according to plan?

Following this summer’s sojourn in the UK, I expected to be offline for five days as we made our way back to Hong Kong for the winter. It all seemed straightforward: travel down to Manchester a day early in order to take a PCR test for covid-19, without a negative result from which one cannot board a plane bound for Hong Kong; one day to account for the journey and the seven-hour time difference; and three days quarantined in a hotel of our choice (it was 21 days last year!). Of course, we had to foot the bill for this.

Unfortunately, that’s not the way it worked out. Something had to go wrong at some point, and it did. On the morning of Sunday, 25th September, I received a call from the front desk of the hotel where we were quarantined to inform me that we could check out. However, by the time we’d reached the check-out desk, the result of a PCR test I’d taken the previous day had surfaced. Paula and I had joked at the time that it should be a guaranteed negative result, because the person who administered the test had merely swabbed the insides of our cheeks rather than the backs of our throats. However, my result was positive!

So it was back to our room as we waited for what would happen next. I was afraid that we would be sent to one of the temporary isolation centres that have sprung up over the past couple of years, which from a distance look more like temporary prisons (bars on the windows, etc.). However, perhaps because of my age, the Hong Kong Health Department decided to send us to an ‘isolation hotel’ (Paula had to come too, because she’d been in contact with me).

I wondered where this hotel would be located. Although there are many hotels that you could book merely to fulfill quarantine requirements, there are just four that have the status of ‘isolation hotel’. We didn’t have long to wait to find out where we were going, but at least we had lunch before we left, which we’d paid for but didn’t expect to consume if we checked out in the morning.

Time to leave. We were ushered out of the back door of the hotel to a waiting minibus, along with two other ‘guests’ whom I assume had also had the misfortune to test positive for covid-19. It didn’t take me long to realize that we were heading out to Lantau, the largest—and most mountainous—of Hong Kong’s many islands. It had been a remote rural backwater before the construction of Chek Lap Kok, Hong Kong’s new airport, in the 1990s, but now there is a new town (Tung Chung) on the north side of the island, facing the airport, with a rail line connecting it to the main urban areas.

And so we arrived at the Novotel, which would be our ‘home’ for the next 11 days. As we checked in, I learned with some dismay that we would be in separate rooms, but fortunately they were interconnected, presumably for use by families when the Novotel was just an ordinary hotel. I was offered a telephone consultation with a doctor, who prescribed a five-day course of anti-viral drugs specifically targeted at the omicron variant of covid-19. Paula wasn’t given this option, and she tested positive two days after our arrival. I recorded my second negative rapid antigen test seven days after our arrival, but Paula didn’t do so until nine days after first testing positive.

The remainder of this post is a summary of what we’ve been doing during the 16-day period between leaving our house in Penrith on Tuesday, 20th September, and returning to our apartment in a village a short distance east of Fanling on Thursday, 6th October:

Frankfurter Free Range. I haven’t travelled with Lufthansa for more than two decades, but there aren’t many options for travel to Hong Kong at the moment—British Airways cancelled all its flights between Hong Kong and the UK with no warning back in June, although they did rebook us with Cathay Pacific, the only airline that flies direct, with no stopovers, from Hong Kong to Manchester.
Anyway, we had to endure a seven-hour stopover in Frankfurt Airport on our way back to Hong Kong, and although we quickly found some comfortable seats to pass the time, I spent quite a lot of that time wandering around to see whether I could take any interesting photographs. This post features the photos that I took here, of which this is an example:

Incidentally, earlier this year the Hong Kong government imposed temporary bans on airlines that imported covid-19 cases into the territory, and I imagine that it has a clear picture of just how many new cases are still arriving, and from where. I mention this mainly because I believe I picked up covid-19 during the flight to Hong Kong. I’d noticed several signs around Frankfurt Airport stating that it was a federal requirement that all passengers wear masks on flights into and out of Germany, but the flight was full, and meals were served during the flight. Also, the toilets were in a dreadful state towards the end of the flight, and it isn’t too much of a stretch to imagine that an infected person removed their mask while using the facility. I recorded a negative PCR test upon arrival in Hong Kong but tested positive two days later.

q – 37. Last year, we endured our 21-day quarantine period (q – 19) in the Marriott Hotel, which overlooks the western approaches to Hong Kong’s harbour. Although this was interesting for a time, it became boring long before the three weeks were up. This year, Paula booked the Nina Hotel in Tsuen Wan, which is technically in the New Territories but is also one terminus of the second line built by the Mass Transit Railway (MTR) in the late 1970s/early 1980s. It ought to be easier to get home after the quarantine period than it was from Hong Kong island last year.
Our room was on the 36th floor of the hotel, and it was located in the corner of the building, with windows on both sides, so I spent the three days here taking bird’s-eye photos from different windows, including the window in the toilet cubicle, at different times of day (and night). This is a typical example:

A six-lane highway through a residential area is not something I would expect to see in many places.

Isolation (link not yet active). I spent a lot of the time in the Novotel sleeping, mainly because there wasn’t a lot else to do, but I did take some interesting photos. This is a view of the ‘wall’ of apartment blocks that is directly in front of our window on the 15th floor of the hotel:

The orange lights at the top of each block came on at precisely 8pm each evening and went off again at 10pm. They took several minutes to build up to full intensity, and you wouldn’t spot the exact switch-on moment unless you already knew it was happening.

To provide some indication of the mountainous nature of Lantau, I took several photos looking to the right from our window, but I’ve selected this photo to include here because the low sunlight from the west highlights the shape of the mountain slopes very effectively:

All the buildings in the foreground are schools!

So it was finally time to head home. Tung Chung MTR station is just a short walk from Novotel, and taking the train seemed the obvious choice, despite having to change trains twice on our way to Fanling. At this point, I have a word of advice for anyone visiting Hong Kong for the first time: do not take the Airport Express in order to get into town. It’s convenient, certainly, but if you do, you will miss one of the minor wonders of Hong Kong: the three spectacular suspension bridges that link the airport, and Lantau, with the rest of the territory. The first two link Lantau with the island of Tsing Yi, while the third links Tsing Yi with the New Territories west of Tsuen Wan and is not followed by either the Airport Express or the Tung Chung Line, which we took on this occasion. So what’s the problem? The railway does cross the first two bridges, but only via a quasi-tunnel below the roadway. And you see nothing. Take a bus!

Before the pandemic, we always took a bus from the airport to a bus station in Fanling that is within walking distance of our village. However, we had no choice on this occasion, because airport buses have plenty of storage room for luggage, while regular buses do not. So we missed the bridges by taking the train.

Our second train change was at Hung Hom, which used to be the southern terminus of the so-called East Rail Line when it was still operated by the Kowloon–Canton Railway (KCR). However, the line was extended last year to Admiralty on Hong Kong island, so the benefit of boarding the train at a terminus—that you could be guaranteed a seat for the 40-minute journey to Fanling—no longer applies. Also, this line used to carry 12-car trains, but since the extension it has been restricted to nine-car trains. Fortunately, we were able to obtain seats. Incidentally, on the second leg of our train journey, someone got up to offer me their seat. Although this practice does make me feel old, I’m not complaining.

And it was reassuring after being cooped up in hotel rooms for two weeks to see familiar topographic features from the windows of the train. First, Amah Rock. This large monolith is visible on a hilltop to the east almost immediately the train emerges from the tunnel connecting Kowloon with the New Territories (amah is the Hong Kong word for a female domestic servant, and the story goes that this monolith represents a poor woman carrying an infant in a meh tai, a harness that I once saw regularly being used to carry a young child but don’t often see nowadays. The woman is looking out to sea waiting for her sailor husband, who is overdue, to return home. Tin Hau, goddess of the sea, who already knew what had befallen the husband, is said to have turned the amah into stone to end her suffering.

Then, as the train approached University station, I could pick out the distinctive profile of Ma On Shan (‘Horse Saddle Mountain’), the second highest mountain in the New Territories, on the summit of which I spent several nights in the 1970s to be able to watch the sunrise.

Finally, as the train neared Taipo, once the principal administrative centre in the New Territories under British rule, I could pick out the instantly recognizable outline of Pat Sin Leng (‘Eight Fairies Ridge’) across the watery expanse of Tolo Harbour.

There is an unwanted footnote to this story. During the flight from Frankfurt to Hong Kong, I drank four 330ml cans of Becks, but during the subsequent fortnight, I didn’t consume a single drop of beer. Obviously, I don’t keep a record of my beer consumption, but it could be four decades since I went this long without tasting a single drop (a time when I couldn’t afford to drink beer). Fortunately, however, in anticipation of possible problems, we’d stocked up before leaving for the UK back in June. Cheers!