Going into hibernation…

You may have noticed a lack of posts recently and the reason is that this blog has started to become a real chore for me. It’s lasted much longer than I thought it would and has opened up some interesting opportunities over the past two years (since it started to attract more visitors, although it has been running in one form or another since 2006!!) – however, I’m having far too much fun doing the film locations blog these days and finding new and interesting stuff to put here has been getting tedious. Besides, I know of several other blogs that do it much better than I do (see my links in the sidebar).

So, until further notice I am hanging up my anorak. Thanks for the support and comments over the past few years, feel free to leave comments still -  it’s only the posts that are going into cryogenic suspension, not me personally – and I will check every few days to answer stuff or return a hello.

Lung Cheung Road Lookout, nr Beacon Hill

Well, I’ve been in the area for quite some time now (about 8 months) and still haven’t actually made a proper effort to see the places that are in my immediate vicinity. So, with a few spare minutes today (I don’t get many occasions when I have the time, will and energy together in one place) I walked up to another one of HK’s so-called “Lookouts”.

A Quickfire Bruce Lee Tour of the North NT

I recently had the pleasure of meeting up with a mad crazy German Bruce Lee fan (who shall remain nameless to protect his shy nature – although he did blame me for the bombing of Dresden…I didn’t really feel I could let him know that my home town was Coventry) and we headed up into the norther part of the New Territories to catch a few of the Bruce Lee-related locations. Now, sadly the day was a bit of a rush so we didn’t have time to do all we could have done but anyway I figured it may be useful to other people who fancy venturing a bit further out of the way and are keen to spend as little time doing it as possible. So here is what we did. It took around 4 hours.

Hong Kong Air Pollution

Well, the weather is on the up (or perhaps I’ve spoken too soon?) and the grey fuggy pollution haze that descends on HK during the so-called ‘winter’ seems to be gradually easing. I see a lot of recommendations on the web whereby people recommend the best time to visit HK is during the cooler winter months, but I don’t agree. The air is pretty rank from around Oct through to March/April time (of course it depends largely on the prevailing winds – south easterlies are the best for good, relatively clean air).

For me the best time to come is always the summer. Despite coming from a country with cold crappy weather 90% of the time, I absolutely love the hot, steamy, sweaty months and would have summer all year round if I could.

Wai Kee Coffee & Noodles Shophouse, Sham Shui Po

My Xmas read this past holiday was “Kowloon: Unknown Territory” by Nicole Chabot and Ira Chaplain. It’s a nice combination of Ira’s eye-catching photographs and Nicole’s thoroughly researched essays that bring some of the lesser-known aspects of Kowloon into the spotlight. It was certainly a good read and will be used over the coming months as a reference for some places that I haven’t been to yet – or even heard of for that matter.

One such place is a pork liver noodle establishment in Sham Shui Po called Wai Kee Coffee and Noodles that has a long history in the area (since 1957 according to Nicole). So, seeing as I am not too far away nowadays (my pad is officially in Sham Shui Po district) it seemed like a good excuse to go and check the place out.

Starfish Bay (海星灣), Lok Wo Sha

As regular readers may know one of my big interests is seeking out HK film locations. Okay, it may be heading towards the sad end of the nerdy spectrum but it is a great way to explore the area and has taken me to some quite obscure places around the territory.

Today’s excursion was essentially a “kill two birds with one stone” kind of thing because it was to find the exact location of where the finale from Jackie Chan’s Drunken Master was filmed, but also to check out the general area because it was used for many low-budget films during the 80′s. I found out about the latter courtesy of a friendly Spanish dude called Jesus who has done a pretty amazing job at documenting some of the more obscure aspects of 80′s HK cinema – notably the cut-and-paste output of Filmark and IFD.

High Rock, Shatin

High Rock is one of those places I originally found out about via the much missed “Things to Do Along the KCR Line booklet. The booklet went missing a few years ago, never to be found again, but in its short time in my possession it introduced me to many of the out-of-the-way sights that spurred me into setting up this blog. Despite this fact I have only just got round to visiting the place – shame on me, because it’s a lovely little building that has a long and varied history in Shatin before its current incarnation as a Christian retreat and hostel.