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Hong Kong, Hotel Furama, Thursday (Thanksgiving Day), 1997-11-27 18:00 local (Z+8)
They don't observe Thanksgiving Day in Hong Kong, of course, but I kind of had the day off. Everybody to whom this is addressed is probably sound asleep in the wee small hours of Thanksgiving. It's 02:00 in Oregon, 05:00 in New York.
I've been to Anchorage and back—spent a day there—since my last message, and since this will probably be my last visit here for some time, I'm wanting to get down some last details. Hong Kong, all things considered, is the layover I most like, and the three times I've come in here this month have made it more so.
A few items from the previous layover that occurred after my previous message: I took a ride on the subway here. It's modern and very clean. There is no trash, no gum squashed onto the platform, and the trains are wide and quiet. The cars are connected such that there is no door between them, only an opening nearly as wide as the cars, which means you can look the entire length of the train when it's not on a curve—and these are long trains. The ticketing is entirely automated, but unlike most subways I've been on, though, the fare is proportional to the distance traveled. For casual users, you walk up to a video display, touch where you want to go, the display tells you how much, you insert your money, and you get a ticket worth that exact amount. Regular users can buy large denomination tickets. The tickets are plastic, credit card size but not as thick. You insert the ticket when you enter a boarding area and again to leave a boarding area. If your ticket has money left on it when you're leaving, you get it back; if not, the machine keeps it. Very efficient.
Speaking of efficiency, there are two tunnels for vehicular traffic between Kowloon (the mainland part of Hong Kong) and Hong Kong Island. There is a toll for using them. While some vehicles stop to pay the toll, most just sail through automatic toll booths without stopping. I haven't yet found out how that's handled. Obviously, there has to be some kind of sensing device on the car to record its transit. Whatever it is, that or something like it is what's needed on all toll roads. It's ridiculous to tie up people to take tolls and cause traffic jams to boot.
Last time in, I was here on a Sunday, and Sunday is the day off for all the Filipino household help in Hong Kong. I didn't know this, but when I left the hotel to go down to a chicken-fast-food place a few blocks away, I was engulfed by this amazing mass of people about a block from the hotel. There wasn't a Chinese in sight, and but for an occasion Filipino male, I was the only male. The authorities had blocked off a major street—Chater Road—for four blocks. They do this every Sunday, and it becomes the gathering place for thousands of Filipino female household help.
I walked down the middle of the street, the sidewalks being impassable, jammed with gals talking in Tagalog (I think that's the name of the primary Filipino language). The high-rise buildings on both sides of the street trap and echo the talking. The net effect is a constant bombardment of sound, almost a roar. The captain I'm with walked it—not at the same time I did—and said he found it almost frightening.
I picked up the details on this day off from the manager of the fast food place. He said that if I wanted to see another like sight to go one block toward the water and walk the long, elevated walkway there. I did, and it was interesting. This walkway is wide. Two cars could easily pass on it, and it runs for nearly a mile. It's supported by pillars coming through its middle, and covered completely though the sides are open to the weather. The right half—going my direction and defined by the middle pillars—of the entire walkway was jammed with Filipino girls sitting on blankets on the concrete. The sound effect wasn't as impressive as between the high-rises, but here there were absolutely no males except yours truly sight seeing.
It's impossible to pack efficiently for this job. The high in Anchorage was 5F. When we landed in Hong Kong early in the morning it was 81F with 90% humidity. My body is confused.
The last two times here I've had a room that overlooks Victoria Harbour. Our flight engineer refers to the room windows—he's also been on the harbour side—as the “big TV”, feeling it's more interesting to watch than the actual television. I agree. I watched for about twenty minutes this morning as tugs maneuvered a large cruise ship into its berth.
I'm wondering if I may have observed a small political protest or just a small mistake this morning. When I opened my window curtains, I observed that one of the two flags flying in front of the hotel had a problem. They're both red. One is the flag of the Hong Kong SAR (Special Administrative Region) and the other the flag of Red China. The Hong Kong flag was okay. It's a design that looks like the five petals of a flower to me. The petals are a white outline. The Red China flag has a large, gold star in the same place our flag has our field of stars and then four smaller stars, also gold, out horizontally from the large star. It was upside down. Now a flag flown upside down is considered to be a distress signal. Hmm. Anyway, somebody must have complained, because a few minutes later the flag was lowered and then raised again right side up.
Well, I'm pooped, so in a few minutes to bed, hoping that the wakeup call will come as planned at 06:00, and I'll be headed home. The cause of my fatigue is having walked a little over ten kilometers in the Victoria Peak Park. The park lies on the ocean side of Hong Kong Island, it's one of their “country parks”—note that's country, not county—and they're undeveloped areas save for trails, but the trails are primarily paved. They have to be given the population pressure on them. If I lived here, I would be visiting them regularly to escape the population overload here.
I'll miss landing at Kai Tak airport. This last time in, it was my leg and we did the runway 13 IGS approach. That's the one I've talked of in earlier messages, the one that is an ILS that leads into a mountain. You have to make a last minute, low level turn to land. I still remember that approach when C.J. and I were sitting in the back coming into Hong Kong after leaving Saudi Arabia. It was also the first approach I flew on my i.o.e. (initial operating experience, a formal FAA requirement) as a 747 captain at Evergreen. The previous two recent times we've done that approach here the captains were flying, and they both loused it up. I wanted to do it right, knowing I'd probably never get to do it again. I knew all its pitfalls and traps from having done it many times with Evergreen and had the recent reminders from the two captains lousing it up. And I did it right. It would have been perfect except for the fact that the touchdown was a bit of a clunker, not bad, but not a roller. Oh, well, keeps me humble.
The reason I probably won't get to do it again is that the new airport, Chek Lap Kok, will open soon, and Kai Tak with its one-of-a-kind-in-the-world approach will be closed. A lot of pilots have feared and cursed that approach. I did at first, but when I rolled out of that steep, low level turn right on the runway centerline, I turned to the captain and said out loud, “I love this approach.” He scowled. It probably confirmed his suspicions that I'm slightly bonkers.
As we were taxiing in, back alongside the runway on which we had just landed, a nice shiny new 747-400 was just starting the last minute turn. The captain said, “Let's watch this,” and I stopped the airplane. The pilot flying made the classical mistakes, started his turn too soon, then didn't bank enough, over-shot the centerline, had to correct at really low level, and finally touched down beyond the landing zone. That's exactly what I did, all of that, when I shot that approach on IOE.
Enough...to bed...Terry
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