but where is hong kong?

Of course everyone has seen images of Hong Kong, and plenty of my friends have worked here. It is a major international city with a sizable expat presence. So much appears familiar: big sky scrapers and ultra modern interiors, massive shopping malls packed with Asian ladies struggling to carry their Chanel and Dior bags. Drunk English expats vomiting. The usual. But what I didn’t expect about Hong Kong is that, actually, you cant see it! The city is one of the world’s most polluted, and covered by an incredibly thick layer of smog. I stay in Kowloon, in a hotel overlooking the Victoria Harbour, and thus just opposite Hong Kong Island. But I had to look on a map to establish that, as my first few days all I saw looking out into the harbour was white haze, and the island just a 10 minute boat ride across was invisible. Sometimes in the evening I could vaguely see the lights from the sky scrapers on the other side, but only on one day were their outlines visible in the daytime. From the top of Victoria Peak, which supposedly has the best views of the city, all I could see where the very closest blocks of flats. Beyond that was the same whiteness that apparently descends over the city most of the year. Apparently now, winter, is the worst period, but only briefly in monsoon season does the blanket ever really lift. Much of the problem seems to be mainland China’s unreliable electricity grid combined with its ever increasingly industrial output, especially around the pearl river delta, whose factories waft population Hong Kong’s way. Yet city mismanagement and denial also appear to play a role, which seems hard to understand. Hong Kong’s airport is one of the greatest (and most costly) engineering achievements of all time, built entirely on reclaimed land, but you would think that if the city planners were willing to spend such funds on an airport, they would do something to make sure pilots could actually see where they were landing!