Remnants of the South Gate, Kowloon Walled City Park, Hong Kong
When we went to Hong Kong in 2006, we spent a fair amount of time wandering around in the New Kowloon area. One of the places that we visited there was the
Kowloon Walled City Park, which has interesting history.
While we were there, I spent a little time sitting on a bench enjoying the scenery while Stephen was photographing. While I sat there, a local man came up to me and said, “Jackie is coming!” He was so excited, but it appeared that he exhausted his knowledge of English on that sentence, so I didn’t find out anything more. He pointed to the other side of the park, so I got up, grabbed Stephen and headed that way. Along the way, several more people were thrilled to tell us that, “Jackie is coming!”
Of course, the most famous Jackie in Hong Kong is Jackie Chan. But because the park was still pretty quiet and sparsely populated despite the undercurrent of excitement, I thought a visit from Jackie Chan was highly unlikely. So we waited with the small crowd of people while a P.A. was set up and a small group of musicians began to play, just to see what happened.
Kowloon Walled City Park, Hong Kong
After a while, an English woman came and stood with us and we chatted with her a bit. She seemed to know quite a bit about the history of the park, which at one time had been a walled city filled with opium dens, drug addicts and crime. The city was finally demolished in 1993 and 1994, and the park built in its place.
As the event got going, we suddenly realized that the woman we had been chatting with earlier was the Jackie everyone was waiting for. We didn’t stay much longer, because it was getting late in the afternoon and we didn’t want to get lost on our way back to the train station.
Of course, I had to look up the guest of honor when we returned to the hotel. Her name was Jackie Pullinger. She went to Hong Kong in 1966, hoping to do missionary work. She got a job as a primary teacher in the walled city, and started a youth club to help drug addicts and the homeless. She eventually started the St. Stephen’s Society, which provides homes and intervention for drug addicts. She has led a fascinating life, it seems, and honestly, I thought our encounter with her was probably way more interesting than if they had been waiting for Jackie Chan. Her book is on my long list of things I want to read.
In a couple weeks, we’ll be heading to Oregon for a road trip, so keep your eyes open for a new travelogue. Originally, we planned to go to Oregon and Washington, and maybe up into Vancouver. But when we started looking into what there is to see in Oregon, we realized that we could easily spend two full weeks there. We will probably head further north on a future trip.
Stephen put together a big spreadsheet with places he’d like to photograph, with the “must see” spots highlighted. Since we are starting in Northern California, our first stops will be Lassen Volcanic National Park and Lava Beds National Monument. After maybe a couple more stops in California (Redwood National Forest?), we’ll head on in to Oregon.
Our “must see” list for Oregon includes Crater Lake National Monument, John Day Fossil Beds, Painted Hills, Wallowa Valley, Cannon Beach, Ecola State Park, Hecata Head Lighthouse and Bandon. There are more than 30 additional places on our list of possible stops. Is there anything else we should add to our list of musts?
Like our American Southwest driving trip a few years ago (no travelogue yet, sorry), we will be booking hotels as we go. Last time, we accomplished this with an iPhone, but I am really looking forward to using the larger iPad on this trip. Looking up hotels on the smaller iPhone screen could be hard on the eyes. AAA now has several apps that I am anxious to try out.
The other thing that will make the trip interesting is updating my blog on the iPad. It is definitely easier to do the typing on my old MacBook (which I sold), but with the iPad, I can pull it out anywhere and post an update. I don’t have to wait for Wi-Fi back at our hotel room. Because I spend a lot of time waiting while Stephen sets up shots, this will be great. I am also going to try to take more iPhone pictures and post those with the travelogues as I go. Of course, I will replace them with Stephen’s much nicer pictures after he has had a chance to process and copyright them. I’m looking forward to trying out the iPad blogging on the go experience.
One thing I haven’t been able to do is get my blog up and running in the WordPress app on the iPad. I have my blogs set up to be IP restricted for posting, so I need to take a moment and figure out what IP to use for the iPad and get that set up. On our trip to Bhutan last fall, I would just turn off the IP restriction, post my travelogue, then turn it back on. So it will be a lot easier if I just configure everything to work on my iPad all the time.
UPDATE: I finally got the WordPress app set up on my iPad for both my blogs. It turns out that the problem wasn’t the IP restriction, but that I just had to log on to WordPress first and enable it. Then I just added the 3G IP address for my iPad to the few IPs I can post from, and I was up and running. We leave for Oregon on Thursday. Chiqui was so excited when the dogsitter came to pick up the key on Saturday. She adores the dog sitter, so Chiqui is always happy to have her come and stay.
