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Golden Domes. South Korea is anxious for tourists, but roads are poor and sights few. Formosa offers good Chinese food, lovely scenery at Sun Moon Lake and hot sulphur baths at Peitou. Indonesia offers rewards for visitors fortified by optimism and durability. Accommodations are poor and government officials often both inept and insolent, but there are wonderful drives from the seedy capital of Djakarta through jungle-clad hills to cool Bandung and Bogor. Bali has two good hotels and is always lively with festivals, cockfights, legong dances and gala cremations. Burma is not much like Kipling's description of it, but Mandalay, Pagan and Rangoon have thousands of superb Buddhist monasteries and gold-domed temples alive with tinkling silver bells. With newer and better hotels, steadily improving plane service and a gradual understanding of visitors' needs, tourist traffic in the Far East is up 20% over 1959, should total 890,000 for this year.
Yellow Stars. Hong Kong is far and away the most efficient tourist center and the most knowledgeable in combining the exotic, flavorful atmosphere of the East with the well-policed comfort and orderliness of the West. The city itself, officially called Victoria, is on Hong Kong Island. But the crown colony includes some 248 other islands, mostly small, barren and uninhabited, plus Kowloon Peninsula and the New Territories on the Chinese main land—altogether some 398 square miles jammed with 3,000,000 people, 99% of whom are Chinese. Hong Kong booms with banks and stockbrokers, merchants and money lenders, smugglers and illicit dealers in gold, narcotics and women. As fast as new land is reclaimed from the sea, it sprouts offices, apartments, factories, mills, warehouses, docks. Ships flying a score of flags sail from Hong Kong to the far parts of the earth—Abidjan, Khorramshahr, Miri, Zanzibar. Nearly 20,000 Chinese junks and sampans drift over its waters, and green-painted barges marked with the yellow stars of Red China slip down the Pearl River from Canton.
Whining Music. To tourists, Hong Kong seems at first a vast department store. As they step from plane or ship, tailors' touts press calling cards on them and promise custom-made suits within 24 hours for only $25. On their way to the hotel, the cab driver offers his services as guide, confidant and business agent. Climbing the broad stairs to the lobby of the popular, 274-room Peninsula Hotel in Kowloon, which commands an unrivaled view of Hong Kong itself banked against the Peak across the harbor, the visitor is surrounded by shop after shop selling bargain-priced brocades, silks, cameras, pearls, jade, tape recorders, linens, carved ivory and inlaid furniture.
The short ride by Star ferry across the harbor from Kowloon to Hong Kong introduces tourists to a popular local pastime: watching Hong Kong girls, wearing cheong-san dresses slit to the thigh, cope with the wind. The first impression of Hong Kong itself is of noise: the staccato of pneumatic drills, thump of pile drivers, cries of hawkers, click of mah-jongg tiles behind shuttered doors, the shouts of coolies dancing under the weight of bamboo shoulder poles. Brass bands sound funeral dirges in the narrow streets; radios whine the cacophony of Cantonese music; the rataplan of $1,000 worth of firecrackers announces a wedding, a birth, or the grand opening of a new noodle store.