Before I left Cebu I finally booked my accommodation for a single night in Hong Kong, accommodation is expensive in Hong Kong, and my funds were running low. The place I ended up booking was the Pearl Premium Guesthouse in a building called Mirador Mansions.
I landed in Hong Kong at midnight, tired and irritable. I exited the train station and discovered that while I could view offline maps on my phone, I couldn’t get a GPS location, So I headed towards a busy building, to get a bearing. which turned out to be Chungking Mansions.
While I stared at the address on the building and trying to orient myself with the map, I was viewed as easy pickings by the Mansion’s dealers, pimps and touts. A guesthouse tout approached me, extolling the virtues of his place, pressing a business card into my hand, which he took back when I told him I already had a booking, then ominously wished me good luck. An exquisitely smelling woman offered to help me, which quickly turned into a sales pitch for the most beautiful women in the world Hong Kong dollars could buy. I was offered dope, meth and cocaine in urgent whispers.
Once I worked out which direction to go, I started moving and it only took a few minutes to get to Mirador Mansions
Which was almost comatose compared to Chungking Mansions. I rode the elevator almost disturbingly alone to the 16th floor, where the reception to my guesthouse is located. An Indian receptionist photocopied my passport and handed me a keycard, and gave complicated instructions to get to my room, which I mostly ignored, opting for wandering around the 7th floor until I found the right door. One swipe of the card granted entry into a hallway with a shared kitchenette, another into my room, which turned out to be cozy, and clean.
The bathroom was a standard and cramped affair where you just about have to sit on the toilet to have a shower.
After a good night’s sleep and some 7-11 coffee, I did some research into both mansions. They were both built during the sixties, originally intended to be purely residential, but quickly morphed into something more interesting. The first few stories became retail, including electronic shops, jewellers, tailors and souvenir stores. The rest is a mix of cheap restaurants, residential and guesthouses. Chungking Mansions in particular became famous in the backpacking world as the cheapest accommodation in Hong Kong, with a flotsam of down scale immigrants from many countries, with a liberal sprinkling of drugs and prostitution. At one point, one-third of second-hand phones in Hong Kong passed through Changking Mansions. Many Chinese residents of Hong Kong refused to even walk past the place. in the early 2000’s , both mansions were at least partly cleaned up, with fire regulations imposed, CCTV cameras installed and many ladies of the evening evicted.
Despite this clean up, both mansions still contain a strong sense of marginal lawlessness, the immigrants are still there, I suspect you could spend hours in the corridors and only hear Cantonese or Chinese from the more adventurous or down at heel Chinese travelers. Many consumer goods from South East Asia and the Subcontinent are only available in Hong Kong from these two mansions. I suspect that the spirit of the now demolished Kowloon Walled City lives on here, if not many of the same residents.
I’m looking forward to visiting again during my next layover , as long as I keep my wits about me.
Adrian's Got The Moose 