisation.
I've taken similar tours through Manhattan and Chicago, and there really is no better way of understanding a city than to appreciate it through the eyes of its architects.
We start at the HSBC HQ, designed by Norman Foster in 1985, wind our way using the Central Elevated Walkway (so clever - the commuters rushing to work don't have to compete with traffic) to gaze at the round windows of Jardine House, and finally end up at the Bank of China, designed by the Chinese-American architect I. M. Pei, the man who gave us the Pyramids at the Louvre in Paris. Outside, the edges are sharp, like the blade of a knife - the building created a stir when it was approved, as it had no curves, considered essential in Chinese culture, and the approval of feng shui masters had not been sought first.
Inside, the building is hollow, like a piece of bamboo. As long as you take your passport, you can whizz up to the 43rd floor to drink in the view. Right next to it is the International Finance Centre, the seventh-highest building in the world, with its spectacular crown.
My walk, too, takes me on the famous half-mile network of escalators towards Soho (it is located south of Hollywood Street), where I can peer into people's living rooms, and marvel at the jumble of gaudy neon street signs strung across the narrow roads, past the Victorian police station, and the old governor's house in the midst of its leafy gardens.
But it's the new buildings that set your pulse racing - the sheer optimism and audacity of constructing the 118-floor International Commerce Centre on the waterfront in West Kowloon, with the top 15 floors reserved for the Ritz-Carlton hotel, which opens this year. Its rooms will surely have the best view in the world. Hong Kong has a vitality you don't find anywhere else.
The brightest minds in the world come here, make money and leave (I cannot tell you how many beautiful children I see, in a crocodile from the International School, the progeny of rich bankers and beautiful women), making the atmosphere uniquely charged. But while cities like London and New York are surrounded by tangles of motorways and suburbs, the surprise is that Hong Kong is incredibly wild and unspoilt: more than 70 per cent is made up of rural mountains, forests and outlying islands with deserted beaches, where you can spot the famous white dolphins basking.
First, though, I take a very steep tram to the Peak, a good place to get your bearings, and take in the view. Then, with a couple of hours to spare, I take a walk through bamboo forests to the Dragon's Back, on the south-east corner of Hong Kong Island, where rich city boys paraglide at weekends, but where I am content to just gaze at the inappropriately named Repulse Bay, which is quite stunning, and at the multi-million-pound mansions squatting around the golf club.
If you have a day to spare, do as I do and take a hike in the Sai Kung East Country Park, on the easternmost edge of the New Territories, a place accessible only by foot or boat. But remember to bring a sunhat, sun cream, rucksack containing bottled water and walking boots. Slightly more leisurely is a trip to Macau, a World Heritage site, where the villages date back to the 16th Century, and betray their Portuguese colonial past to this day in a fabulous fusion of cooking styles.
Rich culture: Shopping for Chinese delicacies in one of Hong Kong's teeming marketsI do my walks - to the Dragon's Back and the country park - with Marco, a former Swiss banker but now an extremely knowledgeable guide from a small company called Walk Hong Kong. Feeling more adventurous, though, I catch a ferry on my own to one of the 260 outlying islands. Lantau, the largest, is an hour by ferry from Hong Kong Central. This is where the real Chinese live, or expat hippies desperate to escape the rat race, in a jumble of houses overlooking a sandy bay, the mountains looming behind.
If you don't have vertigo, you can catch a Crystal Cabin cable car into the hills, from where you can watch the fishermen on sampans in the harbour and see the bronze statue of Buddha. Cheung Chau is lovely, too, only 20 minutes from Central.
On a beach I cool off by dipping my toes in the sand, and feel a million miles from the teeming humanity of the city.
Travel factsBritish Airways (www.ba.com) flies to Hong Kong twice daily from Heathrow. The flight time is about 12 hours. Return fares start at £571.20.
Room rates at the Peninsula start at HK$4,200 (about £330). Suites cost from HK$11,800 (£1,004) per night. Call 00800 2828 3888, www.peninsula.com. For further information on Hong Kong, visit www.discoverHongKong.com.
Liz Jones's latest book, The Exmoor Files: How I Lost A Husband And Tried To Find Rural Bliss (£6.99, Weidenfeld & Nicolson), is out in paperback.
The original of this article appears in the April edition of High Life magazine, available on all British Airways flights and at bahighlife.com
RSS Feed (xml)
