A trip to Stanley and back (NO, not Stanley Park, silly!)

I've had in on good authority that Stanley Market in Stanley (imaginative, eh?) was a place to visit.  Naturally I checked it on Wikipedia first.  HUGE tourist destination, which for this traveller is a HUGE warning sign (remember Bruce Lee Alley or more recently SKY100?)
First I wanted to go swimming in Mui Wo again (sooo nice!) but I was just there yesterday and it is still the Year of the Snake, my personal kick-myself-in-the-behind and don't-get-lazy year, so I made preparations to head for Stanley, which is on the south side of Honk Kong Island, where I have never been, enough of a reason in itself.

To get there I am supposed to take the bus #10 to Happy Valley,  where I should switch buses to #40 to get to Stanley. The #10 is easy to find, it almost stops right in front of my hotel. Nice bus!











Along the route, I finally see one of those HK highrise construction bamboo corsets in the making:











Maybe I mentioned this before, maybe not, but the fact is that English is not a forte of Hong Kong bus drivers. But they make up for it in other ways.  When I get the feeling that my stop should come up very soon, I go down to the bus driver and ask him "Which stop for bus number 40 to Stanley?" The smile and the shrugging shoulders tell me it is the language problem and not that he doesn't know where the bus leaves!
So I stretch out 4 fingers of one hand and make a zero with thumb and index finger of the other while repeating "Stanley, Aberdeen ...".  The expression of understanding is followed by him pointing in the direction where the bus just came from. So I point forward and then make the walking sign in the backward direction, meaning I intend to get off at the next stop.  He just shakes his head, stops, and opens the door for me!                     M_Goi Saai, Mr. Bus Captain (as they are called here ;-)

And Mr. Bus Captain was right: After finding a cemetery and a golden dragon, the presence of these horses

suggests I am VERY close to Happy Valley Racecourse, where my 2nd bus of the day is supposed to get me through the tunnel.  Even though the bus stop poles list about different buses leaving from here, #40 is not among them. So I just hop onto a different number, that is going to Aberdeen, also on the south side of the island. Then comes THE TUNNEL (which apparently I am traversing in a submarine converted to a bus ;-)

I think I missed the right area of Aberdeen because this was the nicest view I found:

So I start looking for a bus for Stanley (again). One of those small minibuses finally arrives and it even stops for me because I learn quickly ;-).  Since ~20 different bus lines stop at every bus stop here, there is no room and no point for all of them to pull in, stop, and see if any passengers might get on. They slow down a bit when approaching the stop and when that happens my favourite routine is jumping a meter into the road, pointing with outstretched arm first at the bus captain and then on the ground in front of me.  That works!
But somehow I think that these people will still be telling their great-grandchildren stories about the crazy German of 2013 ;-)

 When I get off the bus in Stanley and look down the hill I almost start running after the bus begging it to let me back on.  This view is what I was afraid of encountering:











And this is why they all come to Stanley: Stanley Market.  After I hear this sentence in German I almost start running for the bus again:  "Oh look: There is something sweet with a Dragon!"  Pulling up my shoulders and
angling my elbows outward I march through the shopping-bag-carrying crowds to find the ocean. From in here the ocean is just a thing to be imagined, but both Goggle Maps and my own eyes from the bus assure me that it exists.

An ode to faulty image processing: Can you spot the two-faced woman? (the T-shirt accented tummy is real though!)

The Ocean was found! And what a surprise:  Not a single shopping-bag-carrying tourist in sight!  What is wrong with these people?  Reminds me of the woman that after I asked her what to see in Shenzhen China shrugged her shoulders and said: "I don't know; I just shop!" Judging by the numbers: There is nothing wrong with them, and there must be something wrong with me. Ah well ...

 There was a stall with pottery things all on its own at the end of the boardwalk and these two blue horses attracted my attention (The come up to about knee height).  First because they are copies of a blue horse I saw only last week in the Hong Kong Museum of Art. Second because my Grandmother raised horses all her life.  More as a joke I asked the vendor for how much they would sell, even though I assumed they would be way out of my range. Turns out the larger one had a price tag of HK$ 350, which comes to C$ 46!  But since the purchase would also require the purchase of a suitcase, I needed some time to think and asked the shop tender whether there would be somewhere to eat without tourists. Under raised eyebrows he asked incredulously "You want local Chinese restaurant?"
  He then gave me directions to a hidden Chinese restaurant very close to the market. More raised eyebrows when I entered there but the search for the ONE English-language food menu that every restaurant seems to have only took them about 5 minutes ;-)  And this was the reward: A seafood hotpot; the comb-like white things are ginger, judging by taste and texture.

 Very yummy!





After the thinking organ was strengthened by food it decided against the whole horse-suitcase adventure. However, I went back to the store and looked for other things and this is what I found:

A horse copied from the ones in the underground clay army  (HK$30 = C$ 3.90)

A small vase that the owner claimed was 400 years old (something something Dynasty.  Given its beauty and the price tag of HK$150 (C$20) I don't care whether it was made only this morning.  It's GORGEOUS!

And while the horse was available in about 20 identical copies, the other pottery/China (;-) was all individual single pieces that were heavily covered in dust and consequently could actually have just arrived from his village, as the owner claimed.







One look back and I try to catch the bus. The mini-buses only seat 16 and there is no standing room available. After the bus captain decides that the person in line ahead of me isthe magical number 16 and he then tries to clip my toenails using his remote-operated bus door, I decide to try a cab instead.  Good thing too. This way I learn that THE TUNNEL is not the only way to the south coast of HK Island but that there are numerous roads over the hills, known by the particular 'gap' through which they pass.  The cabby drops me at the Causeway MTR station, from which I get to my hotel quickly.