Spending Time in Hong Kong - Without messing about with maps!

Four days in Hong Kong. Just right!

I'm not going to preach about what's best to do, just how I like to spend my time there.

The Jade Market: This is a fanastic place, full of nick-nacks and friendly stall holders who are eager to haggle over their wares. You can spend hours in this place and never get bored.

Hong Kong Park Aviary: Sounds dull - isn't!! This place is fantastic, especially if you're looking to chill out and recover a little from jet lag. It's the size of a football field, drops down some thirty feet (ten meters) from the walkways, is chock-a-block with fully grown trees, and is entirely covered with a semi-permeable roof that allows the rain, light and breeze to pass through it. The birds flutter around the place and probably don't even realise that they're incarcerated in this huge capsule.

I love to spend a couple of hours here, just standing or sitting around while the most unbelievably gorgeous birds and small dear go about their business. It's quite usual to be stood in a spot for a quater of an hour and then notice a bright orange bird sitting a couple of feet away right in front of you.

OK, so it's possibly not everyone's cup of tea, but I'm no twitcher, and this is fab.

The Night Market: Vibrant, busy, massively interesting! The Night Market is in Kowloon (just over the bay from HK proper) and is a must to visit. It's open every night, and stretches a mile or two right up Temple Street. Even if you don't want to buy any of the fake labels or latest technology out of Japan or China, it's thriving with entertainment and food stalls. Just the atmosphere alone makes it worth a visit. I do, just about every night that I'm there!

Hong Kong Science Museum: Great fun if it rains...or doesn't actually! There's tons to do here, loads of it being interactive and not at all focused on kids, although they love it too. Rather than me bashing on about it, /www.lcsd.gov.hk/CE/Museum/Science/eindex.php">have a look for yourself.

Just walking around in the city is a treat. It'll take you an hour or two to walk straight through Kowloon (via a 15 minute ferry trip) and get to the other end of Hong Kong; longer if you have your eyes open and want to do things! The street markets are great; livestock, clothes, watches and jewellery for sale - everything. There's no need to catch a taxi or bus or tube, or anything if you don't want/need to - the ferries are a good idea though if you don't want to get wet!!

OK, not the usual list of things to do in Hong Kong, and not exhaustive either, but possibly something different to consider if you're lucky enough to get out there.

Nightmare Asia! - January 2003, Hong Kong

Flying into Hong Kong always gets me excited. I love the place and drop in for a few days every time I travel out to Oz or NZ. The place has a massive atmosphere; it always smells of...something. It's usually just that 'Hong Kong smell', but every now and again it changes to something fantastic, and on rare occasions to something not too hot!!

As I was moving up the east coast of Asia, I thought I'd show that area of the map. Sorting out the coast and islands such as the Philippines was no real problem, but when confronted with the heavily populated areas of China it became a bit of a nightmare. I can't remember how many 'first' drafts of this area I went through, but I nearly gave up; especially when I realised that the whole of Asia would be similarly difficult to de-construct into underground form. The problem was the lack of natural barriers like the ocean that more or less corral the cities into logical lines. The Asian interior is just a jumble of places without any formal linear structure (no offence intended interior Asian folks). Just look at the sketch of eastern Asia:



After hours of frustration, it finally came together into a cohesive, believable format. Hallelujah, I was happy! Needless to say, the featured sketch isn't the final version (it's a mess), but it shows some of the difficulties involved.

The next step in my journey was the homeward stretch, but as I like Hong Kong so much I'll plug it a little more. The next part of the map was western Asia.

I'll be writing more soon.

This finished artwork from an Asian viewpoint

'Asiocentric' is available to view and purchase online @ gallerisation.co.uk

[Online gallery artwork is necessarily small in order to avoid reproduction]

Best 'Til Last

Wow, if there's ever a good place to see in the New Year, Sydney's got to be right up there with it!! The city's busy but not so much as to get jostled; everyone gets a good view of the proceedings and all of the proceedings are in one good view. It's fairly perfect - oh, and it's T-Shirt weather too. Compare this to sub-zero Yorkshire, England avoiding leary would-be-kissers, beer drenched clothes and foot-treading aplenty...I think I know where I'd like to be!

Anyway, the featured area of this article is South East Asia. I'd pondered getting straight to work on Europe, but being a European I figured (rightly as it turned out) that that Continent would be the easiest to define as an underground map. Better save that to last then - especially seeing as I was looking forward to doing that bit the most.

Here's the South East Asia sketch below. As with all the areas of the world (yes, even Europe), it took hours and hours of trial and error and atlas scanning before I was happy with the end result.



This isn't the sketch that was produced on the plane from Auckland to Sydney, but it was this area that was featured - in a much rougher format at that time.

Back in Sydney, and England were fiddled out of the Fifth Test as Steve Waugh was out around three times before the umpire finally gave him out. The Aussies were in a bit of a panic as Andy Caddick and Steve Harmison set about them, but they scraped home in the end to put the seal on a good old fashioned drubbing. Still, Sydney's a nice place!!

More incursions into Asia next time.

This finished artwork from an Antipodean viewpoint, 'Antipocentric' is available to to view and purchase online @ Gallerisation Just click the image!

[Online gallery artwork is necessarily small in order to avoid reproduction]