Sick again

For lunch today we went to the Tron, a pub behind the Tron Church, which didn't have any light cycles or Master Control computer programs hanging out at the bar. There was a very loud bunch of lads on a stag do, at 11:30 in the morning, which seemed a bit keen, but I suppose you should be happy people can wear hats with fake ginger hair and a bobble on top at first thing in the morning.

A Bangkok Chronicle

Today I got up early, had a call with the office and then went for a run, which meant by 10 am I was no good to anyone, which meant my wife was a little disappointed that her weekend in Bangkok was going to be spent in our hotel room, listening to me snore and fart.

Nobody loves a tourist

I've been reading A Corkscrew is Most Useful, a book about travel writers in the nineteenth century.  I've learnt several things from this:

• Thomas Cook, possible inventor of the package holiday, started off with outings for members of temperance societies.  And 150 years later, we had Club 18-30.  I think that's known as 'emergent behaviour'
• Even in the 1850s, people were already complaining that tourists had got to all the best places and were ruining them for proper travellers
• Richard Burton (the writer, not the husband of Elisabeth Taylor) was tutored by a man whose chief pedagogical device was a horsewhip.

My own father never paid for me to be tutored by anyone who employed any form of flagelation as a classroom aid.  More's the pity. I'd have lost the skin from my back and gained some useful experience for later life.

Visiting Stanley

Today we struggled out of bed late, and took a taxi over to Stanley.

Stanley holds a quasi-mystical status for most Hong Kongers - it's this curious place on the other side of the island, sometimes thought of but infrequently visited.  Possibly because the journey there is something of an odyssey - an eighty dollar taxi ride from Happy Valley with most of it on a long winding road, stuck behind either a bus or a cement mixer, trundling slowly down the coast.

But when you arrive, there's a cornucopia of delights awaiting you.

Public transport

On the way home this evening, I saw an open top tour bus blundering through all the other early evening rush hour traffic. I wondered what would possess somebody to take an open top bus tour of Hong Kong. It seems an ill-suited city to drive around in the open, what with the heat, the humidity, and the pollution. You wouldn't be taking things in at ground level, where the interesting street markets are (although the Hong Kong Government is making a sterling effort to replace as many of these with characterless malls and housing developments as it can) and I can't see that you'd really get a good look at the architecture of Hong Kong from one storey higher, bumping along through stop-start traffic.