You can take a girl out of her transport geek comfort zone, but you can’t take the transport geek out of the girl

[Written on Thursday 12th June]

So, in the interests of research, today I planned a highly detailed reconnaissance itinerary of various areas of Hong Kong with the ultimate objective of happening upon the ideal place to live. Ideal of course being not polluted, some green space, lots of good shops, restaurants and bars, with fantastic apartment buildings hiding away flats that are huge, but cheap because no-one knows about them. Oh and a stone’s throw from the MTR so Colin can get to work easily. Anybody else thinking I might be reconn-ing for a very long time?

My first port of call was to be Olympic, one MTR stop up from where we are at present and attractive not least because of the short commute to the Lehman office, and also, being in Kowloon, more reasonably priced. (MTR map below, but you'll probably need to click on it to be able to view it without a lot of squinting.) Disembarking and coming off the escalator, I was faced with a choice I’d not come across before; did I want to go to Olympian City 1 or Olympian City 2? Being the extremely logical person that I am, it seemed wise to tackle them in numerical order so I headed off across the covered walkway to see what delights awaited me.

Hmm…apart from the huge restaurant and seating area which took up most of the open space in the middle of the shopping centre and the cheap and cheerful Park’N’Shop supermarket, every other shop seemed very Chinese, and seemed to mainly consist of estate agencies, domestic helper recruitment agencies, a music shop and an amusement arcade. Not the most exciting mall I’ve ever been to, it must be said. There was a door to the outside though, so I braced myself for the humidity (it was a very hot day) and went to look around.

All the apartment buildings immediately outside the station/mall complex seemed pretty nice; high rise towers probably built in the last five or six years, predominantly with sea views and no more than a 5-7 minute walk to the station – not the completely covered and air-conditioned trip from apartment to train that I’d been getting used to, but really not bad either. I wandered around, I sat in the sun, I made some notes and was fairly certain that I wouldn’t mind bumming around there if the apartments were up to scratch. The only thing niggling at me was whether I could live with Olympian City 1 being my local shops – though I reasoned that I could always nip down one stop on the MTR to the shopping centre I’m currently living above if necessary.

But wait; I’d forgotten about Olympian City 2! It was only as I went back over the walkway to the station and saw firstly, a kid with a McDonald’s drink and secondly, a woman with a Starbucks container, that I thought there must be more to this Olympic place! And yes indeedy, there was. Olympian City 2 is much newer, brighter and more shiny than it’s (I’m presuming) predecessor. It has western shops, some cracking bakeries and a huge Taste supermarket (slightly pricier than Park’N’Shop but good for hard to get western can’t-live-without items; hell, they even sell Waitrose stuff in there!)

So, crisis averted. The facilities meet my requirements and the apartment buildings look good. I carried on with my itinerary as I couldn’t really pretend to Colin that I’d carried out extensive research if I just went to one place, so I went to Mei Foo with the intention of changing MTR lines. While making the rather long walk to from the West Rail to the Tsuen Wan (the MTR is still quite a newly unified system, previously being a number of different separate railways, so they haven’t quite got the hang of these interchange stations yet), I got a glimpse of Mei Foo and it looked very pleasant – there was a lot of lovely greenery right outside the station – my only concern was that it’s not a very straightforward journey to get to Central. Still, worth thinking about.

Once on the Tsuen Wan line, I enjoyed my longest tube journey so far since arriving here, going a whole six stops down to Yau Ma Tei with the intention of looking around, as it would be an easy commute for Pies (no changing of lines or owt complicated) and is close to the Tsim Sha Tsui area of Kowloon which always seems to have a lot going on.

Getting out of the tube however, I realised I’d made something of a mistake. Ya Ma Tei station spits you out right onto Nathan Road, one of the noisiest, hottest and busiest roads I think I’ve ever been on and all the buildings are fairly old (certainly no on-site gyms or swimming pools like I’d seen at Olympic). I had to walk at a snail’s pace just to avoid stepping on the people in front of me, though to be honest, any faster than that and I think I’d have died from heat exhaustion anyway. There was just no air at all, and let’s face it, Hong Kong is pretty hot all year round; the advantage I think Olympic has is that it’s on the waterfront so you get the breeze from the sea. Not so great if a major typhoon hits, but pfft, that’s why you get a high level place.

I saw a guy running for a bus (which actually had a queue of people waiting to get on, so running really wasn’t called for) and on impulse decided that if it’s worth running for, I might as well get on it too. To be honest, I was pretty much just seduced by it’s air-conditioned sweetness, otherwise Colin was in danger of spending the rest of his time here mourning the girlfriend who’d expired on Nathan Road. Now the trouble with getting on a bus on a whim, is that you have absolutely no idea where you’re going to end up. But hey, I couldn’t go too far wrong could I? And mmmm, feel those icy jets of air blowing on your face.

I tried to work out a vague notion of where we were headed from the road signs that we passed by or under, but all I managed to ascertain was that we were still in Kowloon as we hadn’t gone through one of the cross harbour tunnels (or indeed boarded a ferry, though the chance of that happening would be slightly less likely as the ferries are way too small for buses…) About half an hour later however, the bus reached it’s destination and I had to leave its comfort, still none the wiser of my location.

Now a lesser girl than I would have panicked, but let’s not forget – whether it makes me a bit sad or not, I am a transport nerd and I wasn’t going to be outwitted by being a little off course! I wandered off down the road and happened across a map of the area, right in front of what appeared to be a huge cruise-ship type ocean liner, surrounded by shops and apartment buildings. Er, ok! Apparently it actually houses a shopping centre – cos they
don’t already have enough of those here. The map did help me to work out that I was in Hung Hom, a place I hadn’t planned to check out on my research trip, but one that actually seemed quite cool – very lively but not as stifling as Nathan Road – though the apartment buildings looked relatively old compared to the swanky new developments I’d seen earlier at Olympic.

Hung Hom helpfully has its own ferry pier from where I hopped on the boat to Central, and was soon on the MTR towards Quarry Bay, the last place I’d decided to check out on my day of exploration. Once I finally got to the end of the walk between train and station entrance, I emerged on a pretty non-descript street which led onto a very busy main road, complete with lots of traffic and trams running both ways in the middle. It was pretty hot (even when I walked down to the water there was no breeze like there had been over on the Kowloon side) and there didn’t seem to be an awful lot going on. Now I’m not suggesting that at 4:00 on a Thursday afternoon there should be people dancing in the street, but as the main highway towards Central from the east, it just felt like somewhere you would pass through to get to somewhere else. Not really somewhere you want to call home.

Its one redeeming feature was that it had a Wellcome supermarket (yay – cheap!) so I picked up some much-needed dark chocolate Maltesers (why have they never used dark chocolate before now??!) and some other essentials and headed back to the serviced apartment.

Unless Discovery Bay offers something amazing and cheap tomorrow, I think I’d best bring Colin out to Olympic sharp-ish and get real estate lady Agnes sourcing us a fantastic apartment there asap!