Today I went on a scavenger hunt of sorts. Hong Kong promotes a series of walking tours which take you past historic sites and buildings. From the get go I assumed there was little chance of actually finding everything on the list, so I decided to make a game out of it and see how many I could take pictures of. It didn't go very well. The fail was in large part due to starting out with partial battery on my phone and no physical map. So the hunt could last only as long as 50% battery life on a Google Nexus One switching between GPS/maps, browser, camera and mp3 player. The heritage trail map online was pretty poor as well and matching it up to google maps on my phone was a trick... even for an expert delivery driver. However, the other reason for the fail might ultimately have been a net positive in that it ended up reinforcing something I'd already known about the place. Most of these buildings, actually all of them, were off limits to the public as they were still in use. This includes a Victorian era prison (edit: I was wrong, Victoria Prison closed a few years ago). Hong Kong is so hard up for physical space it's just not practical to turn the old Government House into a full time museum (it's only open to the public two days a year). The point of this trip is to learn first hand about the way society operates here, so I suppose I can't complain too much. Still unfortunate that the most I could see of Government House was the ornate Victorian wrought iron downward facing spikes on the outer wall.
Walls outside Government House. Notice the camera.
Hong Kong's prison. Easy to pin as from the Victorian era from it's name: "Victoria Prison"
Pretty low tech means of keeping people in, shards of glass.
Not quite Alcatraz. There are literally bars, restaurants and even an auto racing club right across the street.
RSS Feed