Left Heathrow mid-afternoon on Monday and arrive in Hong Kong at 7am local time Tuesday after an 11 hour flight taking us 8 hours into the future.  The difficult part from the point of view of our body clocks is that the eight hours we lost going out was the part of the day usually spent asleep, so we are deposited in a strange city with that feeling of dislocation and hyper-reality of jet lag and culture shock.   One of the main shocks is just how smoothly the arrival and transit through customs/baggage control turns out to be - beautifully efficient - and we stumble through to the MTR where smiling staff sell us a four day tourist pass that gives unlimited use of the MTR network.  This pentrates my fogged brain and makes me very happy.

How sad is it, that here I am in one of the most exciting cities in the world and I want to spend my limited time here playing on a new Underground.  As we ride in to town on the airport express I study my new map.  I find myself referring to 'the Central Line' and the 'District Line' instead of the Tseun Wan Line or the Kwun Tong Line due to the red and green colourings, but it helps me to grasp something I recognise.  

The train goes above ground, and outside is dazzling sunshine as we pull through stunning scenes of verdant tropical islands lush with vegetation and sparkling water.  Sleep deprivation gives everything a hyper-real glow beyond the natural gorgeousness already out there. The line crosses onto an island, where we change at Tsing Yi to pick up the Tung Chung Line to Hong Kong station. (I'll edit in pictures later as they haven't been uploaded yet) 

This proves to be a slight cock-up as that involves rather a long walk between Hong Kong station and Central where we are to met our host, Sarah at 8am so she can get us back to the flat before she goes to work.  But hell, we're in bloody Hong Kong, HONG KONG!!!   And brain-fogged as we are, here we are working it out...I am most pleased at our derring-do attitude. 'Met us at the airport? No fear, we're intelligent adults, we'll work it out'.  And we do.  

We realise just how big Central station is, and the multiple choice of exits, and a slight hysteria follows as we have no idea where Sarah might be in the steadily increasing tide of morning commuters.  I find that one way to comprehend the situation is to compare it to getting lost in the Bank-Monument complex.  Understanding through analogy.Grabbing at anything recognisable we are astounded to find a Pret a Manger in the station.  Ah, the horrors of globalisation; why travel when everything here, you have back home. But it gives us a landmark, and thankfully B finds Sarah's mobile number on his laptop and we manage to find a payphone and after the hilarity of there being two Pret a Mangers in Central, eventually a familiar blonde figure approaches and whisks us out of the aircondtioned cool into the craziness of a Hong Kong rush hour, and a tramride to Happy Valley.



I'm trying to listen as Sarah points out important landmarks, such as her office for meeting her later, but brain is too excited, too overwrought.  Walking out into Hong Kong is staggering - not least the heat which is like opening the oven door when roasting pork, steamy and tantalising. Everything swims in unreality and overloaded with the differences, the colour, the energy.  And the whole of this wonderful newness edged with the peculiar  exagerration and feeling of being in motion when still that jetlag coats your senses with.           

...time for a nap and a shower, and to process that we really have made it, and as an aside have knocked out three stations already.

A weekend in London to break up some of the vast distances I'm due to cover in September between Cornwall and the Southern Hemisphere.  The map of what's left to achieve is no longer simple.  Travelling radially in London is not easy, so with some head-scratching, and consulting of what's closed for engineering works this weekend,  the plan is to try work up towards Arnos Grove on the Piccadilly Line.

B shows a touching enthusiasm for this exciting plan, and as soon as we are on the platform at South Ken, promptly goes to sleep.  Oh the thrill of travel, but then B has spent a large part of his childhood commuting up and down the westerly end of the royal blue Piccadilly.  That said, I would have thought venturing beyond the usual terminus of South Ken would be a thrilling adventure into unknown lands.  Or am I just easily excited? I must remember I cannot expect other people to be delighted by the prospect of visiting Holloway Road tube station on a Saturday afternoon for no other reason than to go to a tube station.  Not like there's cake involved



First stop; the Caledonian Road.  We alight along with a decent handful of wearied travellers, but I'm the only one to get excited at discovering the station is tiled in pink, well, puce...a sort of 'wet plastered wall'  and 'fresh scab' shades of magenta.  Exclaiming about the tiling earns a few odd stares. Few commuters ever bounce up and down gleefully exclaiming 'look it's all pink!'  

Even better the tiling is of the old variety with the station name emblazoned along the wall. Shows the current blue lettering to be coldly utilitarian.  It's always a joy to arrive at a Leslie Green station. 

 Other little details survive.  I assume that the details tiled into the walls such as the below signage towards Finsbury Park (the opposite platform points towards Hammersmith) are original.  I am charmed by the endearing unnecessary nouveau curls in the design.  How very stylish...

Unusually there are no stairs to the lifts, making the station wheelchair-friendly since 1906.  .

I suspect that there might be secret Thunderbirds base under the station, and the strange little device on the wall next to the lift is a Hint to the Wise.  Ok, so it's probably some terribly famous local landmark of which I am completely ignorant but the Thunderbirds idea makes the world seem all glorious technicolour when the reality is all there seems to be around here are prisons. Directional signage upstairs points you towards both Pentonville and Holloway prisons, which is all rather sad and grey.  

  
And onward to the Holloway Road which is tiled yellow and brown, and is another Edwardian beauty from Leslie Green.  Even the tunnel mouth is tiled. 

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Once upon a time the Holloway Road was home to an experimental spiral escalator.  

How simply marvellous and yet terrifying!  Bits of the workings are in the Transport Museum Depot at Acton.  It was housed in the second of two lift shafts built in the station but never really worked properly and so was never used by the public.  It actually sounds lethal, like a satanic Disneyland ride designed to maim the unwary, the kind of thing that would give any decent Health and Safety Inspector palpitations these days, but then my preponderance for impractical trailing clothing makes me a tad nervous of escalators in general especially after ruining a splendid white bias-cut summer dress whose hem got shredded by escalator teeth at Liverpool Street and I had to go on a hot date tattered and covered in machine oil.  There was a scary comedy moment of trying to extricate myself from the machinery as it continued to eat my clothing where I feared public nudity might be the only escape option possible for freeing myself without injury to anything but my dignity. As I was wearing precisely the white dress and nothing else but my shoes, even as it was happening my valiant efforts to rip myself free while still partly clad played in my head like Jane comic strip. 

Anyway, I peer through grills into dark, hidden spaces at the station to see if I can discover where this strange spiral beastie may have once lived...was this its lair?



Upstairs, just like the Caledonian Road before it, Holloway Road's station building is one of Green's beautiful ox blood tiled gems with semi-circular windows.  These stations seem so quintessentially 'London' to me, part of the construction of the city's identity that I absorbed as a child when dreaming of one day moving to the Big Smoke.