30 — Sunday, March 21, 1999 —

HONG KONG: That
14-hour flight from
Vancouver but a
blurred memory (was I
supposed to avoid alco-
hol or water?) I have a
clear view of Hong
Kong’s waterfront
from the Mandarin
Griental Hotel.

Vm looking for Chinese
gunboats but ail I can sce is
the Star Ferry,

Other than the Chinese
flag outside the Post Office,
not much seems to have
changed since my last visit
before the handover of the
British colony to China. The
People’s Liberation Army
now occupies the nearby
Prince of Wales building,
where the British forces
called the shots between gin
and tonics, but astonishingly
its name has not been
changed.

The rickshaw men, last of
a breed whose Wanchai
brothers made no-squeak
shoes for sailors, still tour
wearily for picture poses at
the ferry dock, cell-phone
users bark Cantonese above
the din of crowded sidewalks
and everywhere one turns
there are even more shopping
centres the size of small
countries.

One difference is that
there are not so many shop-

ADVENTURE

North Shore News

Close shaves are still available in Hong Kong, and in the street, too, where it’s business as usual.

pers or tourists from the big-
spending countries of Asia
such as japan. Harbour City,
with 700 shops, may be the
biggest mall on the planet,
bur the designer stores are
having to slash prices to stay
in business. The huge new
airports’s 130 retail spaces, a
record number in the world
of duty free, were all but
deserted when I caught my
Canadian Airlines flight from
Hong Kong to Bangkok.
Hotels too are having to
cut prices to attract business,
ail to the advantage of
Canadian tourists who con-

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For Canadians it’s still a
major gateway to Asia and a
lively place to explore and
draw a breath before moving
on.

Chris Patten, the last
British governor, may be his-
tory but his favourite cake

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shop, the Tai Cheong in
Central, is still going strong,
and what’s more the street
name remains the very British
Lyndhurst Terrace.

Bonham Road is as fasci-
nating as ever, a maze of
small shops selling everything

AIR CANADA
AEROPLAN

from lotus leaves for wrap-
ping rice dumplings to gin-
seng in brandy. Swallows nest
for soup, and good complex-
ions, are more expensive than
caviar,

Eating in Hong Kong,
always a pleasure, offers more
choice than ever from two
Michelin three-star restaurants
to food malls where the thun-
der of chopsticks is heard
nighdly. One of the liveliest
nighttime places is Lan Kwai
Fong, where some restaurants
such as Va Bene was busy, but
ominously, others were not.

Another evening I took a
cruise boat trip to the fisher-
men’s village of Lep Yue
Mun. Hong Kong harbour at
night is quite an experience
and Lep Yue Mun a wender-
ful maze of fish shops, but
the barn of our restaurant
had more waiters than cus-
tomers.

Not so the Bela Vista at
Macau, always 2 delightful
place for lunch. The terrace
of the old colonial pile hosted
a throng enjoying African
chicken in its twilight days
prior to the imminent han-
dover of Macau to China
when the Bela Vista, sadly,
will become the home of the
Portuguese consul-general.

The famed view from the
Bela Vista now includes the
70-storey Bank of China
building and some of the
40,000 empty apartments

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