The Hong Kong Rat

published on Mar 01st, 2006 // 0 Comments

How to reluctantly end up with the most expensive accommodation in Hong Kong

A few years ago I was traveling to Australia to spend a year drinking working and getting a tan wage. Part of my travel package meant I could pick a stopover destination on the way there and on the way back. I chose Hong Kong as a suitable spot for a week.

My friend had been working in Hong Kong for a few months and had given me the low-down of where to eat and drink but nothing he said could have prepared me for the experience I went through.

I arrived into Hong Kong tired but excited. It was as far away as one could get from a small sleepy fishing village in the south west of Ireland. I had my Lonely Planet guide with everywhere I thought a suitable place to kip for a night marked. They suggested the Mansions which are basically big tenement blocks with hostel like rooms you can rent for the night. There were plenty of these. Used to making do and not wanting to blow my wad of hard earned drinking cash for Oz I booked into one of these.

To describe my room won’t extend much beyond this paragraph. It was 3 meters in length by less than 1.5 meters wide. A bed that stretched the width of the room and a sink with a rubber hose for a shower. Air conditioning and a box the height of the ceiling with a loo in it and erm… a front door.

I left my rucksack and headed off to see the sights. The room was about 8 stories up and no elevator. Coming down the stairs I encountered the largest cockroaches I have seen in my life. I knew that they were big and they were part of life over here but I had to step around them for fear of them biting my ankles.

Hong Kong overall was a great experience and I thoroughly enjoyed every moment of it. I had arrived 2 days before the Chinese new year and couldn’t wait for the firework display. Shopping is great there but expensive; everything is expensive. I couldn’t buy much as my rucksack was already full and as I was away for a whole year I thought a paper dragon wouldn’t have survived the ordeal. The streets are literally brimming with people. They were taking up every inch of pavement. This is frustrating, well for me it was as I am quite tall and a typical Chinese person height-wise would be small. The problem here is that I can see where I want to go in the distance but I am restricted from the chest down by Hong Kong workforce on their way home. I made it to lots of places though including bars that I was told to visit , sights I had read about, longest escalator in the world. Nights always finished late chatting with groups of people I had met in bars. All of them on their way to similar travelling destinations.

This one night I came back to my penthouse and crashed out on the bed with the AC turned way up. Did I mention I had no window. I woke up to a scratchy noise. When I awoke I was drenched with sweat, knew it was 6 but didn’t know if it was AM or PM. Scanning the room I saw that there was a disused vent directly above my bed to the right. I put the noise down the some cockroaches poking about up there. I nodded back to sleep peacefully vowing to stuff it with toilet paper if the noise continued. Next time I awoke it was to that noise again. Bleary eyed I looked up at the vent, the exact same time a large rat plopped out of it and was left hanging by its front two paws. HORROR!! Not what you want to be woken up with! I quickly looked for escape exits. I wasn’t going to stick around for the fight. In-between me and the door was the rat still dangling to its own beat. My rucksack was on the bed so I packed it quickly with all my gear and flung it towards the door. Next I started to gather my drinking shrapnel (ie. money left over from drinking) from a wooden ledge at the end of the bed. Still being slightly drunk I managed to knock all this to the floor. So there I was crouched down staring up at a rat while blindly picking my loose change off the floor. I did manage to get out the door and it turns out it was still in the AM.

What to do? Booked into the 4 star Holiday Inn down the road is what I did. Since I was leaving that morning my stay which cost 25 times as much as my rat penthouse was only 3 hours, which was just enough time to watch Titanic and drink the Heineken and eat the chocolate from the fridge.