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OFF WE GO exploring Hong Kong's notorious black-market bazaar and budget accommodations, and one possible over-populated, multi-ethnic future for all…?
Get your bearings
Although most of Hong Kong's seven million inhabitants live in skyscrapers in the centre of Hong Kong Island, the "Special Administrative Region" is spread over an area of 1,130 square kilometres. Much of this is the New Territories to the north, a peninsula attached to the south of China surrounded by 265 islands, many wild and unpopulated.
At the heart of this former British colony is Hong Kong Island, whose northern rim is lined with skyscrapers in the district, called Central.
Just across Victoria Harbour is Kowloon, the southernmost part of the New Territories.
The classic experience of Hong Kong is, and always has been, a crossing of Victoria Harbour on one of the Star ferries, brave little craft that have been ploughing this short route, back and forth, night and day, for a hundred years…a timeless experience. The ship sails, regular passengers reverse their wooden seat backs with a familiar clatter to catch the cooler breeze, and there is a ringing of bells and shouting of seamen that might sound as if it came directly from the China seas of antiquity. Look around you, though, and you will discover that really this is a voyage of perpetual change. As always the harbour seems to be jammed with a thousand vessels, but they range from the most ravaged and antique of sampans to container ships so futuristic that they scarcely look like ships at all. The skyline of the harbour is sure to be cluttered with construction cranes, and its buildings are a dizzy ensemble of styles, tastes, and ages—vast, showy skyscrapers, drab old tenement blocks, structures clad in gold or silver, massed slabs of concrete and red brick and steel, the whole orchestrated by the inescapable thumping of steam-hammers and violently expressing the power of materialist progress.
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