Hong Kong
In 1988, my friend Rick Criscione and I went to Hong Kong. Our travels were full of excitement as you will see. We tried to do the trip as cheaply as possible and only paid $400 for our round trip airfares. We stayed at a rundown place called the Chunking Mansions in Kowloon which was a group of five towers and cost us $8 a night to stay there. Lonely Planet travel books says this about the place: Say ‘budget accommodation’ and ‘Hong Kong’ in one breath and everyone thinks of Chungking Mansions. Built in 1961, CKM is a labyrinth of homes, guesthouses, Indian restaurants, souvenir stalls and foreign-exchange shops spread over five 17-storey blocks in the heart of Tsim Sha Tsui. According to Gordon Mathews, an anthropologist who studies the place, it has a resident population of about 4000 and an estimated 10,000 daily visitors. Over 120 different nationalities – predominantly South Asian and African – pass through its doors in a single year. CKM has a unique TV line-up, consisti