Kiwiblog

The flight out of Hong Kong was at 11 pm Saturday night, so spent the afternoon looking around Hong Kong Island itself. This is a view from Victoria Peak.

Another view from Victoria Peak. It was nice to actually get into some of the non-urban parts of Hong Kong.

This photo I took down near the Aberdeen Fishing Village. The bamboo was massive compared to what you see in NZ. Those shoots were thicker than my arm and went up scores of feet.

This is down at Stanley Bay, which is home to the popular Stanley Market. The drive over here alone makes it worthwhile.

We headed down to the Kowloon waterfront for dinner on Friday night.  Felix was booked up, but a local girl recommended Cucina, and we were not disappointed.

Cucina is on the sixth floor of the Marco Polo Hotel, and has a pretty good view. It is an unusual restaurant in that it has two separate kitchens – an Italian kitchen and a Chinese kitchen.

As we were in Asia, we went Chinese and in fact chose the Chinese set menu. This not only well priced, but was superb food ranging from a giant scallop, to baked crab to wonderful soup, over six courses. I thoroughly recommend it.

Quite a nice view at night. At 8 pm they have a light show, which is in all the tourist brochures. Not really anything that special though – a few of the buildings light up, and one of them has a green laser fire from its roof – but only once every couple of minutes.

Not sure what we will do today (Saturday). The flight leaves at 11 pm to Zurich, and check out is at midday. So hopefully find something to look at in the afternoon that involves air conditioning!

Some of the many skyscrapers in Hong Kong.

This is my second visit to Hong Kong. The first one didn’t really count, as I just went drinking with Cactus. We have a two day stop-over here, so decided to do a bit of tourism.

A surprising number of people do not realise that Hong Kong is not just Hong Kong Island, but also a fair bit of territory on the mainland.

Also while the area has a very high population density, only 25% of the land is developed and 40% is effectively conservation land.

This is the entry to the Chuk Lam Sim Yuen monastery. We picked a good day to go out as it was only 27 degrees.

The monastery is famous for its three large golden Buddhas.

One of the four warriors protecting the Buddhas. His job is to distract you with his music.

I noticed the swastika on the Buddha. Their use of its predates the Nazis by around 1,000 years. It is also a mirror reverse of the Nazi one, to help distinguish it.

This one has four heads, originating from Thailand.

As I said, only 25% of Hong Kong is developed. Despite that they are the 4th most dense populations on Earth – with an average 6,300 people per square km. To compare NZ is 16 and Australia is 3.

This is a lookout from near the top of Tai Mo Shan. One can actually see a Chinese city from here.

An old martial arts training building in the old Shui Tau village. We did a “Hidden Oasis” half day tour which included a visit to the village, parts of which are 900 years old.

I loved this huge banyan tree which has actually swallowed up the remains of this old house.

A fellow tourist from Colombia shows how large the cavity in the tree roots is.

Some nice large limes growing in the village.

We then went off to the Kadoorie Farm & Botanic Garden. Mum snapped this photo of a couple of the bats.

A couple of boars sleeping happily.

This little critter literally strolled past us.  You can mingle with them easily.

Whale Oil relaxing after getting into a scrap with some journalists. Remember the old maxim, if you wrestle with pigs in mud, you just get really dirty and the pigs really enjoy it!

Off to dinner tonight, and hope to see the light show from the harbour.

Vernon Small reports on the conclusion of a free trade agreement with Hong Kong. So it got me thinking what are the countries we have an FTA wth, or are negotiating. The answers are:

1. Australia, since 1983
2. Singapore since 2001
3. Thailand since 2005
4. Trans-Pacific (Brunei/Chile/Singapore) since 2005
5. China since 2008
6. ASEAN (Brunei/Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam)
7. Malaysia
8. Gulf Co-operation Council (Bahrain, Oman, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar)
9. Hong Kong
10. Korea

Now who are our biggest trading partners:

1. Australia $18.7b – in force
2. USA $9.0b – zip
3. China $8.9b – in force
4. Japan $7.6b – some momentum
5. Singapore – $3.1b – in force
6. Germany – $3.0b – zip
7. Malaysia $2.9b – finalised
8. UK $2.8b – zip
9. Korea $2.7b – under negotiation

Also the total value of trade with ASEAN is $12.2b and GCC $4.3b.

So while progress on Doha remains stalled, we’re doing pretty well. The big gaps are USA, Japan and the EU. The EU are hopeless. Japan is showing some signs of life and in a very welcome move, President Obama a few minutes ago said the United States would seek to join the Trans-Pac agreement.

I’m delighted his protectionist election rhetoric, may have been just that – rhetoric. I started writing this blog post unaware of Obama’s announcement – how is that for good timing!

Paul Walker blogs on the benefits of economic freedom, and mentions Hong Kong and Cuba:

An interesting point of comparison is that in 1958 Cuba’s per capita GDP was $3,170 while Hong Kong had a per capita GDP of $2,924. Since then these two countries have followed very different development paths in terms of economic freedom . Today Cuba is one of the poorest countries in Latin America, very different from today’s Hong Kong.

So in 1958 Cuba had a higher GDP per capita than Hong Kong. And today?

Hong Kong is US$41,944 (PPP) compared to around US$4,500 for Cuba.

Cuba has a state which is basically 100% of GDP. In Hong Kong it is under 20%. In NZ it is 42%.

Cactus Kate celebrates the Hong Kong Government giving out NZ5.5b of tax cuts because they took in too much tax.  And that is on top of the fact the top marginal tax rate is 17%.

Craig Foss is outraged over the sacking of the democratically elected Hawkes’ Bay District Health Board after just 72 days in office.

Liberty Scott has the top ten reasons why lefties should hate Castro.

Russell Brown covers the issue of some favourable parliamentary edits in Wikipedia to National MP’s pages. I agree with his conclusion that if you do more than one or two minor edits you should register a profile rather than just do it from your IP address.

A friend gave me an article in New Scientist a couple of weeks ago, about how political persuasion may have a genetic basis.  They found identical twins has more similar political views than fraternal twins, which is quite fascinating.  I had been planning to blog it, but Kiwiblogblog have covered it with links to an extract of the original research.

Daily Tech finds that a 12 month drop in world temperatures has wiped out a century of warming.  From what I can tell this doesn’t mean that human activity is not contributing to warming, just that other factors such as solar activity still have far more influence. Comments from those more up to date with the science here are welcome.

Tim Selwyn at Tumeke has a post on Oliver Driver’s interview with Helen Clark’ and how she seemed unsure how to handle questions criticising her performance not from a right wing perspective but from the left. He also compares how Helen Clark was unable to come up with a single nice thing to say about John Ke, while Key had no problem supplying an admirable quality of Clark’s the previous week. If someone can get the Alt TV interview onto You Tube I’ll link to it.