Chungking Mansions

This is what Lonely Planet has to say about Chungking Mansions: “You may be put off by the undercurrent of sleaze and peculiar odours - cooking fat, incense and shit – but don’t seek sanctuary in the lifts; they’re like steel coffins on cables…. Be grateful for the stray cats as they keep the rats in check”. We had bought the Lonely Planet. We had read this review. We had (presumably) thought it sounded horrible. To this day I have no explanation as to why we ended up staying there.

As the crowded shuttle bus from the airport made its way into Tsim Sha Tsui it stopped to let off happy tourists and locals along the way. By the time it finally reached Chungking Mansions, Mia and I were the only souls left on board. As the bus pulled up outside our stop the driver turned to us and muttered something unintelligible to us in what appeared to be a friendly but concerned manner, then he smiled, waved goodbye and opened the doors. We could see the iron security gates covering the tall archway to Chungking Mansions, but it was not obvious whether the gates were there to keep undesirables out or to keep the inhabitants in. The entranceway was obstructed by a very large gang of seedy looking people, some Chinese, some North African immigrants. As we got off the bus our backpacks and fresh airport luggage tags drew them towards us like a huge bucket of fish guts thrown into shark infested waters. Indeed, judging from the smell emanating from the entrance hall I suspect that Chungking Mansions was no stranger to hurled buckets of fish guts. The people clamouring around us were trying to drag us into their hostels within the tower block but we firmly but politely told them that we already had a reservation so didn’t require their services. We made it inside and headed towards the “steel coffin on a cable” for Block A which would take us up to “Li’s Place”.

After a 5 minute wait for the elevator the doors creaked open and about 30 people levered themselves out from a space the size of a small lavatory. We squeezed ourselves in making sure that our backpacks were against the wall and away from any pickpocket’s light fingers, and the lift started an uneasy ascent to the seventh floor. Mr Li told us that they were full (despite my reservation) but instead he had got us a room in his cousin’s hostel and a man would show us to the new place. This meant taking the elevator back down to the ground floor, a short walk through fish guts avenue and then another thrilling elevator ride in the H Block lift. I swear to god, while the guy was waiting for the lift to come he held his hands together in prayer! I found it very difficult to warm to this guy because he was far too friendly. All the time he was telling us how lucky we were and that we had a great room - “super-deluxe” in fact. I didn’t mention it, but I suspected that my definition of a super deluxe room would be vastly different to his. He had that over-the-top kind of friendliness that people only give you when they’re either about to rip you off or when they’ve just slept with your girlfriend. As Mia had only just met the guy I had to assume this was going to be a very expensive elevator ride.

This is the view out of our window. I'll leave you to judge whether the room met our super deluxe expectations or not.

The next day we checked into the YMCA - 3 times the price, but worth 10 times more at least!

Flight to Hong Kong

8:30am - Sydney airport:
Our flight to Hong Kong was looking good to leave on time at 10:20am, and Mia and myself were ready to check in. But there was one small but significant problem

8:30am - A dark filing cabinet in Flightcentre Sydney City.
Mia’s plane ticket looked at its watch anxiously.

The woman behind the check in desk was adamant that as Mia had a paper ticket we couldn’t leave without it. The problem was that the branch of FlightCentre didn’t open till 10am which would only give us 20 minutes to get back to the airport, pass security and board the plane. The 24 hour emergency helpline was pretty useless and the guy on the other end of the phone seemed reluctant to concede that we would miss the flight and rebook us on the next one. With about 10 minutes to go we finally managed to contact the office and they rebooked us on the afternoon flight. Then they sent the tickets round in a taxi, and by 2pm we were on our way to Hong Kong.

Sydney Again

I flew back to Sydney to meet up with Mia who was about to fly home to Finland. It amazes me that Mia lived in Sydney for 9 months and hadn’t done any tourist things apart from looking at the bridge and the opera house. But before we did any sightseeing this time Mia had 9 months worth of packing and goodbyes to do before she left. How much crap can you accumulate in 9 months?? One big rucksack, one medium sized rucksack, 5 green bags, 2 handbags, 1 plastic bag and a cowboy hat. We trawled round the city collecting her belongings from various friend’s houses, nurses quarters, pawn shops and homeless shelters, then brought it all back to our small hostel room on the bus. The next 3 days were spent reducing her baggage to a size and weight that wouldn’t cause the aeroplane to crash.

After that we went to Taronga Zoo and did the Bondi to Coogee walk, and also sorted out our next adventure in Hong Kong…

Matt's Stag - Naked in Brisbane

After Darwin I flew to Brisbane for Matt’s stag night. As everyone knows the main aim of any stag night is to try and give the groom-to-be as much shit as possible so that they realise that married life is infinitely better than spending the rest of their life hanging out with their male friends. So it was inevitable that someone would end up naked and humiliated, but I wasn’t quite prepared for it being me.

Unfortunately the only flights that leave Darwin for Brisbane go at about 1am, and as I was flying out on the day of his stag do it meant that I faced the prospect of going out drinking that evening having only had 2 hours sleep. To compensate I booked a single room in Bunk in Fortitude Valley and decided to go to bed for some serious power napping as soon as I got there. When I tried to check in at 6am I was told that the room wouldn’t be ready till midday and I had to amuse myself having an exceedingly long breakfast and writing emails until I could check in. I slept from about 1 till 5 then woke up to find several drunken answerphone messages from Matt’s friends telling me to get out of bed and join them in a pool bar in Queens Street. We had a few games of pool and then headed off to Matt’s place to have a barbecue and to throw some things off the balcony at passers by.

For the stag the evening passed relatively uneventfully. He neither vomited, nor was humiliated, and nor was made to get up on stage during a live sex show and violate a Spanish stripper with a vibrator in his mouth (so Ed, it was nothing like yours mate)... We ended the evening watching the first round England-Paraguay world cup match in the Storey bridge hotel then made our (very) drunken way back to our respective residences.

As I had to fly to Sydney the next day I made sure that I drank plenty of water before bed as I didn’t want to be too hungover the next day. At about 4am I woke up and was dying to take a piss – in fact I was so pant-wettingly dying to take a piss that I didn’t have time to find the light switch, my clothes or even a key, so I propped the door open with my shoes and wrapped a towel round me and ran to the bathroom.

Relieved, I was just about to flush the toilet when I heard a banging noise in the corridor.
Wouldn’t it be bad if that was my door closing? I thought.
Then I felt the full force of the ‘Oh-Shit Second’ when you suddenly realise that something truly bad has happened. Sure enough, on returning to my room I discovered that my shoes had been pushed aside by the weight of the door and the door was now firmly closed and locked. It was 4 am and I was drunk and naked in a hostel corridor, with only a very small travel towel to protect my modesty.

My first instinct was to find somewhere to curl up and go to sleep but the corridor was pretty spartan and was just a maze of locked doors. My second instinct – admittedly a far superior one – was to check whether there was anyone around who could let me back into my room. I walked down the stairs to reception and I could make out some noises coming from behind the closed doors. Lots of noises. Not quiet noises of receptionists tapping on keyboards or stapling bits of paper, but loud ‘duff-duff’ noises of drunken football fans having fun in the hostel bar. For Bunk is a party hostel and is home to more Irish people than Ireland itself. On the plus side its size meant reception was 24 hours, but first I would have to get there without someone forcibly removing my towel and whipping me with it. I gingerly pushed open the door to reception and surveyed the scene. I think that’s when I got my first wolf whistle. There were about 10 people sitting on the sofas staring at me. I looked towards the reception desk but there was no-one behind it, but then I spied a girl I thought had been working there earlier who was now chatting to a couple of other people just across the room. I walked up to her and cleared my throat. She turned round and looked at my towel.
“Excuse me, I appear to have locked myself out of my room, have you got a spare key?”.
That’s what I tried to say. What actually came out was more like
“nufff-ee ‘ve nocked sef me ruum. Syu got hay sperek-hee?”
She looked at me closely whilst reaching for the can of mace in her handbag.
Shit, she doesn’t work here, I thought. Look and see if she’s wearing a name tag… fuck, now she thinks I’m looking at her tits! And now I’ve gone red in the face! And I’m naked and I stink of booze!

I tried once more with the sentence about the spare key, this time doing the international hand signal for key and mentioning my room number. This seemingly had more meaning and she moved to the reception desk and started tapping on the computer. I smiled sweetly and tried to make a joke about some shit or other. I can’t remember exactly what - hopefully I didn’t break into some Peter Kay routine or anything. Within a few minutes she had coded me a new key-card and I bolted up the stairs to hide my shame under the duvet. It was then, and only then, when I was safely tucked up in bed on my own and in the dark, that I could begin to see the funny side.

Great British Sand Art

Whilst the Aboriginals express themselves through the wonderful medium of rock art, me and Katharine (yes, that is how you spell it) decided that we'd display our artistic talents by sculpting things in sand on Mindil Beach in Darwin. And what more sublime subject is there than the “sand arse”?


So on the left you have “Crack Lady” (© Me 2006)
And on the right you have “Surfer Dood” sic (© Katharine, 2006)

Not content with that we decided to follow up with a collaboration in the form of a piece of installation art:


"Crocydylus Silicus" (© Me + Katharine, 2006)

Note the contrast between the medium and the subject:
Sand: soft, smooth, comfortable to sit on;
Crocodile: hard, rough, extremely dangerous to sit on.

I think we were both a bit surprised at how good it turned out, and as crocodiles on the beach in Darwin are not uncommon we were half hoping that the police might turn up and try to shoot it.

Aboriginal Rock Art

Aboriginals used to communicate the Dreamtime Stories (myths about how the landscape was created) by painting the scenes from the legends on sheltered rock formations. These tales invariably involve giant snakes having their eggs stolen by enormous emus, followed by the maddened snakes pursuing the thieves across the land angrily crashing into mountains to create rivers and valleys. It is worth noticing that the quality of the art improves greatly as you go North – the paintings on the sides of Uluru in the centre are jumbled daubs, but as you get into the Northern Territory the art becomes more representational and more worthy of postcards and photographs. Why should this be? Most likely because in the desert the Aboriginals had to spend the majority of their time scratching for food in the dry earth, whereas in the moist tropical north they could find all the food they needed in the morning, then spend the afternoon at leisure painting men with large penises on their neighbours living room walls.

Deeply buried in Kakadu national Park we unearthed previously undiscovered school reports from what appears to be an aboriginal art teacher sometime in the dim and distant past….

Name: Didjbarrka
Subject: Rock Art (Aboriginal)
Form: 3a
Didjbarrka has worked hard this term and has showed steady improvement. He is keen to contribute and often willing to help clean up the cave after class. Well done Didjbarrka!




Name: Wadjularbinna
Subject: Rock Art (Aboriginal)
Form: 3a
What Wadjularbinna lacks in ability he makes up in enthusiasm, particularly when finger painting. Although I sometimes struggle to work out what he has drawn, his attitude has been exemplary and he sets a fine example to other class members.

Name: Bangana
Subject: Rock Art (Aboriginal)
Form: 5c
Bangana has been disruptive in class this year and has been disciplined several times for painting over the work of his other classmates. There are plenty of other rocks he could be using, but he seeks to gain attention by defacing the work of others. Does Bananga have concentration problems at home? I think it might be a good idea if we all met up and had a chat.

Name: Morri Morri
Subject: Rock Art (Aboriginal, Remedial)
Form: 5c
Could do better.