Other Chinese cities honor Mao. Shenzhen has this huge poster of Deng Xiaoping, their patron saint.

Shenzhen? Really?

I first heard of Shenzhen three years ago when I read a fabulous biography of Deng Xiaoping, China’s preeminent leader in the early post-Mao years. He recognized that China needed to introduce market economies into its system and starting in 1980 chose Shenzhen, then a village of about 30,000 people but with close proximity to Hong Kong and a good port, as the first Special Economic Zone. This is where China would experiment with what Deng called “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” Largely, that translates as “capitalism.”

That first experiment was a pretty significant success. In the 35 years since all that started, Shenzhen has grown to a city of some 10.5 million people. If you’re doing the arithmetic, that’s a growth rate of a little 18 percent per year. For 35 years. Pretty unbelievable. To put that in context, it would be like Monroe, Michigan, growing into a city of 7 million by 2050. Heck, if it grew that fast it would warrant a visit from Stephen Colbert or someone like that!

The view from the hotel’s 96th floor lobby. That little park way down there is a little over a mile in circumference; gives you a sense of just how high we are.

So there we are, in Hong Kong with Mark recovering from knee surgery and me still getting over whatever awfulness I got in my tummy as we were leaving Bhutan. The hotels were way too expensive and we weren’t happy with any of the options when Mark said “Hey, why don’t we catch a train to Shenzhen and see what that’s all about?” Great idea. We could save some money, stay in a very cool hotel where the lobby is on the 96th floor, and see this little slice of Chinese – indeed, world – history in the making. How bad could it be?

Ugh. Turns out there is even less to do in Shenzhen than in Hong Kong, particularly if you’re comparatively immobile. And still hot as hell if you go outside; up to the low-90s pretty much every day by 9:00 AM or so. The food options are pretty grim. The hotel aspires to greatness but they haven’t learned to actually provide decent food or services yet. And when I decided I needed to see a doctor to see what the hell was going on in my tummy (OK, to be honest when Mark decided I was going to see a doctor), it wasn’t at all clear he had much to offer.

The park was very pleasant, if unbearably hot most of the day

So it’s been a pretty grim week here. We went into Hong Kong once to have dinner with Shideh one more time. That process is interesting; even though Hong Kong and Shenzhen are both in China, Hong Kong is treated just like a foreign border. So coming into Hong Kong you go through passport control on the China side of the “border” and then the same on the Hong Kong side. You have to make sure you have both currencies. And then coming back to Shenzhen it’s getting your passport checked twice more, on each side of the border. It’s the only “border” we’ve ever taken the subway to, as far as we can remember.

Drinks with Shideh. Next time we see them it’ll be in … London? Stockholm? Who knows; that’s the fun of having such interesting friends!

There’s a nice park a couple blocks from the hotel, and if you get there before 8:00 AM or so it’s merely in the mid- to upper-80s, so you can join hundreds of Chinese getting their morning exercise walking, running, dancing, playing badminton, practicing tai chi, etc., etc., etc. I managed that a few mornings when my stomach was calm, but my recovery has been two steps forward one-and-three-quarters back so it didn’t always work for me.

A couple days after getting here to Shenzhen, though, Mark’s doctor gave him the all-clear to travel by the end of the week. Very quickly, then, we went online to see where we could get frequent flyer tickets to. The winner was Munich, with a connecting flight – again – through Bangkok. I love having this flexibility; we’re free on July 5 and not meeting the Germains in Greece until the last week of July. Pick a place to spend those three weeks. Germany wins, though the Greeks might not be happy with incoming flights from Germany these days.

As we went to get on the subway to go into Hong Kong we saw this vending machine selling … wine. How cool is that? On the topic of weird local flavor, a sign at the hotel gym warns against storing radioactive material in the lockers. It had never occurred to me to do so, but I’ll be careful in the future.

Our room was on the 88th floor up there, and then we’d go for a drink in the evening at the bar on the 100th floor. Not for those who don’t like heights.

The view from Mark’s hospital room as the crazy typhoon weather was just starting to pass by

A funny thing happened on the way to India. The plan had been that after Bhutan we were going to go up into Kashmir, the Himalayan region in India. So we’d fly to Delhi, spend a day or two, and then head back into the mountains. But, as it became clear Mark’s knee was an unsolved problem, we decided instead to go from Delhi right to Hong Kong to confer again with Dr. Tong. We’d already booked the flight from Paro to Delhi, one of the few places you can fly to out of Bhutan, and decided we could manage it for just two days despite the forecast highs of 107 degrees. Seriously, the forecast was for 107 degrees.

Mark was up early our last morning in Bhutan and he had a thought. “I wonder if we need a visa to get into India?” Now, you might think that experienced travelers would ask that question before they were ready to head out to the airport. It turns out Americans do need a visa to enter India and you need to apply some measurable time in advance; there are no visas on arrival for Americans. Huh.

This was a time we were distinctly happy to be staying where the staff would go above and beyond to help us figure it out. One of the women in the office called a friend of hers with Royal Bhutan Airline to see what our options were. Getting on the flight to Delhi was simply not one of those options. In short order – a hectic and scary 60 minutes or so, but short order in the scheme of things – we’d rebooked for a slightly later flight to Bangkok, booked a night in a hotel there, canceled our reservation in Delhi, and changed our Delhi-Hong Kong flight to a Bangkok-Hong Kong. Remarkably there was surprisingly little hassle with the various airlines and hotels involved.

Our first couple days in Hong Kong were sunny, but I was just curled up miserable in bed. After a couple days here in the midst of Hong Kong we moved across the bay to Kowloon where the hotel rooms were bigger and much cheaper.

So instead of a night or two in Delhi, we had a night in Bangkok. But then a funny thing happened on the way to Hong Kong. Somehow, somewhere, I ate something I really shouldn’t have. By the time we were up the next morning to go to the airport I was miserably sick. Just awful. And this as we’re taking Bangkok’s elevated subway system to the airport in the intense heat with few elevators or escalators to ease the burden of traveling with luggage. Pure misery. How did that happen? Our lodge in Bhutan was totally First World quality – and really good First World. I’d eaten one meal on Royal Air Bhutan and then we had dinner at a top-notch steak house in Bangkok. That was it. One of those, though, was a killer.

A panoramic shot of Hong Kong from Kowloon

Thus we were quite the couple on arrival in Hong Kong. Mark was probably there to have surgery on his knee (and indeed that’s what the doctor ordered) and I was as sick as I’ve been in a number of years. The result of all that misery is that the pictures we have from our first 10 days back in Hong Kong are pretty much all from the inside of our hotel room looking out. Looking out at rain, I should add. A typhoon apparently passed by the region and for pretty much a solid week it was either raining or getting ready to rain. As we sat in the hotel, Mark nursing his knee after the second arthroscopic event, me staying close to the bathroom. It was lovely.

The view from our second hotel, this time in Kowloon. We looked at this a lot over our week there, neither of us really able to do anything beyond take the elevator to the mall below us for lunch and then dinner. Great fun.

The good news is we’re both on the mend, we think. I was down for nearly two weeks, sometimes better, sometimes worse, but sick enough that I haven’t had a cocktail in 12 days. That’s serious. Finally, though, I’m confident the worst is over for me, at least. It’s too soon to know yet whether Mark’s surgery fixed the pain he’s had walking pretty much all year, but I’m an optimist.

From Hong Kong island, this huge sign signals that something big – mostly Lars’s museum – is happening in West Kowloon. From our hotel this was just a quick walk as I started to recover some strength.

There were a couple bright spots in our otherwise bleak time in Hong Kong. One night our friends Lars & Shideh invited us to tag along to a little party they were going to with a bunch of artists and architects (recall that Shideh is an architect and Lars is building a huge new modern art museum in Hong Kong, what is described as the most important new museum project since the Pompidou Center was built in Paris 40 years ago). It was fun hanging out with this artsy crowd of European ex-pats and Hong Kong locals. One of the young women there, who works with (and claims to worship) Shideh, is Victor Hugo’s granddaughter. How cool is that?

And then on our last night in Hong Kong Shideh & Lars invited us and two other couples to celebrate – a week late – midsummer’s eve, a big holiday in Lars’s native Sweden. One of the other couples was Mark’s knee surgeon, whose wife just happens to be one of Shideh’s closest friends. Such a small world. Suffice it to say that a Swedish midsummer feast includes more varieties of pickled herring than you’ve ever imagined, free flowing aquavit, and Lars teaching us Swedish drinking songs accompanied by some crazy dance moves.

The always beautiful Shideh describing the various herring dishes we’d be trying

We’re continuing to lie low while Mark’s knee heals, but we were bored beyond words hanging out in our hotel in Kowloon, across the bay from Hong Kong city proper so Mark came up with a crazy idea. We crossed over the “border” with China – Hong Kong is of course in China, but the border between the two is just like an international border with visa requirements, passport control, and customs – and are going to hang out for a week in Shenzhen (if we can stand it that long), a city that’s sprung up in the last few decades to link China’s massive workforce with Hong Kong’s access to global finance. We’ll report on this odd place soon.

The middle building was our hotel in Kowloon. The tall building on the right includes a Ritz Carlton hotel on the top floors, so one night we went for drinks up on the 136th floor or something, what turns out to be the world’s highest bar. Pretty cool.

Finally, our last full day in Hong Kong the weather broke. Mark & I were both feeling well enough to go to the pool on the 76th floor and enjoy the sun and view of that Ritz building.