| 14 July 2006 Star Ferry Oh, it is a strange morning. It has been so strange for so long that the magnitude of what is happening now is lost to context. Israel is engaged in a two front war, bombing Beirut International. My car salesman is named Mohammed, and he is from Palestine. He is concerned. His family is over there someplace, not his extended family, but his real one. Wife and kids. Maybe they are on the West Bank, which is not under attack. But he still looks distracted. Iran is threatening some sort of apocalyptic action if Syria is attacked, opening up a third front in this latest war, and the price of oil is floating up again to record levels. It takes a special act of brutality to get our attention these days, and I have already had one of those this week. It makes me want to escape to another time, when enemies and evil were a little more human scale. Hong Kong was a place you could find just about anything you wanted. I found that out more than a quarter century ago, when the mountains west of Kowloon and the New Territories were dark, and the border impenetrable. We would anchor in the harbor, far out, and the boats would take us in amidst the junks and bustle of the inner harbor. The Wanchai was still there, even if Suzie Wong was a little long in the tooth. The busy dredging and filling was creating new land to throw glass towers into the sky, but the old Hong Kong was still there. The New Stanley Market, and the Repulse Bay Hotel, and the original Jimmy's Kitchen on Victoria Island, below the Peak, and the funicular railway. We would all chip in for a suite in a good hotel, and share it for the duration of the visit, coming and going, depending on our duties back on the ship. If sleep was necessary ashore, we could crash on the floor, or drag a mattress off the bed and double the sleeping area. If we needed it. There is plenty of time for sleep, we would say, later. When we were underway again, or in the grave. We often stayed on Victoria Island, though the new hotels going up in Kowloon sometimes got our business. It was easy to get back and forth. We took the Star Ferry. The little Green-and-white boats had been running for a century before I saw them, and they continued to run, parallel tracks, across the narrows from Victoria the sprawl of the New Territories, with the mountains of the other China in the distance. The Star is Hong Kong. It was built by a entrepreneur to carry his workers, and proved to be the most efficient way to move the burgeoning population. It ran, back and forth, right through the general strike in 1925 when only the Royal Navy kept the ferries running from their headquarters on HMS Tamar. The Japanese, when they arrived in 1941, were the only ones who shut it down. It ran through the fall of Shanghai and the great flight of the Kuomintang money from the Communists, and it runs still. Though the times are about to change for the Star, and another icon of the old Empire in the Far East changes to meet the future. The rickshaws are long gone, of course. There was an old man who held the last license the Authorities permitted, and he mostly made his income on the Victoria side, outside the classic old terminal with the clock tower having his picture taken by the tourists. There were two classes of passage, and richest and cheapest luxury in the world was to travel first class for a dime. That meant you followed the green metal walkways to the upper deck, not there was much difference. The boats were all old, but serviceable and relatively clean. “No Spitting” signs were posted prominently everywhere. Traveling second class meant that you knew, for the entire ten-minute voyage, that there was someone better off than you. Traveling First Class you were liable to meet anyone. A glamorous White Russian princess, maybe, or the Air Wing Commander in his Whites on personal business, or Suzie Wong herself. Perhaps it was her daughter, with long black lustrous hair in which you could lose yourself in the smell of perfume. My pal Vinnie met Steve McQueen one trip. Steve was in town filming the movie The Sand Pebbles. I bet he was heading back from one of the watering holes, maybe Ned Kelly's Last Stand. The Aussies behind the bar never closed the place. Or maybe it was the Club Bottoms Up, that was in one of the James Bond films and the women were more exotic than you could imagine. Everyone has a Star Ferry story, and some of them are actually repeatable in polite company. The Empire might have been over, but you could not tell in Hong Kong, and particularly not in the First Class section of the Star Ferry. In Mumbai, or what was Imperial Bombay, that will just get you priority treatment for a bomb on the train. Copyright 2006 Vic Socotra |