“Eeeeeerrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrkkkk!”
The bus gives an alarming lurch as we swing round another corner, the driver seemingly with one foot hard onto the accelerator, the other just a forcefully applied to the brake. My hand, trying in vain to scribble in my notebook, swerves off the page again, providing another useful line of blue biro to add to my recent collection.
I’m taking the express bus from Causeway Bay down to the south of Hong Kong island for shopping, lunch and a bit of a wander, but I’m petrified that I might not make it. The bus is obviously called an Express for a reason: the bat-out-of-hell thundercat at the wheel. Every time we hit a corner on this very windy cross-island highway she accelerates – hard – and I debate whether I will reach my destination in one piece.
I think about asking her to slow down but the supremely English need never to make a fuss has me by the metaphorical balls so I just put my notebook down and hold on for dear life, trying to concentrate instead on the scenery.
Despite the hazy mist of a Hong Kong winter’s day, I can see why the south of the island is often regarded as its most beautiful landscape. Even in the midst of the ‘Bitter Moon’ (the coldest time of year) the sea is a delicious turquoise and the land rises steeply from the beach-lined coastline into pretty hump-backed hills.
Despite the winter haze, Stanley's bay is very blue-tiful
Unlike skyscraper-filled Central, the scenery has changed so little in the south over the last 150 years that you could recognize it from early colonial paintings: the same calm bays and hill forts (although these tend to be museums or hotels now). As the bus lurches through Deep Water Bay and on into Stanley, I half close my eyes (which I am doing intermittently anyway out of terror) and I can imagine those bay-moored yachts are a flotilla of galleons, full of spices from the East Indies.
We screech to a halt in the southern town of Stanley, the brakes making a ‘Kerrrchunk’ noise that makes me throw myself off with gratitude. I trot down the hill for a browse around the market, which is Stanley’s main attraction and one of the best places to pick up all kind of Chinesey crap for your mantelpiece. I manage to curb my spending madness for the most part (for once), although I have to confess to getting sucked into buying some Mao Tse Tung communist drinks coasters (just right for annoying Tory friends).
After an hour or so browsing the pretty knick-knacks of the market, I’m a bit cold and very hungry so decide it’s time for some lunch. Hitting an LP-recommended cheapo, Toby’s Inn, I order my first real dim sum (or as they call it here ‘Yum Cha’ – to take tea), asking the bemused waiter to just bring me a few ‘bits of whatever’s good’.
Looking around, the reason for his bemusement becomes clearer. I’m the only non-Chinese face in the whole restaurant and was getting some curious looks. The place is heaving. All kinds of people are out ‘taking tea’ for Sunday lunch – it’s a very typical Hongkongese activity. There are a number of big family groups (one with the typical screaming baby), singles, couples, friends. A boy of about five sits next to his scolding mother stuffing rice into his mouth as fast as it will fit, mastering his chopsticks in a way that puts this fork-loving pretender to shame.
The ‘bits of something good’, when they come after about 2 minutes, were just that. Exactly as I had imagined real Chinese dim sum to be – hot, comforting and just fatty enough, like a meaty bowl of chicken soup – there are three wicker bowls straight from the steamer. A wrapped leaf with rice that turns out to contain chunks of marinated pork, three dumplings – surprisingly light and lemony, and some steamed rolls, each contained an unbelievably moist chicken wing, the meat tumbling out of the wrapper and almost into my tea cup. I drink tiny cup after tiny cup of the tea to wash all of this down, feeling gradually warmed from the core out.
Yum Cha: what the Cantonese call Dim Sum. And 'Yum' is right!
Afterwards I roll out of the restaurant in a cloud of warm chicken-infused air. Disgusted with my piggery, I direct all my powers into a desperate attempt at digestion. (By this point I’m not surprised it’s considered good manners in China to burp after a meal, just slightly surprised that it’s not also polite to fart, belch or vomit a little on the floor (a la the Romans), just out of sheer necessity.) I suggest to myself a bracing walk along the promenade, sucking down lungfuls of cold air as a digestif.
The harbour front provides a glimpse into another world. While in Toby’s Inn I was the only European, here I could be strolling along the Riviera, with dozens of families sitting out in the winter sunshine at posh pubs and bistros, with hardly a Chinese face among them. I do see a couple of Chinese taitais (ladies who lunch) doing what they do best, complete with tiny handbag-dogs, both sporting fashionable outfits. And yes I do mean the dogs, not just the women.
Surprisingly, rather than the Pekinese or Shih Tzus or other Asian dog breeds, most Hong Kong dogs I have seen here are decidedly British: labs and retrievers, Scotties, Yorkies…even a Corgi or two. But then Stanley seems rather a British place, with the exception of the Chinese-style tat in the market. It was the British ruler’s first administrative centre straight after the First Opium Wars, named after Lord Stanley, 14th Earl of Derby, Secretary of State for War and the Colonies and the town’s landmarks include Murray House, a 19th century building with elaborate colonnades that couldn’t look more colonial if it had a Union Jack paint job and a man in a three-cornered hat doing a little dance on the roof, and – just out of town – the Stanley Military Cemetery, where hundreds of British colonials were buried during the second world war.
It seems to be my fate, having once been a geneournalist (my soon-to-be-patented term for a family history journalist), to end up in a huge number of cemeteries. While I was editor at FHM I took pictures in graveyards as far-flung as Edinburgh, Belfast, St Albans, The Gambia, Thailand. And here I found myself in Hong Kong doing it again. OK, this was for a freelance piece so I will be paid for them, but God, did it feel like a Busman’s Holiday.
The overwhelming majority of the deaths remembered here were from fighting or internment during WWII (the topic of a piece I’m writing), and just reading names and dates tells a gruesome story. At the entrance to the cemetery starts a long line of young soldiers – British and Canadian – all of whom died in just a few days of December 1941, in an ultimately cursed attempt to stop the Japanese invasion.
Hong Kong's fallen volunteers at the Stanley Military Cemetery
Towards the back of the cemetery there are a number of rough-hewn lumps of stone with wobbly black engravings – these all date from 1942-5, and belong to civilians who died in the infamous internment camps at Stanley Prison and Stanley Fort. A small circle of these belong to babies who died at just a couple of weeks or months old. And then there’s a mass grave with the names of 30 people who died in an air raid in 1945, not 2 months before the war’s end. An air raid by the British on their countrymen in the camps – friendly fire, at its most pathetic.
After snapping enough pics to keep the good readers of FHM happy for months, I turn and walk back into town, taking in the bay, the dog walkers, the last few stragglers on the beach as the sun started to set. I like the old-fashioned feel of the place, understand why this has been a popular settlement since the Brits first landed back in the 1840s.
Stanley would be a great place to live, I think – good food, good beaches, lots to do. And it’s easy to get here from Central. I’d definitely come back again. But next time I’ll be taking the slow bus.
