It's a cold morning in Hong Kong, you're wearing long johns and a turtleneck sweater under your dress blues and pea coat and you've put on gloves as you cross the gray harbor water to the dock at North Point.

From this distance, the shanties seem scattered across the dark hills beyond the city buildings. You plan your route straight through the city streets and up into the heart of the shanties.

Crossing the first of several main avenues, you head into crowded side street. You are head and shoulders taller than the all-Chinese crowd moving slowly through the street lined on both sides with cheaply constructed tables with assortments of shriveled vegetables, dried seafood, canned foods and a few clothes, blankets and bolts of flimsy cloth. Under some tables you see gaunt Grandparents and children huddled. Behind the standing and often stamping in the freezing cold adult sellers, you see bedding and you realize that many of these people are living here on this street or they, at least, got there early to secure a marketing spot.

You reach the next avenue crossing and the contrast between the well dressed prosperous looking people on the avenue and the shabby, seem-to-be-starving people in the side street couldn't be more stark.
Luxury cars fill generous avenues, the narrow cross streets are packed with the poor and their desperate markets.

It's like that through the next few blocks. You walk with the thick crowd. You don't see many transactions taking place. You are not comfortable enough to buy anything.  You are a tourist passing through, observing without understanding. Who are these people? Why are they in the street? Why is so little for sale and so many people passing through?

After a few more blocks the market ends, the crowd thins, the street starts uphill. There are small groups manufacturing outdoors. Workers pounding thin copper sheets into bowl shapes, heating metal rods and bending them into sharp angels. In front of an open shed, workers are wrapping bent bamboo with wicker, joining shapes into chairs.   In other open shelters, painters are decorating pottery.

Climbing farther, the street is no longer paved nor straight. You follow a well worn wandering path up past tent-sized wooden and corrugated metal houses. Through an open door of one impossibly small house, you see a family group at a table, holding bowls at their chins and eating rapidly with circular chopstick gestures. The father looks squarely at you, unsmiling. You wonder why you, a stranger passing by, can see the family so easily? He's probably wondering the same thing.

There are houses or shelters interlocked with each other in various arrangements, as you continue through twists and turns to up the hill. There are people in every structure and there's steady foot traffic up and down the hill. Many people are carrying water uphill in open buckets tied to bamboo poles over their shoulders.  Some paths traverse the contour of the hill.  You take one east for a ways and then go father uphill.  A thin man is tying two sticks together with string, some children are wrapped in blankets by a tiny coal fire.

You are high up the hill about level with the highest shelters, with few people walking, you pause, remove your gloves and pea coat, although it is still cold enough to make your breath visible. You look over the improvised neighborhood with its uneven lines of odd shape roofs, rising trails of smoke from cooking and heating fires, the standard city below, the harbor beyond and Kowloon beyond that. Like the panorama from the Peak Tram yesterday, except with makeshift housing in the foreground instead of solid prosperous buildings and you're standing on muddy dirt instead of clean concrete.

You fish out your notebook, your pen and you write, "Humans expand into available space, planting the seeds of future cities", turn the notebook sideways and sketch the shanty roof lines and the city view below.

08:00, you're excited to be going ashore on your own. In the water taxi, Holloway, a Radioman striker asks what you are going to do. "No schedule" you say "just take a look at the city, see what I can find".
"I'd go with you" he says "but Morgan here needs to get a tailor made suit" gesturing to a skinny red-haired Seaman you've seen around, "I'm going to take him to the place where I ordered mine yesterday."

You like Holloway, his Maine backwoods friendliness is comforting, but you're relieved to not be caught in his constant conversation all day. You want to be away from the Navy.

Crossing the harbor, you're seeing more of the surroundings than you had before. You now see the makeshift, shanty town on the hills behind the east end of the city.

From the taxi dock, you walk towards the city center, Victoria, where the oldest and tallest buildings are. The streets you walk have a lot of car traffic, not many pedestrians, the stores are opening up. You don't see busses or streetcars, so you walk, wondering if you can cover all the streets in Hong Kong in the four days remaining.

Some of the store fronts you pass are inviting, with enough English signage to make their business clear to you. Some storefronts are more Chinese and appear opaque to you.

As you approach the blocks with larger buildings, the sidewalks become filled with fast walking, well-dressed people. Most are Chinese, but many are European, possibly American looking, a few are Indian and African, some men with turbans on their heads, some in long colorful robes dotting a sea of dark coats.
You pause at a corner tea shop with a mixture of Chinese and Europeans sitting at small tables inside. You have your Hong Kong money, you feel flush with the exchange rate of five HK dollars for one US dollar. You enter the shop, ask for coffee and you point to a pastry that looks familiar.

"Please, sit down, I'll bring it to you" the Chinese counter waiter says in clear English. You find an empty table with two chairs, You put your heavy Pea Coat on one and sit in the other. The air in the small cafe is full of tobacco smoke and there's a glass ashtray on the table, so you light a cigarette. Your coffee and pastry arrives. You sip, and smoke, peering out the window at the passing pedestrian parade.

You think of San Francisco, from your one trip there when you were fifteen, how you sat in a similar corner cafe there with your sister and parents, how excited you were to be in the urban downtown. You think of sitting with Mr. Miles and your Drama Department buddies at a table inside at the drive-in. You think of Hemingway writing at a cafe table in Paris, you remember the paintings you've made of imaginary Parisan Cafe scenes. Forgetting that you're in Navy uniform, you picture yourself a bohemian artist. You should be sketching. You should have a notebook. You decide to take on the mission, to find a notebook and a pen, so you can sketch and take notes of your observations.

Walking the streets of the central  city, you find a pocket-sized notebook in  a stationary store.  You try a few ink cartridge fountain pens, settle for a ballpoint pen.

Consulting a map, you see you're not far from the Peak Tram. Taking it to the top of the mountain behind the city will give you an overview, so you can better plan your exploration.

The tram is well built, the incline steep, the ride smooth, the view instructive, Hong Kong is a grown up city, solid construction, good roads, careful landscaping with mature trees, trimmed bushes and gardens.

 It's November, overcast and cold with mist around the buildings.

From the top, the dense city below looks stable and quiet. You are drawn to the more erratic patterns of the shanty town you had seen earlier on the hills at, what you now see is the far east end of the city. You make a note to explore that area.

"The Western Pacific covers all but the peaks of this mountain range on the east coast of China" you write in your new notebook. You turn it sideways and sketch an outline drawing of the harbor and the mountains behind Kowloon.

Returning on the tram downhill to the central city you find a British style restaurant, buy yourself a big meal with your cheap dollars and linger at the comfortable table sketching your left hand with your right.

You're walking busy streets in an international crowd, evening is coming, the car traffic is snarled and you notice that many of the cars are Mercedes with uniformed drivers and tinted rear side windows. Many of the women are in fur coats, there is an formal glamour to the most of the pedestrians.

You go in a movie theater playing Fellini's 8 1/2. You are ushered to a side seat in the rear of a full house. The movie is in progress, Claudia Cardinale's luminous face is drifting across a darkened screen. You don't need the English and Cantonese subtitles, you seen it before, you know the power of this film is not in the meaning of the spoken words.

You move to a seat down front as the audience clears out during the end credits, you stay for the next showing, proud to be able to see 8 1/2 for two and a half times.

You're walking out of the central city following a crowded avenue lined with big and brightly lit retail stores full of furniture, clothing, Chinese antiques, kitchen appliances, cameras, small radios and big television sets. You've walked many blocks, you find a noodle shop, you sit at a counter and are served a hot bowl. You think of Kaseko slurping as you struggle with getting noodles in your mouth with the chopsticks. Encouraged by watching the other patrons, you pick up the bowl and drink the soup.

Quite satisfied with your day and evening, you find your way back to the water taxi and to the ship,  planning your next day, planning to go straight to the hillside shanty town.

The ship heaves and bucks, you hold the tubular frame with both hands. The ship convulses and you trust the support chains to block your roll off the top rack if your grip loosens.

Churbuck gave you the first part of his GQ watch as you begin a long approach to Hong Kong. The swells are long and low, coming off the bow on the port side. You have port rudder on slightly as a default, jabs of starboard rudder regularly, when it starts falling off.

When we pick up the Harbor Pilot, Churbuck gets back on the helm. You're on the log. The Captain and the XO on the Bridge. Because it's GQ, you can't go out of the Pilot House. You're passing islands just off China and you can only see through portholes. You think, "next time."

Victoria Harbour is filled with vessels of all types, huge cargo ships, tiny junks and every size and type in between including other military ships, some from other countries. Your ship moors in the middle, you'll do the resupplying and get ashore on boats.

You and Churbuck are in dress blues, on the Fantail, ready for liberty. You get permission, do your salutes, climb over the side, down a short ladder to a water taxi that delivers you several shipmates across to the main dock across the harbor.

You're going with Churbuck to a floating restaurant he knows. You board another watertaxi with him and your out on the silky, sunset colored water.  The restaurant is brightly outlined with red lights. You step to the dock, enter a wooden gate, are greeted by the hosts, escorted to a dock where you overlook several pens in the water, a worker with a long-handled net, scoops up a big, flapping red snapper, holding it in a spotlight so Churbuck can approve it. He does and with a sweeping toss with the net, the fish slides onto a metal table where a kitchen worker takes it inside.

In the dining room the two of you have a large round table and a waiter for yourselves. You have drinks, appetizers and the big fish comes out steaming on a platter. The waiter serves you portions of the fish, some noodles and vegetables. You refuse offers of a fork, insisting that you learn how to eat with the fat, square ended Chinese sticks. You don't do well at all, struggling for an hour without getting much of the meal in your mouth.

You'll be in port five days and you learn that many of the married guys and others routinely save money by not taking liberty in Hong Kong. They're afraid of the pleasures, goods and trinkets for sale there and don't go ashore. You got other men to take your watches and you can take liberty from 0800 to midnight all five days.

You go with Churbuck to a tailor. You get measured, pick designs, material  for a suit and a sport coat and slacks. You draw a design for a suit with high buttoned, lapel-less jacket, thin legged pants and choose a near-black, charcoal serge for it. Orders placed, Churbuck tells you that he's going to lay low for the rest of the days here in Hong Kong, he'll come back to pick up his suits, but other than that, he'll stay on the ship.

"When we get to Subic, they'll be plenty of time for drinking and whoring. I don't like being over in Hong Kong that much. You'll be on your own for the rest of the time here." he  says.

"I want liberty. I don't want to stay on the ship," you tell him, feeling absolute about it.

"Like I say," he says, "you'll be on your own, then."

You're thinking of what you're going to do, he adds another thought, "let's go to Suzie Wong's first."

It's a  bar with hostesses, a girl for each of you. You all sit and other girls bring your drink orders. Your girl is older, you don't think she's attractive. You see a few younger girls dancing with each other. One looks particularly cute to you.

"You like the cherry girl?" your hostess asks, a little too forcefully. "You can have her, if she likes you" she adds.
You don't know how any of this works, you sense your girl isn't pleased, but you don't know why you should care about her, you didn't choose her.
"I'll ask her to dance" you announce. As you approach  the dance floor, the girls, led by the one you like leave the floor. You don't think you should follow them into the dark recesses of the club, so you return to the booth where your hostess takes your face in her hands and with pouty, mock babytalk tone, she says "oh,    the cherry girl didn't want to dance with you?"

"I don't know, she left before I could ask her" you say.

Another round of drinks. Your hostess sees your eyes searching the room for the young girl and says, "If you want to dance with cherry girl, I can bring her over here and she will dance with you."

That sounds good to you, so you tell her, "OK".

The hostess gets up, straightens her tight skirt and disappears into the shadows, reappearing a moment later with the young girl you like.

The older hostess introduces the young girl to you and you ask her to dance. The cherry girl is gorgeous, but she's unhappy, she keeps her eyes lowered while dancing listlessly. You ask her what is wrong, she becomes more unhappy, backs away from you.

One of the other young girls explains that the one you're trying to dance with doesn't speak English and is afraid of the your hostess, afraid that she will hurt her if you she dances with her.

You're thinking that the only thing you can can't have fun in this bar, you ask Churbuck to leave with you, "let's find another bar".

That's fine with him. You start start to leave and the hostess puts your arm around her neck, wraps hers around your waist and walks you out the door. Churbuck and his hostess walk out into the evening sidewalk also. Your hostess stops and faces you, puts her two arms around your neck and pulls you down in a kiss.

"First kiss" she says, resisting as you pull away.

"Goodbye" you say.