My ebook: Journeys with the caterpillar

My ebook
"
Journeys with the caterpillar: Travelling through the islands of Flores
and Sumba, Indonesia
" is available at
this link


Tuesday, August 09, 2005

Dixie tour of Hong Kong

I won't call it a Patel tour..kind of like the "Dixie" prefix....and I am a pro in Dixie having done dixies at Chicago, Cincinnati, Singapore, Fredrikshagen...I come prepared, search 2 hrs over the internet to figure out which places I want to see and how to reach there, and then I plunder with my camera...I print out downloaded maps and write in the hour-by-hour plan behind it...Any mistake is going to cost me time and snaps...I check-in all heavy stuff and just carry a back-pack with a back-up of undergarments, socks and headache pills...
I land at 5:30 AM at Hong Kong and have eight hours in between flights...By the time I get out of the airport, the sun has come out... Now before I start on a Dixie, I always play some groovy electronic music on my head (to help my body not think about its loss of time-zone sense )..I start off at Kowloon, "Firestarter" playing...Promenade, Avenue of stars, Star boat ferry to Central, Victoria Peak tram ride, the Peak, Hong Kong Park..they all fall one by one before my camera...By the time I reach the worlds longest escalator, the heat and humidity has drenched me and legs are aching..I play some heavy metal to take my mind off the pain..I go up 1/4th the height in the escalator, I get the idea, come down, head off to Man Mao Temple..Now one thing that freaks me out when I am on a dixie is when I find that maps are not drawn to scale..I play "Primus-Electric Uncle Sam"...At Man Mao, I stand next to some worshippers and take snaps of their Gods..Funny, how worshippers and snap-happy tourists stand side by side in the cramped temple with totally different motivations, each waiting for his moment..Mission accomplished, I head back to the airport and change my clothes at the Cathay lounge..Content, at another clinically executed trip, I play a more happy tune - "NoFx" version of "Kill all the white men" :-)...
Suddenly on the flight I realize a mistake.. At any new place I visit, I ensure that I do a no. 2 there and I missed it at Hong Kong...

2 comments:

Kaps said...

if u had gone one month later u could have seen the Disneyland. Did u visit the Buddha in Lantau island?

Shivaji said...

Yes I did....Checked that out in the bus tour of Lantau...
By the way, they have made the MTR line go all up the way to Disneyland