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View from the Hotel Stage, 1 Chi Wo, Jordan

I will always have a special fondness for Hong Kong because it’s the first foreign city I ever visited on my own. (There’s an extremely detailed account of that trip in the first Twisted book.) Since then I’ve been to Hong Kong a few times, but it doesn’t get old. Hong Kong is not just about the spectacular sights and food: there’s something in the air, something thrilling and vaguely chaotic. It’s a sense of possibility that you get in a world city. You know that things are happening that were not stage-managed for promotional purposes.

We spent several days in Hong Kong at the end of May to shoot two episodes for Trippies. We had wonderful meals that we burned off by walking, walking, and walking from markets in Kowloon to hiking trails in the New Territories to Old Town Central where we looked for the locations of Wong Kar Wai movies, to the Film Archive to Sai Ying’s haunted houses to the dojo of one of Ip Man’s students, to new food and drink haunts like May Chow’s Happy Paradise and Victoria Chow’s Kwoon cocktails.

At the end of a long, packed but strangely not exhausting shoot, we met Vivian Mak, whom I hereby dub the Empress of Tea. Vivian is the proprietor and soul of MingCha Tea House, one of the finest tea shops on the planet. She gave us a quick workshop, during which we sampled a variety of teas, each with a distinct flavor and aroma, which is more than I can say for some overpriced tea shops. It’s not cheap, but you get more than what you pay for and leave feeling clean and almost virtuous.

Even the setting is dramatic: MingCha is hidden inside an old factory building.

Now I’m going to re-watch Chungking Express and In the Mood for Love, and if anyone borrowed my DVDs and didn’t return them, prepare for pain.

You can watch the previous episodes of Trippies (China, Turkey, Thailand, Korea) here.