After our climb to The Big Buddha, the tofu pudding, the glass gondola return trip, we rode the Hong Kong subway into the heart of the city for a visit to The Peak. The Peak is the highest vantage point in Hong Kong for viewing the central city.
Getting to The Peak, like getting to The Big Buddha, requires riding a rare form of transportation. In this case it was a 10 minute ride on a 125 year old tram railway that ascends 1300 feet in 10 minutes. Officially, the gradient is between 4 and 27 degrees, but from a passenger's perspective it seemed closer to 45 degrees, with most of the trip on the steepest part of that spectrum.
When the tram left the station and began to climb, we thought, momentarily, that we would be in big trouble if the mechanism that grips the cable failed. Five or six minutes into the climb, we began to wish the old trains had head rests. The ride was a serious and literal pain in the neck.
Nonetheless, the ride was clearly an improvement over the means of transportation employed prior to the building of the tram in 1888. In those days, anyone wishing to ride to the top was carried in a frail bamboo sedan chair, powered by what the brochure calls "two strong coolies." As with their brothers who power rickshaws, apart from the benefit of the exercise for "staying in shape" it is hard to imagine an upside to a job like this. I found no information about the time required for a sedan chair hike to the vista.
At the top of the tram run, we disembarked at the base of The Peak Tower; at the top of this tower is the best view of Hong Kong anywhere. Six or seven escalators and one more ticket booth later, we arrived on Sky Terrace 428.
We arrived a little early for the light show that begins at dusk. The light show is not entertainment as, say, a laser show might be. It is simply the point at which the tall new buildings around the harbor in the center of Hong Kong turn on their external lights. This kind of light show is a fairly common feature of the modern Chinese cities we have visited so far. The lights in downtown Guangzhou, for example, are quite impressive.
As with the tram itself, I had trouble getting a clear picture of the lights themselves as they came to life on cue, which was 6:30 if I remember correctly. My difficulty this time was not motion but the fog, the crowds (which became denser as 6:30 approached) and, of course, my on-going camera issues.Street level Hong Kong was reasonably warm on this day in January, but the air at The Peak, given the departing sunlight and the steady breeze was rather cool.
After dinner in the tower we took the tram back down the steep hill. To my surprise, we rode backward down the hill. Too bad, I thought it would have made for better viewing to see where we were going rather than where we had been. Then it occurred to me that forward facing seats would have dumped us onto the floor as soon as we hit the slope.
We had a set up an elaborate system to be sure we awoke on time to catch the shuttle over to the airport for our flight back to the States. But the arrangements were unnecessary. At 5 a.m. the fire alarm jolted us out of bed. We went to the door and looked out at the empty hallway. No smoke, no burning smell.
Pretty soon Yujia appeared at our door to say, "Don't worry. Just stay in the room."
We did. The alarm stopped. We debated going back to bed and decided against it. The fire trucks that had gathered on the driveway below our window turned off their lights and rumbled away.
After welcoming us aboard for our trip home, the captain said we would have strong tail winds so we could expect a shorter trip to New York. But when he turned off the seat belt sign, the largest Asian woman I have ever seen flopped her seat back into my lap, and I knew it was going to feel like a long trip regardless of how much time the tail winds saved us.
No comments:
Post a Comment