Hong Kong High

It was drizzly and foggy the morning we arrived in Hong Kong, and for the three days we were there that is exactly the way it remained. Sometimes it was more drizzly than it was foggy and sometimes the other way around, but it was not the sort of weather of which postcards are made.

I am told there are some lovely mountains that surround Hong Kong and that the highest point, Victoria Peak, offers a spectacular view of the city and the South China Sea. I am also told that reaching the peak via the Peak Tram, in operation since 1885, is a wonderful experience, which explains why it is the most popular attraction for visitors to Hong Kong.

My wife and I didn't do that. It was drizzly and foggy. And if we couldn't see the lovely mountains, then it seemed foolish to hop on an old train and ride to the top of the mountains and then not see the city and the sea below. We were staying in a gracious and legendary hotel, the Peninsula, with a view of Victoria Harbor and creature comforts galore. We were tempted just to hunker down and stay dry, but that would have been foolish, too.

Fortunately, Hong Kong is a city that is well equipped to handle drizzly, foggy weather, far better than other soggy outposts like London or Seattle or San Francisco. Many of the tallest buildings and office complexes in the downtown core are connected by elevated walkways, meaning you can walk for blocks and blocks in Hong Kong and never have to actually cross a street.

These crosswalks invariably lead to vast, unending shopping malls containing outlets of every recognizable fashion/jewelry/electronics brand in the world and then some. Gap and Gucci, Banana Republic and Bulgari, the shops go on and on, with some inscrutable Japanese chains thrown into the mix-Happy Big You, Miss Elephant Girl, Wild Mister Man. The weird thing-the shops aren't very big at all, hardly any larger than my living room at home. And there seldom seems to be anyone actually shopping in them. Rather, there's a lonely-looking shop girl and some racks and shelves of this and that, and otherwise the shops are empty. They're like 3-D billboards. It's all about branding and maintaining a presence while thousands and thousands of people walk by every day.

So we walked in the fog and the drizzle, and didn't shop, and sooner or later we came to what is, in my estimation, the coolest attraction in Hong Kong-the Central Mid-Levels Escalator. At nearly a half-mile, it is the longest covered outdoor escalator in the world, a category that I didn't even know existed until I visited Hong Kong. Don't ask me what city has the second-longest one.

The escalator climbs up the side of one of the allegedly lovely mountains. It has 22 sections, including three moving sidewalks, and it opened in 1997 to help people who live in the zillions of apartments along its route get to work. Yes, it is a commuter escalator, if you can imagine; and each day some 100,000 Hong Kongers, or whatever you call them, use it. During rush hour all the stairs move down the mountain, toward the central city, but during off-hours they go in both directions.

We hopped on at the bottom and rode all the way to the top; and I'm telling you, there is no better way to get a quick sense of what Hong Kong is all about than by riding the Central Mid-Levels Escalator. It was the ultimate in voyeurism. The escalator slices past apartments where you can look in the window and see people eating breakfast in pajamas, past schools where children are busy being children, past restaurants where the kitchen staff is uncrating chickens on the back steps. I saw a piano tuner tuning a piano, a florist cutting stems off roses and arranging them in a vase, and a butcher with a big knife creating pork chops from a pig. This last sight I could have lived without, but it beat heck out of walking through all those eerie shopping malls.

When we got off the escalator, we promptly got lost, my favorite way for exploring a city. We stepped into a Buddhist temple, then we stepped right back out because the air was so thick with incense and my wife and I were coughing so loudly that we were disturbing the worshippers. Good thing there isn't a Buddhist hell or we would surely burn in it. We stopped at a Chinese restaurant where no one spoke English and we ordered by pointing at other people's plates. It was great fun and everyone laughed at us. I'm still not sure what we ate, but it was delicious and I suspect it may have been duck.

We eventually wound up in Hong Kong's Aphrodisiac District. They don't really call it the Aphrodisiac District, but that's what it is-block after block of stores filled with ancient natural remedies used to promote vitality and youthful vigor and all the other euphemisms for why there is Viagra. These stores advertised themselves, not with big signs, but by window displays that featured lots of not-so-subtle phallic inventory such as water buffalo horns and antelope antlers and bagfuls of ginseng root shaped like tiny, well, it was really quite fascinating. And unlike the empty brand-name shops, these places were packed with people, men and women, buying vast quantities of stuff and handing over lots of cash. It offered considerable insight into why China is the most populous nation in the world.

After leaving the Aphrodisiac District, my wife and I went straight to our hotel suite. No, it was not a cause-and-effect thing. We were wet and cold and tired. And the Peninsula Hotel is wonderfully restorative. Opened in 1928 at the southern tip of the Kowloon Peninsula, a 10-minute ride on the Star Ferry from downtown Hong Kong, the Peninsula has long reigned as the city's pre-eminent place to stay. Recent renovations and additions-a seductive spa and indoor swimming pool, a luxurious rooftop lounge called the China Clipper for guests who arrive by helicopter, a dreamy Phillipe Starck-designed restaurant called Felix-have only added to the 300-room hotel's allure.

We signed up for the hotel's dim sum cooking class, thinking we might actually acquire the skills needed to make the delectable little dumplings and cook them for our friends when we got home. Boy, were we delusional.

Our instructor was a talented chef named Yip Wing Wah, who has been making dim sum at the Peninsula for more than 20 years. He showed us how to make a dough from two types of flour and mix in some chive juice to turn it green. Then he pressed the dough into small paper-thin ovals on a cutting board with a big butcher's knife, placed a dab of a shrimp-and-bamboo-shoot mixture on each of the ovals, and folded them into tidy little purses with his fingertips.

"Just like closing a curtain," Chef Yip said.

My wife and I tried it. Hers turned out pretty good, but instead of little purses my dim sum creations looked more like lumpy backpacks. Chef Yip then showed us how to make a scallop-and-chives dumpling.

"It is supposed to look like a tiny hat," Chef Yip said, his fingers doing their magic. My dumplings looked like tiny Frisbees.

Later, we took part in a tea sampling, conducted by Raymond Hui, assistant manager of the Peninsula's Spring Moon restaurant. Talk about ritual. We learned that the best Chinese teas are covered with a thin layer of dust. The first batch of hot water is poured in the pot and then immediately poured out.

"That is your enemy's cup," explained Hui, and I resolved to serve such tea only to Republicans.

By the time the sampling was over, we had gone through five types of tea-green, black, oolong, white and Puer-style-at least 20 small cups.

Which explains why, long past midnight, my wife and I were sitting in our suite, wide awake, staring across Victoria Harbor, toward the dazzling Hong Kong skyline, which we were told existed just beyond the fog and drizzle.