PLOCK

a brief mini photo update ….

BMW china …

…private dancing road for people with long arms …

…midnight snacks …

…”excuse me..?!” …

schmolly …

…more or less since I heard that hong kong actually has wild monekys, I planned to have a look …. but never did it…

so this was a suitable plan for a day trip now … I was actually a bit irritated, because I did some hiking close to that supposed area before, but never saw a monkey …

however, with such clear aim, we should be able to do it ….

so we took the bus to monkey mountain…

…well we took the (same) bus three times to be precise …

the first time we took it to miss the right station … so we went on the other side of the road to take the same bus back … but that was trash, because the bus on the other side was actually still going in the same direction …. confusing? … how we later found out the returning bus actually stopped five meters further on the same side where we got off …. more confusing?

however, after going too far, taking another bus to go even more far until the final stop, we finally got another bus going back to the missed stop … the bus driver was the same like in the first bus … the driver pretended not to recognize anything, but I’m sure he was having fun for himself … seeing these two confused tourists spending there time on the bus….

however, in the afternoon we finally arrived … somewhere close to monkey mountain …. still not sure where exactly we need to go we aimed for a bridge passing the high speed highway, since we felt we need to go on the other side …. and … it seemed we hit the main entrance…

because already on the bridge we saw two monkey bumpers guarding the entrance:

…kind of bizarre … also because I somehow expected them to run away once we come closer, but they didn’t…

… rather the opposite … one of them seemed to want to check my pockets at the entrance….

which made me suddenly realize that it was a very stupid idea to buy three buns and some cookies, packed in the locally most common plastic bags and have them stuffed into my jacketpocket, so that there were half sticking out of it ….. they were basically shouting to the monkeys “ding ding ding … food delivery!”

…since i knew from india already how fast they can grab stuff … I thought about protecting the buns by gently pushing my hand into that pocket … which was probably mistake nr. 2 … because then they seemd to expect me even more to pass my food to them (probably as entrance fee) …

… i tried to explain that everything is just a misunderstanding … they didn’t seem to like misunderstandings … and showed some teeth (probably to signal me that they are hungry)

so we decided to pretend not to have seen them and pass them quickly … what kind of worked out ….

with safety distance to the bumper monkeys we started to rethink, how we should continue … still not clear how we should find the right path without passing the bumpers again …. we spotted the monkey boss …

…and he spotted us …

…and that one was even less shy…

even though he pretended just watching the landscape… but he was walking far too fast for being interested in the landscape …. and so did we… and then he tried to reach out to my tasty pocket…

… but i really didn’t feel like sharing my snacks ….

and he didn’t feel like not sharing and tried to diminish is disadvantage in height …

and blocked the way

then a short confrontation took place (it seemed the boss had mistaken me as a tree, at least he jumped on me and grabbed on my jacket…

That made me finally prefer to walk even faster to get out of reach as quick as possible…. and we retreat directly into the mountains to reorganize ourselves (… e.g. me putting my food in basements bag instead of keeping them in my pocket) … and yes … ironically, as soon as we had entered the nature, there were no monkeys at all….

after a while the monkey mountain without monkeys was also boring, so we went back and figured out where most of the monkeys seem to hang out mostly …

…which was the car parking areas …

… maybe because I hide my lunch, however, these pals seemed to be quite more peacefull … at least they weren’t approaching us anymore … and we tried to keep distance to the boss whenever he appeared somewhere…

the irony in the end was, that the monkeys choose from mountains, lake and forest particularly that areas which had the maximum possible flair of a badly prepared zoo … in between fences …and concrete mountains …

…well… some trees also there …

…. so after we almost finished documenting the complete monkey viallage, we came to enjoy the precious monkey feeding ritual, which seems to regularly take place (and might contribute to the monkeys preferance to hang out at parking sites)

it works like this: father drives on the car parking, and pulls down the window for a few centimeters … and then the laughing son can throw some - previously bought snacks from 711 throw that gap….

but …. not everybody knows how to feed monkeys properly, thats why some nice people posted some signs with food suggestions:

yes! bananas of course - this we know from tv series … but we might not have known their preferance for sandwiches and drinks in tetrapaks …

that the professional monkeyfeeding crews are muc more creative than that, is easy to see by spending some looks in the bushes around, which contain loads of various packagings … some even looked like sushi ….

yeah, that was bizarre!

what we do tomorrow?

with chickenwings to ocean park?

last weekend the weather finally cleared up and everybody went out…

… so we decided to try out the beachparty on the next island from ours….

but even though it is quite close, the ferry connections forced us to go to the city first and then take another ferry to lamma island …. so far so good … but the lamma ferry pier somehow works differently …

BUT … we managed … and so we were on the ferry again …

and finally on lamma island …. the island also seems to run differently from ours…

after heading for a while in direction of the famous powerplant we reached the powerplant beach…

what we found there was more or less a stage, some people, some fire and some underaverage live bands
then hans moleman took over the camera …

…and then passed it back …

but then the party was done and we had to find some alternative entertainment…

so we ended up in a szechuan restaurant…

(woops … did i just eat one of those whole chillis?!)

….

( … i think it just entered my stomach now …)

…

(…damn! … i think it left the stomach and entered my blood system now)

after dj basement had just orderd 3 litres of wine, the american host (island local) just felt like letting us know, that the last ferry from that island would just leave in a few minutes ….

… so we had to take an alternative ferry …

one of those funky charter boats …

the captain was probably from japan or at least his flipflops were telling so …

finally we arrived south side hk island again … not sure what to do next we decided to find a bus …

but that was so confusing that we just decided to first-come-first-serves….

and the winner was …. cyberport - a weired cyber-event-shopping mall in the middle of nowhere….

and since nowhere was boring we started exploring the facilities of cyberport …

…and found the car parking with the usual family caravans …

some almost usual prohibitions …

… and some engine room, which didn’t look cyber at all …

after all this adventure we somehow still made it back to civilization ….

… and then back home …

…and what shall we do tomorrow?

spicy noodles?

guests alway help to gain a new perspective on the familiar environment.

in that way we discovered these super fancy bling bling stickers ….

… and of course …. we had to buy some …

… but where to stick them now …

… it’s great to have some holidays …

incredible … he’s just in town and already loaded with new commercial job offers! DJ Basement is the new face of Maurice Lacroix (also because the old face - Justin Rose had too many pimples recently)

after the long absence of photos with a real camera, there is finally some input again.

the reason: fred aka dj basement is in hk again. So this will be the first selection of his hong kong exploration photos commented by me ….

first of all he started exploring the island with all it’s traditional values, such as the milk & juice selection in an ancient supermarket:

then he was ordering some local specialities at the sweet shop, some glutinous rice cake (aka wobbling sweetened red bean rice jelly thing) :

(dj basement: “hmm …it’s not really like cake …”)

and just after this glorious meal he had his first fans lining up for autographs:

after that he got to enjoy the sunrise … well, he needed some help with that actually…

_p: “hey, this would be a nice picture…”

basement:”what?”

_p: “look over there!”

basement: “the trashbin?”

_p: “behind the trashbin, damn it!”

basement: “hae?!”

_p:”the sunset?!!”

basement: ” …. hmm …. ok ….”