I’ve been let off my leash. Or rather, I’ve been forced to untether my leash and pay a brief visit to Hong Kong for visa shenanigans - apparently, you used to be able to change a tourist visa to a business visa on the mainland but the Olympics gave the goverment an opportunity to throw a bureaucratic spanner in the works and it hasn’t yet been removed. So here I am in Hong Kong, waiting for my over-priced visa to apear from the travel agents, while James whiles away three peaceful days in Hooters  (I’m not joking, it’s about fifty yards down the road from our flat) back in Beijing.

Despite having to fly both ways (it’s 26 hours on a train and I start work next week), which makes me very grumpy on emotional, environmental and financial grounds, Hong Kong is not a bad place to wait for your visa. The plane was delayed yesterday so I got in very late and decided to catch the Airport Express into town to save time: honestly, after the last five months of rickety buses and smokey train carriages, it was like stepping into the space age. Sleek, bullet-like, weirdly silent and with not a speck of dirt anywhere, it rocketed me into Kowloon at break-neck speed and deposited me into a terminal with so many exits it took me 25 minutes to escape onto the street. I just wandered round in ever decreasing circles, reminding myself of a guy I used to work with when I was involved with British University Sports…he was the sports president at Preston University and he met me in London once to sit on a disciplinaty panel at the BUSA offices. He was Northern Irish, and before going to study in Preston – which he thought was the Metropolis of Metropolises – he’d barely been of his family’s farm in the beautiful Irish countryside. Belfast was like Vegas. When I met him at Euston he’d never been to London before and he looked like an antelope caught in a buffalo stampede. His first words were ‘I was going to meet you at the offices but I don’t know how to get out of here onto the street’.

Anyway, I finally found the right exit and managed to navigate through the packed streets of Kowloon to my hostel, although I nearly got run over about fifteen times through gawping at the lights, smells and immense energy of Nathan Road, the city’s commercial epicentre, not to mention being almost bowled over by the heat. Despite the lateness I took a detour to the harbour to see the pretty lights of Hong Kong Island, which has got to be one of the most beautiful and show-offy urban views anywhere in the world. The water flashes with an electric rainbow of reflections, every skyscraper competes to have the boldest light displays, the hills loom up in the background and you can see the posh houses twinkling smugly up on Victoria Peak - it’s like Singapore on steroids, I cannot imagine what the electricity bill is but clearly they have the money here.

My hostel is possibly Hong Kong’s cheapest at about a tenner a night: the room – a double, allegedly - is a large cupboard with a shoebox for a bathroom, but it’s clean and quiet and I think it’s pretty secure, unless of course the building catches fire in the night which is a definite possibility…has anybody reading ever stayed in Chungking Mansions? It’s amazing – fifteen cavernous floors of little dark corridors, all containing separate guest houses except for the bottom two which hold restaurants and shops run by traders form every conceivable corner of Asia. Indians offer you tailored suits, Cantonese offer you cheap rooms and Jamaicans offer you all sorts of things - it was an interesting place to rock up to at midnight last night but after wandering the money-stuffed streets of Hong Kong Island today I’m quite looking forward to getting back there for a beer tonight. 

I’ve visited a lot of great cities in the past few months but, on first impressions, Hong Kong has probably left me the most open-mouthed. Partly it’s the sky scrapers; they’re so densley packed on the harbour that walking between them you feel like an ant, and partly it’s the ecleticism. It’s like a mixture of Monaco (crowded, hilly), Beijing (Chinese, exotic), London (double-decker buses, anally polite signs about littering, sensible traffic) and Cape Town (views, beaches), with some San Fransisco-style trams and a whole load of people thrown in for good measure. I started the day by visiting the birds and monkies – who are absolutely free to see and very well-looked after – in the zoological gardens, then hid from the heat in Hong Kong Park for an hour or so before spending too much money in the antiques shops on Hollywood Road. I had grand plans for a few museums as well but by the time I got back across the harbour I was reaching sensory overload so I shall go for a quick pint instead.

The visa is sorted and I fly back to Beijing tomorrow, so I won’t have enough time to get to know the city warts and all, but for now I’m happy to treat it like a cheap date: it looks great although I’m not sure how much there is under the surface, and I’ve had enough of for now but I hope to be back…much the same thoughts James is probably having as he emerges from Hooters…on that note, I think I’ll go and get a beer.