Hong Kong tour: Curses and local food

Like most adventures, it started off innocently enough, but this traveller soon learnt that a tour with a local can lead you down a very different path.

A paper effigy being whacked with a slipper during a villain hitting ceremony in Hong Kong. Picture: Alamy

On a steamy Hong Kong summer morning it was a toss-up over which was more terrifying — “villain hitting” or mistletoe soup. This was a journey to the city’s weird side that required both a stout heart and a brave stomach.

Like most adventures, it started off innocently enough. Even its name was innocuous, billed as a food and culture tour with Sam the Local. Of course, there was no Sam, that was just the name of the company. Instead there was the very enthusiastic Lotus.

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The idea is to match visitors with locals who know the streets of their city — Lotus knew every street market, local restaurant, and eccentric nook and cranny. It was a great way to see how the locals live. Seeing how they eat, however, was a different thing.

Armed with travel cards, we rode a gleaming subway to Causeway Bay on Hong Kong Island’s northside and into another world, the crazy, noisy commercial district of Wan Chai Rd.

Then we met the “villain hitters”. They looked more like weathered grannies, mystics in disguise, as they sat on stools at dusty stalls under the Canal Rd flyover waving around flaming pieces of paper. For $HK50 (about $8.75) they’ll read your future or put a curse on whoever you want.

A street scene in Kowloon, Hong Kong.

It’s a blunt little ceremony involving writing that whoever’s name on a paper figure of a man or a woman. You can even detail what you want to happen to them. Imagination is a wonderful thing. Then the villain hitters smash the paper with a shoe and burn the paper figure to trigger the curse. I can’t say if it worked. As tempted as I was, with a ready list of names, I didn’t want to chance karma.

As I was wondered if, inadvertently, anyone I had bad thoughts about may be mysteriously being beaten by a shoe and set on fire, Lotus was off, through Bowrington Road Market and up flights of stairs into a food hall where locals queued for huge bowls of noodles. We were the sole westerners, and unsure about bits of “pig’s flesh and intestines” floating in the noodle broth. Thankfully, I am a vegetarian.

I wasn’t so lucky at the next stop, a little Heard St Chinese dessert shop which served us bowls of what looked like brown water with lotus seeds floating in it and a boiled egg in the middle. With a flourish, Lotus took a paper towel from her bag and opened it to reveal the main ingredient — a bunch of mistletoe twigs.

Take my advice and stick to kissing under it. I was left wondering whether karma had got me anyway, just for thinking about that list of names.

Onwards to Wing Wah restaurant on Hennessey Rd, famous for its noodles and one of just three Hong Kong noodle shops still making noodles using bamboo, which makes them more chewy. I ordered bamboo “fungus” after the fungus translated as mushroom. It wasn’t. It was bamboo fungus.

And no, I won’t tell you what bamboo fungus or mistletoe soup as a dessert taste like. You will have to book a $HK200 ($35) tour with your own Lotus to find out.

samthelocal.com

The writer travelled as a guest of Cathay Pacific and the Mandarin Oriental.

 

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