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A HANKERING FOR HONKERS

The mode of arrival in Hong Kong is the first dramatic difference you notice when returning to Hong Kong after an absence of nearly twenty years. I discovered the magic of the MTR which I’ll get to later.

This " old China hand" is old enough to remember the days of the white-knuckle landings at Kai Tak Airport at overcrowded Kowloon.

After a seemingly endless flight north from Australia, hour after droning hour of blackness, the jet would do a sudden left turn and it was like arriving in Vegas.

The myriad lights of Hong Kong burst below, and around, you. Even then, they didn’t call this the City of Lights for nothing.

And if you arrived in the daytime it was even more exciting -- for a different reason.

To say that residential space in Hong Kong is rare is about as obvious as saying there may be sugar in Pavlova.

Consequently, by twenty years ago, Hong Kong’s so-called International Airport had been virtually built out by high-rise apartments. Forests of them. And they were so close, as you came in for landing, you could have checked to see if the clothes festooning tiny balconies were still damp. You could even have reached in and changed the channel on the TV.

I was last in Hong Kong nearly twenty years ago-eons before the Chinese ended the British 99-year lease on the colony and hauled it back under

(supposedly) mainland control.

In 1983, under an obviously sceptical management team at Melbourne’s 3AW, I had the loony idea of flying to Beijing to do the first ever live radio broadcast to the west.

We flew to Canberra to get visas, had a dry run in Honkers, and then flew on the dubious CAAC to Beijing.

I won’t bore you with details about how a two dollar padlock on my Beijing radio studio door at 5a.m. and dunderheaded, obtuse, communist officials almost thwarted me but we got to air and the radio trailblazer won me the Grand Award at the International Radio Festival in New York some months later.

Maybe that is part of my continuing warm and fuzzy feeling towards Asia.

I have often had an ambivalent attitude towards this part of the world. For many of us a bring-your-own saucepan for dubious chow mien or chop suey from the Chinese local on a Sunday night was our big family moment of culinary enlightenment.

The best man at my first wedding bravely headed off to Honkers next morning to blaze his new journalistic career in Asia. He was back in Sydney, chastened, four days later following the shock revelation that Hong Kong was " full of Chinese". And his Kiwi wife-to-be, he said, "hated Chinese food".

Hardly the world’s best investigative journalist. Could never work out why he even contemplated going there.

For many Aussies Hong Kong has been their first overseas port of call. Their first taste of exotica. The first experience of (jeeeeez!) duty free shopping. A world of cheap booze and watches and Walkmans and ciggies. Well, it was.

I’m not sure that is still so much the case? Hong Kong (especially Kowloon) is, like Singapore, still one endless duty free strip but when you can buy duty free booze and perfume at Sydney or Melbourne airports on your return why bother? And now, with the Australian dollar worth less than four to the HK equivalent, the bargains aren’t so obvious.

But one of the big surprises of Hong Kong 2001 is the lack of surprises caused by the forced British handover of the island territory back to the Chinese.

Images remain of a tearful Christopher Patton (the last British Governor) folding the Union Jack as the 99-year lease ran out and the sun finally set on the Empire in this part of the world when the clock struck midnight on New Year’s Eve 1997.

Honkers could never be the same. It would regress under Beijing oppression.

We saw Chinese guards in olive tunics and bristling with weaponry taking to the streets as Crowns and words like " Royal" were peeled off building facades.

The surprise is it hasn’t happened. Hong Kong is as hedonistic and as capitalistic as ever. The finance district skyscrapers keep going up and up. The foreigners still congregate in expensive drinking and eating enclaves like Soho and Lang Kwai Fong on Hong Kong Island.

And, across the water, the undisputed crown of capitalism, The Peninsular Hotel, still flourishes. On my recent count there were five Bentleys and Rolls Royces in the hotel driveway-and they were just for guests’ airport and cruise ship transportation.

Liner cruising is booming in Asia for Asians with Hong Kong and Singapore the springboard cities for Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam and (increasingly) mainland China ports like Zhanjiang. Recent three and five-day pre-Christmas trips on the Star Cruises Super Star Leo were full and that towering liner carries 2000 guests.

But speaking of transportation: my biggest, newest impression of Hong Kong hit as soon as the plane touched down at the new multi-billion airport off Lantau Island.

It was suggested we take a train to Hong Kong Island - which sounded pretty suss. It was as smooth as silky noodles.

Spotless, air-conditioned, wide carriages with comfortable airline seats and a TV screen in the back of each headrest. Twenty minutes later we were in the heart of Hong Kong Central. Later, I discovered that from hotels, like the Island Shangri-la or the Conrad International, you can check your bags from the station below the hotels right on to your flight at the airport.

For a couple of Aussie dollars you can forget the Star ferry and take the MTR to most places you want to go. Koowloon. Wan Chai. Causeway Bay. Fast. Clean. Efficient.

Mussolini campaigned on making the trains run on time and maybe that’s what the new Chinese regime is doing in Hong Kong.

It meant I didn’t take a late night Star Ferry from under the clock tower. Like in the old movies of the Orient. And sort of missed it.

©Copyright Derryn Hinch 2002