The Travel Bug

Travel Story by Tom Spurling

Hong Kong

The recent bird-flu epidemic that swept across Asia has made me all sentimental about travel in the region.

In 2003 I flew from Japan to Hong Kong at the height of SARS hysteria. It was Spring Break and my girlfriend and I needed a cheap getaway. Being a global citizen, it would have been poor form to reschedule on account of CNN warnings.

All the toxic spills and adrenaline refills of adventure travel were screaming at me through saturated lungs. Being a vagabond at heart, my girlfriend was also buoyed by the idea of a spot of virus dodging in the petri-dish of British-Chinese confluence – spectacular Hong Kong island. If biology was spitting back at the human race, then we wanted to be there to cheer the bastard home.

But what an ideal time it was to travel in Asia. Spacious aircraft seating; affordable penthouse suites; complimentary body probes; private public transport; dying yuppies.

After ticking 'No' in the box marked 'Internal bleeding', we headed for the heart of SARS madness, Kowloon, to get first dibs on fake Hard Rock Café T-shirts. Soon enough the local bartering system revealed itself, and what a novel custom it was – cough on it, and it's free. Using tabloid newspapers as our guidebooks, we then dared to brave the wild Hong Kong fauna spreading terror and disease through the remaining 6.9 million sterilized natives; 'Here, Kitty, Kitty."

Temperatures rising by the minute, we paid a special visit to the home of this economic wonderland's burgeoning industry – the Mask Market. Gas masks, surgical masks, gridiron helmets; if it can partially cover your face, you'll find it, underground and lemon-scented.

Honored to bear witness to such a historical moment of urban plague – unrivalled since monks and wenches peacefully co-existed here – that night we decided to get all rowdy and drunk. And as homage to forward-thinking Chinese government officials eager to implement population control, but tired of shelling out for condoms, my girlfriend suggested a bowl of sun-kissed pork dumplings to speed up our decline. Now not only could we revel in the bowels of dysenteric delusion, but the added spice of potential bloodied death meant hours of splendid, fully televised anxiety with regular updates from reporters on the hospital frontlines, expiring on camera, warning us to stay the hell out of Hong Kong. When in Rome, remember to swim in the sewers.

Hong Kong is uber cool. After five days of checking our dated fashion in foot-long mirrors and re-checking the farcical tabs in foot-long bars, we were scheduled to see Moby play by the South China Sea. Sadly, the little astronaut was scared away by the piling corpses, and thought it safer to indulge in some post-colonial exploration of his own, fusing cultures from the ass-end of an opium pipe.

Taking the escalator home for one final time, our bare hands gripping the infected rail in one final attempt to prolong our Spring Break, Japan suddenly seemed quite dull. But then I remembered the earthquakes and the volcanoes and the tsunamis and the typhoons and the murderous white-gloved election campaigns that make you want to vote for the apocalyptic Aum movement, and Japan soon seemed like a veritable hotspot of near-death bonhomie.

While careful not to dismiss the Japanese as half-hearted – they do excel in humiliating themselves for cash prizes, and they did invent the word, kamikaze – an airborne virus, a fate invisible to the naked eye, a thing far closer to God's kitchen, is more than enough to give me the travel bug.

Read more about the author of this story:
Tom Spurling