After I started writing for famed newspaper South China Morning Post (their Post Magazine on Sundays) it seems this blog has gone to hell. Now I’m getting paid to write what I would normally put here… but then again on this blog there is no one changing “… we found him standing there bathed in fluorescent light, placidly munching on a banana” to “we found him eating a banana”.

Anyway, there’s been another semi-epic trip deep into Guangdong province, paradise of joy and Cantonese. The first thing that happened was that the heavens opened and the worst electrical storm ever flooded the little town of Wan Fau in five minutes.

If I had been hanging around by the pool, I would have been killed by the turbine that was blown off the roof. Then I would have been electrocuted. Good thing I don’t hang around pools.

There was nothing to do, basically, but drink beer and play cards. And go to the excellent SD Bar Noble Pub (formerly known as Time Pulse Bar) where one of the dancers from last time I was there was now the manager, and where the entertainment was now a guy playing a rocked-up version of Vivaldi’s Summer! It worked well. Oh, Wan Fau.

Political rubbish collector

Locals fighting over free phone subscriptions

I felt sorry for this vagrant and pulled out a ten yuan note for him so he could keep drinking himself to death. Unfortunately I pulled out a 50. What’s the etiquette? Take it back and exchange it for a ten? Ask him to give me 40 yuan in change? He was unconscious anyway. I let him have the 50.

Then it was time to move to fabled party town Sei Wui and the stylists there.

Success! 8 yuan.

…followed by old staple ‘cards with dudes’.And beer. The best beer is now what they think is called Snow but which is actually Mons.

Ahhhhh cheers. Guangdong!

The US is under attack. Threatened by islamists from all over the world, streaming unhindered in across its borders and, increasingly, by enemies inexplicably placed in key positions in its government, it is growing weak and blind to the danger.

The US president is using the very people who have repeatedly declared the USA to be their enemy number one, CAIR (in reality the Muslim Brotherhood), as his closest advisors. The words ‘jihad’, ‘jihadist’ and ‘islamist terrorism’ have now been removed from FBI teaching materials.

Anybody who still shrugs off world jihad and the creation of a new world caliphate as just some individual nutjobs hijacking their lofty and peaceful religion, should watch this documentary.

Parts 1 and 2 of this documentary are also available on YouTube.

I’m so, so glad I don’t live in Norway anymore so I don’t have to see the smirking loser Breivik’s face splashed across the front page of every newspaper day in and day out.

The trial continues apace, with Breivik being grilled by the prosecutors about his motives. They very much want him to be a Christian right-wing fanatic with links to all the, what they call right-wing or “extreme right”, populistic, fascist, nazi etc. etc. “groups” that he at some stage boasted about belonging to.

Now it appears that the man is a total loner and loser with no links nor any particular ideology at all.
“Nazi”, but pro-Israel. “Christian”, but atheist. “Anti-muslim”, but admiring Al-Qaeda. (In fact he told the court of plans to behead former prime minister Gro Harlem Brundtland as well as other Norwegian political figures.) “Political activist”, but spent the year before the killings playing video games by himself.

They even tried to make his limply raised fist on his first day in court into a “right-wing salute”. Last time I looked, the fist thing is one historically favoured by socialists, communists, the black panthers and other extreme left groups.

Many Norwegians have expressed disgust at Breivik’s being allowed to get on the stand and express himself. They think it should be a closed-doors trial.

Others disagree.

Among them is a girl, Stine Brandvik, who stared down the muzzle of Breivik’s gun (the man had so little human contact that he gave his guns names) but miraculously escaped being shot in the head because he had run out of bullets.

She says: “He got all he asked for, a stage, a mike, a tweeting audience of journalists. But that only exposed him for what he is. With each passing day of the trial he is diminishing and his project is diminishing with him until nothing remains.”

“He clearly wants to be a celebrity on the back of what he did, but each time he tries to talk about his motives it comes out as nonsense and it’s good for everyone to see that.To me, he is not like other human beings. I saw his face. He knew exactly what he was doing. He is a monster, not an ideologue. I want people to know that.”

I’ve said it many times before: I think Breivik is a man who wanted most of all to kill a lot of people, and created a warped ideology cherry-picked from things he had read, from that standpoint. He even invoked Gandhi in his so-called manifesto (less than 40% of which was written by himself) for God’s sakes.

He is a whimpering little man who wanted to feel great, one way or another. Unfortunately he chose to partly use the important work that has been done by normal, sane people who are worried about the relentless march of world jihad and the effect this has had and is having on our Western culture, to justify his mad actions.

And that’s all the left-leaning, politically correct western media wants to see.

A couple of Sundays ago, April 15th to be exact, I threw a Titanic party and felt the usual fare, Sichuan food, wouldn’t do to commemorate the tragedy. We needed dairy and salmon. Off I trotted to the Wellcome Shop only to find that most of the butter they have there is halal.

Am i naive? I thought only meat had to be halal, that is to say, the animal must be slaughtered in the slowest, most painful way possible while some geezer turns to Mecca shouting about how Allah is the greatest.

Here is what Tundra Tabloids said about halal only last week: “Outside of the fact that the meat can very well contain sanitary risks from amounts of fecal matter, as the animal ingests its own blood contaminated from its flaying around, thereby spreading bacteria into the meat of the dying animal, also a portion of the proceeds from halal purchases goes to funding the jihad.”

I had noticed on an earlier occasion halal peanuts(!) but now it seemed this thing was eating up Wellcome from the inside. I therefore thought it right to write to Wellcome:

Dear manager
I was extremely surprised and puzzled when I tried to buy butter in Wellcome the other day and found that more than 60% of the packets were marked ‘halal’.

Could you explain to me what separates a halal (allowed) peanut from a haram (forbidden) peanut? I really want to know!

Yes it’s true. Buying foodstuffs marked halal is putting money in the pockets of people who hate our way of life and want to take us down. I urge you to write to Wellcome too, to get rid of this menace.

Seems like Lantau is saved (for now) – all the parties shot down the incinerator proposal at Legco today. Rest in peace, idiotic ideas from the environmental ‘protection’ department!

So we brace ourselves for the next onslaught, because they have tasted blood and will take down South Lantau one way or another… just not yet, and not in this way.

My bet is on lots of artificial islands outside Mui Wo, connected by roads …

On Ching Ming I continued my chronicling of the coastline of Hong Kong Island for my video Conquering Hongkie, and boldly went etc. with my faith-and skillful camerawoman L. And verily, the coastline is full of surprises when one cares to look. The biggest surprise is of course that the road is mostly built as far inland as possible. I chose Ching Ming as an excellent day to shoot, so I could show what the locals get up to on grave sweeping day (or Burn Lantau Festival as it’s also known.)

When we got to the cemetery below Pok Fu Lam the locals were out in force all right. Hoi hoi, now to respectfully shoot the burning of paper object and -money (smoke drifting across identical tomb stones, cut to some incense, oh yeah), the eating and the party atmosphere!

Hm. There were indeed hundreds of people, but … where was the smoke? Where were the suckling pigs? The burning gaffs and cash? It took me at least 15 minutes of wasted footage before it dawned on me: This was a Christian cemetery. Ahhrghhh. Well, just because I had just taken a photo of a gigantic cross didn’t mean I would twig the fact that it was a non-Taoist graveyard, right?

Moving on, we found ourselves in the worst of bad-taste nightmares: The oddly named Cyberport which is actually a conglomeration of ghastly luxury flats and shops. The only thing it had going for it was that you can walk your dog there. It was actually something of a doggie paradise. But visually – run awaaaaaaay!

Finally able to access some bits of water below a vast housing estate, we came across a swimmer. Well. Some people call it swimming, others ‘splashing around’. If I hadn’t actually seen him go into the water, I would have thought that he was drowning, brutally thrown off some freighter in mid-freight.

The gigantic housing estate, near a place called Wah Kwai (which should be pronounced Wah Gwai) was so attractive, I’d choose it over Cyberport any day. For one thing, the inhabitants had filled the area closest to the water with all sorts of figurines. And when I say all, I mean all:

As well as the usual goddesses and deities, there were Christmas reindeer in full regalia, little childrens’ heads (porcelain ones, hello) encased in concrete, all sorts of animals and a Little Red Riding Hood. Hundreds if not thousands of these covered a surprisingly large wooded area that had just been left to its own devices.

A bit further up the path some geezers were even fishing in a brook, a brook in a thicket. The scene looked not a little like that film with the duelling banjos – and that on Hong Kong Island!

When we reached Aberdeen it was getting dark, but looked alluring, like a real fisherman’s wharf. Fishing boats bobbed on the water which looked clean and inviting when you couldn’t see it. There was a beautiful wholesale fish market and – the whole of Aberdeen’s water front is being razed to make way for something awful, with tiles and manicured flower beds. It probably didn’t look enough like ‘Hong Kong New Town’ for our never-resting civil servants.

So true. Efficiency really is life. I was thinking that yesterday as I sat on the bus from Yeung Gong (Yangjiang) to Guangzhou, said to take two and a half to three hours. But because of rain and many other vehicles having the same mad idea of going to Guangzhou, the trip took five hours.

I’m in Guangzhou now, hiding from the rain. That’s okay. I love Guangzhou, and the yam cha (notably taro cakes) is sublime. Anyway, to get to Yeung Gong, far down the coast on the way to Hainan Island, we took the ferry to Zhuhai, to find a long, long (endless?) water promenade.

I’m currently on a quest to walk around the entire Hong Kong Island and so far have walked from Central to Aberdeen. Of the stretch I’ve walked so far, maybe 5% is actually near or with access to water. Why can’t we have water?

The game – is on! I’m starting mini-adventures combined with work: I’m shooting everything about Hong Kong for tourists and people who want to settle here. The first thing I’m doing is walking around the entire Hong Kong Island (not in one go – hello!) and shooting everything. Ten hours or something of footage whittled down to a two minute segment, just like, oh, I don’t know, David Attenborough? Or that other geezer. Jamie Oliver.

I’ve never walked around Hong Kong Island before and now I finally got to see the road winding through the trees of the western part of the island which I’ve been looking at from the Mui Wo ferry almost every day for 20 years… Better late than never eh? Now I’ll see the truth.

Above is child rearing Hong Kong style – a sea of concrete with a childhood paradise squeezed in beneath a bridge.

We also had the joy of seeing absolutely every architectural style ever invented on a single building: The charming Villa Cecil. Round windows, square windows, metal, marble, columns, weird shipdeck-like structures (when I say ship I mean the Starship Enterprise) waste swathes of concrete floor made so very humane and welcoming with three wilting plants.

Then, a sudden wilderness. Real trees and bushes. Then: Dai Kao Wan, possibly the last slum settlement in Hong Kong in the middle of all that money – but surrounded by a graveyard and who wants to live near dead people? We’ll see – my guess is that the squatter colony will be luxury flats for mainlanders to stash their Louis Vuitton handbags in… let’s be generous and say two years.

Tomorrow I’m walking onwards from Sandy Bay to Aberdeen! Can’t wait to see that map come to life. After walking around Hong Kong Island I will walk across it. Tips for interesting places are welcome!

When I arrived in Hong Kong a lifetime ago, perms were the hairstyle du jour for men; notably tight curls on top with short backs. Since then the male hairstyles have gone through the same ups and downs as other places, but one terrible travesty has been a constant: The inexplicable urge of the Chinese male to change the most beautiful hair on earth: Black, shiny, into red, rusty, brown… and now this. The colour with no name … except maybe piss yellow?

Why, Chinese guys, why? All right, so the dude above probably is beyond help no matter what colour his hair is, but still! Black and shiny, people! Stick to black and shiny!

A bit belated, here are some images from the rally against the “super” incinerator off Lantau. It was an interesting march, and according to police, 1,500 people participated. That means… there were double that? The Hong Kong police, as indeed police in other places, are known to be not very enthusiastic about counting correctly the number of demonstrators. But as so many of them were filming the rally, I’m sure they got the numbers right this time.

With recent upheavals in Central, the route from Pier 6 to government’s charming and, architecturally, astonishingly cutting-edge (if we lived in 1950) edifice is not exactly cut and dried, and the procession wound through Central in a most circuitous way; fighting through the crowds of Pedder street, going up and down stairs and escalators and through shopping centers, notably Pacific Place.

I’m afraid we lost quite a few activists in that particular place, what with sales and all. “Wah! Prada! Here, hold my banner, see you next week!”

Then it was off to Intimidation Court (govt. HQ) with its shiny black windows and black everything, to hand over petitions and signatures to the smirking Elvis Au (second in command over at the Environmental Destruction Department.) Unlike the demonstrators, some of whom idiotically wore Guy Fawkes masks now that we needed to be taken seriously, he at least had the good grace to wear a suit. That’s the only good thing I’ll probably ever say about Elvis again. This man is on a mission: He is after your view, your air and your seawater and he won’t stop before the pollution is evenly distributed.

This incinerator is the most impossible-to-understand scheme the government has come up with. There is not a single good thing about this plan. The practice of burning waste in incinerators was discontinued in this very town in 1997 over “pollution concerns”. But now, according to Elvis, we should start doing it again, because 1. There will be no emissions and 2. All the pollution will blow away because the wind always blows in one direction here in Hong Kong. I’m sure the people in the Philippines are glad to hear that. And also, as was his final reassurance at the Islands Council meeting last month: “It shouldn’t be a problem”. That’s the kind of discussion-ending, reassuring argument we want to hear from a government official.

But no one can accuse the government of not being open and accountable, because despite saying earlier that it would reveal the price of this project only after the funding had gone through Legco, it has now openly said that it will cost 15 billion of taxpayers’ money to ruin South Lantau and Cheung Chau, not the paltry HK$13 billion first calculated.

Think big, eh! When I look out my living room windows and see the grey pall hanging over the South China sea all year round, I will be greatly comforted in knowing that I now have the same amount of pollution as other Hong Kong people. If not more! Hooray!