Hong Kong! It was a night flight from Tokyo to Hong Kong and, as we approached the island, the huge brightly-lit high-rise towers of Hong Kong rose out of the darkness like a setting from a sci-fi movie. I have never seen buildings placed so close together in my life. The effect was surreal. We didn’t have the best experience in Hong Kong, so I probably should not say much at all. I can’t resist a few notes: Our arrival there meant claiming our luggage and somehow getting it and us to a hotel in one of the busiest cities in the world. There are 14,000 taxis in Hong Kong. We also had to go through customs, obtain a visa, exchange money, and etc. It was quite late by the time we found our way down the long ramp to the outside of the airport, in search of a taxi. And we got off to a bad start. As we came out of the terminal, a man rushed forward to solicit that we ride in his taxi. He motioned us to the side, where, behind a dumpster, he had a mini-van parked. Jet-lag and tiredness did not help. We began to move toward his vehicle, but I noticed that it was the only one and had no taxi marks on it, whatsoever. Just then, my older daughter grabbed my arm and said, "No dad, the taxis are over here!" And sure enough, a long row of people queued up for taxis and a long line of matching taxis were up ahead. We would go there. Next, all of us and our luggage would not fit in one taxi, so we had to take two. Even then, our bags hardly fit and the taxi trunks had to remain open for the ride to the hotel, with the attendant worries of maybe luggage flying out on the street. Then, the two cabs did not stay together, again dividing my family. Hong Kong taxis drive like mad and most of the drivers are not at all friendly, sometimes scarily unfriendly. So, we hurtled through the streets of Kawloon at breakneck speed, with a driver that did not respond to English. The hotels in Hong Kong are exorbitantly expensive, with a single room going for between $200-$300 and little other choice. We just had to pay. Once at the hotel, we went out and walked through some of the shopping district -- side-by-side shops packed with electronic gear, clothes, etc. Everything in Hong Kong seems jammed together. The streets have traffic on the opposite side to America, so you really do have to look both ways. The many streets all had high-rise buildings placed back-to-back and these served as huge channels for the air that moved, like rivers, through them. As you walked by a cross-street, you would be flooded by a tide of garbage smell and have to hold your breath and get out of that intersection before you dared to breathe again. Everywhere, everything is for sale. It may be my imagination, but it is my impression that the Chinese don’t much like westerners or, at least, Americans. I did not experience anywhere else in Asia the coldness that I did from the folks in Hong Kong. Of course, not all of them were like this. We did meet one cab driver who took us under his wing. In fact, we spent a number of hours having him drive us all over both Hong Kong and Kowloon to see the tourist sights. We made one long drive into the New Territories to the largest Chinese Buddhist temple, where we experienced the only peace and space in that city. We also took a sampan boat into Hong Kong harbor and saw the boat people, an entire subculture that live there aboard the closely moored boats. Apart from the outboard fumes and intermittent rain, the boat people were fascinating. Aside from the temple, I hardly remember the sights, because what really impressed me, as I wrote earlier, were how closely they could place high-rise buildings and the obvious discrepancy between the very rich and the very poor. We saw some incredible tenements, some quite old, some quite heartbreaking. And we wandered, by mistake, into the basement of one building while looking for the Buddhist center we wanted to visit. The slice of life we saw there haunts me still. Everywhere, people in sweat shops, stripped naked to the waist in the heat, not smiling, heads down, working. In every crevice and corner, some kind of bed, the mini-home of an old person or caretaker. We had no business being in there was the look I got from the many people we passed in the steamy hallways. And we tried to get out of there. We squeezed into a tiny elevator (not more than four-foot square) and rode slowly up to what we thought was the floor we wanted, only to have the doors open to a wall of steel. No exit. And then the slow ride down. I have never been more claustrophobic than on that elevator and I prayed that it would not lose power and get stuck there. That elevator summed up everything about my experience of Hong Kong. Talk about a foreign place. We just did not connect well with that city. In fact, for weeks afterward, whenever we encountered an impossible or gross situation, one of us would shout out "Hong Kong!" My sincere apologies to the residents of Hong Kong, whom I’m sure are wonderful, for my particular experience. I wish it had been different. ...back to the opening page go on to the next story...