The Fragrant Bay

playboy's travel editor

Like Most Places of character, Hong Kong can't be "done" in one or two -- or even three -- days. There's a lot to see, a lot to do in this ancient city, and there are only 24 hours in a Hong Kong day, just like anyplace else.

One day is irrevocably lost when you cross the International Date Line. No help for it, though: that's the only way you can get into The Fragrant Bay -- which is what a Chinese means when he says those two words, hong kong.

And fragrant it is with frangipani and honeysuckle, bright with purple morning glories and vivid tropical growths patching the green and white tiers of Victoria Peak, or set formally into the lawns of the Royal Hong Kong Golf Club.

But there's more to this outpost of Empire on the edge of mainland China, to this British Crown Colony that speaks English but feels Chinese. Perhaps it's the rich, almost sensual enjoyment Orientals everywhere seem to draw from every tiny moment of living.

We tried to put a finger on what it was the very first time we drove in from Kai-Tak airport, through swarming streets gay with paper bunting and banners ablaze with Chinese ideographs. We came into the huge, somberly Victorian lobby of the Peninsula Hotel and watched the fat young Chinese businessmen muttering of real estate in corner chairs ... the lean British couple, not quite elderly but obviously dull in a shrill way, going in for lunch...the sallow bellhop whose face showed the precise passion of his Chinese father and Portuguese mother over in Macao. They were all familiar. Not in the way a caricature is familiar -- rather as casual friends whose name escapes one at the moment.

And that seems to typify Hong Kong too: it's everything people associate in their minds with the East. Yet there's a twist somewhere along the way, an offbeat something that makes one stop and wonder whether it really is the way you expected it to be...

Now, there are three ways to see any town. You can buy a bunch of conducted tour tickets, and let no one speak ill of that system -- we've used it quite often; you can stroll around on your own -- and that we do rather more often; or finally, you can head for the nearest bar (continued on page 60)Fragrant Bay(continued from page 29) and just let things happen -- and there are decided advantages to that method. In Hong Kong, if your choice should be the latter (as ours tends to be with the waning of the moon) there's just one place.

Hop a cab or rickshaw, say "Pop Gingle's" -- and that's it. The place is run by a 300-pound ex-Navy chief steward from Junction City, Wis. He was paid off in 1936, blew his discharge money in one night that old geezers still recall with awe and has been sitting happily around ever since at 70 Nathan Street in Kowloon, entertaining characters from all over the world. His court is a barren bar, its decor limited to a picture of Custer's Last Stand, a juke box and the smell of American home cooking.

Whether you're the sightseeing type or the stroll-and-absorb creature we are ourselves, there's common ground for both at the top of Victoria Peak. You take a little cogwheel tramway up there, moving in ten minutes from the sweaty hubbub of a great city onto the 1,800-foot top of the forested rock. From there, look out at one of the world's truly great views.

Gaze down the slope, dotted with small homes and buttressed mansions, exquisite small gardens and the bright blue of little reservoirs. The green seems to work on into the city of Victoria at the foot of the hill. (Hong Kong is the island, whose main city is Victoria; also the name of the colony as a whole). If you look just past the modern white skyscrapers in the financial district, for instance, you'll see the green expanse of the Hong Kong Cricket Club ... a juxtaposition that cries aloud of England.

Beyond that are the docks and the glassy blue of the roadstead flecked with the sun's gold. Anchored there, a dozen liners and large freighters are unloading into a cluster of junks moored alongside. Everywhere to right and left, ferries and tugs and sampans are churning the blue water--through channels between the various islands that dot the bay--off to the agricultural New Territories to the left, across the wide mouth of the muddy Pearl River to Macao, and mostly across the short gap between Victoria and the peninsula of Kowloon. The ferries that look like small brothers of those in New York harbor move 250,000 people a day. Back of Kowloon, often hazed in light mist, are the hills that gave the place its name, for kau laung means nine dragons. And back of those hills is the hidden immensity of China itself, stretching across to the Great Wall and the Western Mountains and the vast Gobi Desert.

The cruise-ship crowds wearing bright Hawaiian shirts and Philippine sandals and Japanese fans are everywhere. We'll drive down with them from the Peak, to the jazzily odd mansion of old Aw Boon Haw, the multimillionaire manufacturer of Tiger Balm, mentholated salve that's allegedly good for anything and is definitely good for at least a couple of ills. And on from there to the Star Ferry for Kowloon and a swank lunch at Gaddi's in the Peninsula Hotel--where we'll buy their brocaded menu for $2 as a souvenir.

But that's where we leave the crowd. They'll drive to the old village of Shaukiwan, to the beach resort at Repulse Bay, past Aberdeen fishing village, to Chinese temples and open hill cemeteries with white porcelain interment jars lining the ashes of honored ancestors in strictly protocolar order. Next day, they'll tour the rice paddies and terraced hillside farms and the not-very-Chinese-looking villages of the New Territories--as far as the military zone and the steel-plated road-and-rail bridge that links across a muddy little river with Red China--lunching at the Dragon Inn or Castle Peak Hotel, then back into Kowloon.

We'll be off on our own, sopping up the exotic joy of every street: calm, ivory women in sheath dresses of red and purple silk, slim nylon-clad legs flashing through the hip-high slits in their skirts...coolies trotting through the crowds, loads slung from either end of a shoulder-borne bamboo pole...round-faced urchins in brocaded robes tumbling happily in parks...or bearded elders sitting and dreaming or perhaps playing mah jong on sunny sidewalks. Maybe we'll hire a sampan, rowed by a strong young woman...to adventure out into the busy bay and alongside high-sterned seagoing junks, great fibre-mat sails spread on slant masts, ribbed and shaped like the wings of huge bats ... or along the watery streets of the junk village off Aberdeen, as exotically different as anyone could hope.

We might see the cruise crowd again at dinner--perhaps at Winner House or Tai Lung or the Princess Garden which specializes in the Peking-style delicacies of North China. Some of them will be choosing their seafood dinner aboard a junk restaurant, picking it as it swims in a cage of bamboo slats slung overboard, then going above deck for a quiet drink in the glowing sunset while their fish is readied.

Now, we relish a few meals of gelatinous shark fin soup; crisp Peking duck served with a thick soya sauce in a sort of pancake; muddy tasting 100-year-old eggs (if you can find 'em); sliced shrimp and mashed shrimp and fried shrimp with tender white bamboo shoots simmered in chicken broth; and--to end the meal Chinese fashion--delicious seaweed soup with tiny sea snails. We can use a few meals like that; but as a steady diet we'll take something more substantial. That, we suspect, is why steak houses like the Parisian Grill or the supper-clubbish Champagne Room of Sunning House are so well patronized!

But one thing we do always try to do in the food line is lunch -- preferably with a Chinese friend who can translate--at one of the truly Oriental tea houses patronized almost exclusively by Chinese businessmen. Here, after wiping mouths and hands on a steaming cloth and sipping the unfailing glass of jasmine tea, we'll sample small, inexpensive portions from thirty or forty different dishes being carried around the room.

One evening in Hong Kong we always go to Gripps in the Hong Kong Hotel or the Skyroom at Luna Park, then on to take in at least part of the seemingly interminable Chinese plays at the Po Hing Theatre--where, for us at least, the chattering, strolling audience and the tea-drinking orchestra are the better part of the show. But for an evening really to be remembered, you have to go to Macao--31/2 hours and $10 away by ferry. It's still pretty wide open, despite the alleged crackdown of the Portuguese colonial administration and subsequent more careful licensing of gambling, opium, taxi-dancers, sing-song girls and...well, let your imagination run riot and you'll probably not be exaggerating.

We usually take a ferry--still sporting grillwork round its bridge as a defense against river pirates--after lunch, and sleep our way across. You miss little except more junks and some muddy water. And you'll need the sleep.

Macao is pretty solemn for a wide-open town, and a radical change from bustling Hong Kong. Here are wide avenues lined by ancient banyan trees, twisting cobbled lanes, hill-topping cathedrals and a quiet Mediterranean way of life. In keeping with this, we usually start off with a stroll along Praia Grande, the built-up waterfront where little bats flit at dusk between the banyan trees.

Then we'll hail a cab for a drive around the few sights and back for a late dinner at the Riviera Hotel or the Pousada, which is Portuguese in food and atmosphere and mighty good. Take an extra brandy after dinner--and relax. Nothing ever seems to close up here, and little is really doing until around 11. When you do get going, you can concentrate all your activities in the 10-story Central Hotel, if you wish. For here the lower floor is given over to opium; gambling takes the next three or four floors; taxi-dancers are sitting in a row for hire on the floor above that (with electric signs announcing the results of bird-cage dice downstairs for those who prefer to do more than one thing at a time); and what you may possibly have in mind goes on most everywhere else. Or you can diversify at a variety of spots along and just off the central portion of Avenida Almeida Ribeiro.

We favor this latter approach ourselves, if only to aggravate the Chinese panderers who seem to be ensconced behind every pillar of the Avenida's arcaded sidewalk. While we'd as soon cut off our strong right arm as go along with them, it's educational indeed to see what a range of new and strange (concluded overleaf)Fragrant Bay(continued from page 60) pleasures they manage to dream up after you balk at the standard offering.

Of course, you'll want to visit an opium den. There's probably more danger in the germs on an uncleaned pipe (so buy your own) than in a novice's first pipeful. You can find a den right across from the Grand Hotel: it's as dismally different as any of these dingy places--with smokers paired on wide wooden benches in each smoking room or divan. Then the Grand would be a good place to watch or try out taxi dancers in a murky hall inadequately lit by dull red lights. Fox trots and tangos seem somehow inappropriate with a high-boned Eurasian girl in your arms repeating the familiar yet always pathetic--and quite possibly true--hard-luck story with an Oriental flavor.

Wherever you go earlier, however, you'll probably end up handing over your money to the venerable Ah Fong, who's manned the fan-tan table at the Central for 45 years. You watch the table from any one of four floors -- through a circular shaft, down which you also lower your bets in a little basket on a string (any currency is accepted).

The idea quite briefly is this: about a hundred white buttons are scooped out of a larger pile into a cup. This is then inverted and, after a small bell is ceremoniously rung, the cup is removed and the buttons spread on the table. With a wand, the dealer then removes four buttons at a time until only four or less are left. If the number remaining is the number you bet on, you win; if it isn't, you lose...and Ah Fong unsmilingly socks away your loot. We don't mean to sound bitter, but it helps in playing fan-tan if you've just sat and watched for about 20 years. Many of the old timers will hold up fingers after the first or second lot of four buttons has been raked away, indicating how many will be left at the end. Amazingly, they're often right. But they don't seem to win any too often either.

You can stay over in Macao or ferry back to Hong Kong in the wee hours. It's entirely up to you, or her. But there is one good reason for getting back to Hong Kong some time before your plane leaves--and that's shopping.

Except for suits and dresses, which require fitting, we usually leave our Hong Kong shopping for the last day. There's crafty good sense worthy of a Chinese in that resolution. For if we started the first day, we'd never get out of the shops till our plane was due off or we ran out of money. And either way, we'd not enjoy the rest of Hong Kong. Tailoring, however, is a first-day activity. Suits and dresses can be ready in 24 hours, but really good places--like Jimmy Chen on the Kowloon side or Tailor Cheung on the island--prefer two or three days and at least two fittings. And, believe us, it's worth the trouble: Savile Row tailoring in an English flannel suit at $32, a shantung silk suit at $22 or a pure cashmere topcoat at $75.

The bargains are almost irresistible in this free port: Kentucky bourbon for instance, cheaper than you can get it at home. There's only one slight drawback to this whole business--that's a line of courteous but muscular chaps hired by the U. S. Customs Service to man the dykes at Honolulu and San Francisco. In a great many years of travel, we've yet to meet a bunch of customs men anywhere who're as solemnly dedicated as these fellows to blocking entry of anything that will profit the Communist Chinese. And that does mean jade. So now we check with the airline when we fly in or the U. S. Consulate for the list of currently approved stores licensed to issue official certificates of origin...and, brother, don't let any smooth-talking shopkeeper tell you those certificates aren't necessary.

With that list in hand, we sally forth to do verbal battle with the store keepers. You'll never win a haggling match with a Chinese, but it's fun to try. We take the precaution of pricing our needs ahead of time at shops in the Peninsula Hotel, where prices are fair (though not cheap) and fixed. Then we're off after ivory and hardwood items, silks and garments. We usually skip jewelry: we find better at no greater cost nearer its point of origin, in Japan, Siam or India. And while we'll look at and yearn for jade, lacquerwork, cloisonné and rugs, we'll turn away with a wrench--for those are items out of Red China.

European and American goods are acceptable, of course, to the stern-faced men at the U. S. port of entry. And the prices do help drown our grief over the jade we can't have: brandy at $4, Paris perfume at $25 an ounce ($45 in the U. S.), a Rollei camera that retails in the U. S. at $309.50 for $205. Those prices explain something else: if you're ever in San Francisco and see an affable gink smothered in packages get off the plane, his face wreathed in the simple bliss of living, a straggle of Peking duck trailing down his shirt front and lipstick on his left ear ... stand back; let him go by in his mellow daze--that was us.

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October through April is the best time to visit Hong Kong. Contact Northwest Orient Airlines (1885 University Avenue, St. Paul, Minn.) or Pan American Airways (222 Stockton Street, San Francisco, Cal.) who'll fly you there for $550 tourist, $765 first class. Or by sea, try American President Lines (311 California Street, San Francisco 4, Cal.) or Pacific Far East Line (315 California Street, San Francisco 4, Cal.) who'll sail you there for $450 on luxury freighters on up to $650 and beyond on liners.