Hong Kong bargain days over

COLIN MOORE hoped for some good deals in Hong Kong but found he may as well shop at home.

Made in Hong Kong. It once denoted goods that were inexpensive and, more recently, made with some quality compared with other Asian manufacturing centres.

In downtown Hong Kong you could find a tailor to sew up a made-to-measure suit while you had lunch.

In the late 1980s a friend returned from an expat stint with almost a container-load of irresistible bargains. One hundred pairs of swim fins, camping gear and clothing that sported the names of the world's great labels.

So before leaving for one of the world's busiest ports and the fourth largest banking and financial centre in the world, I sought his advice about what bargains to look for and where to find them.

"Forget it," he said. "It's cheaper here." And so it proved.

The Big Red Barn buyers can do a much better job of sourcing a good deal for several thousand pairs of swim fins and the like than your average impatient traveller has a hope of scoring.

The fact is that the Special Administrative Region of China is not the Hong Kong it used to be. It is a hugely wealthy city in which a shopping mall can afford to spend $HK24 million (the New Zealand dollar is valued at about four Hong Kong dollars) to save and maintain a 120-year-old banyan tree in its plaza.

It is now more a financial centre than a manufacturing base, its huge port - which copes with 240,000 ships a year - serving the hinterland of China.

Shenzhen, just across the New Territories border, has grown from a city of a few hundred thousand to an estimated 6 million in just 20 years. In time the whole area will probably become a supercity.

Trucks are forced to queue for hours to cross the border, so dense is the traffic between Shenzhen and the Hong Kong port.

The generally inexpensive goods they carry bear the label "Made in China."

In downtown Kowloon there is no shortage of shops catering for tourists. I'm in the market for some specific items - a camera, a wallet, some computer equipment and sports clothes.

The tourist shops have some of what I want but the prices are not competitive with Auckland retailers.

The United States Pacific fleet is in town and the sailors have deep pockets. There is no point in bargaining.

So I jump on the the Star Ferry for an NZ60c ride to Hong Kong Central and a computer centre where several hundred small stores are housed on three floors.

Laptops and scanners are sold at similar prices in New Zealand. Eventually I find the CD writer I am looking for. I estimate that it is about $NZ50 cheaper than I can buy it back home.

No luck with the camera, however. I know the model and the best New Zealand price you can obtain for a bit of haggling for cash. The Hong Kong price is marginally more expensive.

Cellphones must be cheap because everyone is clutching one.

The citizens of Hong Kong are the world's highest per-capita users of cellphones. Believe it. They seem to be used like worry-beads, with people scrolling through the numbers until they find someone to chat to on the way home from work. The underground has been wired to accommodate them.

Temple St Market, which comes to life after dusk, is a short walk from my Kowloon hotel and should be a good bet for a canvas wallet for my daughter and some sports clothes, but I choose to go to Stanley Market on the south side of Hong Kong Island.

The No 6 bus to Stanley leaves outside the Star Ferry terminal. On Sundays its pavements are crowded with Filipino maids who use their one day off a week to meet friends. They sit on the pavement in their hundreds in groups of six or eight, sharing a takeaway lunch and talking the day through.

I ask one group, who all work for Chinese families, why they choose to spend their day off sitting on a concrete pavement instead of going to the beach or a country park.

They answer that there are beaches in the Philippines. In Hong Kong they want to spend their leisure time with friends from their own country.

The bus climbs over the spine of Hong Kong Island. A couple of nights before I rode the Peak Tram, the city's famed funicular railway to the top of Victoria Peak and a view of Hong Kong from the Peak restaurant that was every bit as splendid as the brochures promised.

But views from the bus are even more arresting. The fare is $HK7.50 and the smallest I have is a $HK100 note. The driver does not give change.

A German woman offers to pay my fare. She has lived in Hong Kong for 13 years. Her children go to boarding school in Germany. Her tennis coach is a New Zealander.

A sweaty bloke carrying a tennis racket and a bucket of tennis balls gets on. He is an Australian tennis coach back for his second tour in Hong Kong.

The conversation is expat community stuff. Some of the old Hong Kong lingers.

At the Foreign Correspondent's Club the previous evening I have a hunch about the little old lady sitting on her own for dinner. It is Clare Hollingworth of Britain's Daily Telegraph, aged 88 and still filing regularly.

You won't remember me, I explain, but you bought me breakfast at the Cairo Hilton in 1969 in exchange for smuggling your stories past the Egyptian censors and through to the Telegraph staffer in Beirut, an old journalist friend from Rhodesia.

Hollingworth is almost blind and friends keep her up to date by reading the news. She has worked in every hot-spot around the world and in the 1950s broke the Kim Philby/third man story. She is the archetypal expat.



The Aussie tennis coach says he gets $HK500 an hour for tennis lessons. He works 20 hours a week.

He says Stanley is just like living in Sydney. The previous weekend he and a couple of Aussie mates had taken their surfboards to a country park in the New Territories, walked to a surf beach with a superb 1.5m break, and there was no one else on the beach.

"The locals don't go to the beach until someone says it's officially summer," he explains.

We pass Repulse Bay, where the sand is golden and the sea a brilliant blue. It's about 30 deg C outside the air-conditioned bus - and there's no one on the beach.

The Stanley beachfront is indeed like parts of Sydney. And it's lined with bars where a pint of Fosters costs about $NZ10.

The markets are a collection of stalls, some large, some small, connected by narrow alleyways. At a cafe where the customers are all Chinese, the excellent meal is relatively cheap.

I search for sports clothes. Those for sale are rubbish - awfully cut but not cheap. Mr Tyndall's buyers have a lot better taste.

The material wallets on display are made in Nepal. When I find what I want the price is about $NZ35.

I ignore the silk scarves - three for about $NZ18 - for which I am later admonished by my wife.

But back in New Zealand a surf shop sells the label wallet I seek for $15. It is made in China.

* Colin Moore went shopping in Hong Kong with the help of Cathay Pacific Airways and the Hong Kong Tourist Association.