Ready for Your Next Great Travel Adventure?

To help get you started, and to set the scene, below are descriptions from my books of some of the world’s most amazing destinations.  These clips are to help you learn about the location, prep for your travels and drive up your excitement about a specific place.

Hong Kong

The first time I arrived in Asia, I landed in Hong Kong, China. The city is perhaps, or at least was once, the greatest experiment in pure capitalism the world has ever seen. The free market system implemented under British colonial rule, which ended in 1997, left Hong Kong to become a free-wheeling market-driven economic dynasty. Today wall-to-wall skyscrapers are set on the edge of the most populous continent on the planet. The air, heavy with humidity, moves rapidly with the pounding feet of eight million people all assuming they will soon be rich.

You can buy anything in Hong Kong. Traders along Nathan Road had electronics stacked to the ceilings. Stanley Market was loaded with trinkets and souvenirs. The food comes from everywhere. The currency is issued by private commercial banks, not the government. You still pay less than 50 cents (U.S. depending on the exchange rate) to cross from ‘Hong Kong side’ to ‘Kowloon side’ on the famous wooden Star Ferry boats.

The city moves with non-stop energy, a city of business, a city of entrepreneurs.

In a country where everyone is trying to make money, the attitude is charged. Television networks were not running commercials for diseases, cleaning products or other every day drudgeries. Advertising was aspirational. You saw luxury cars, watches, high-end apartments and designer clothes.

I was amazed.

Even people living in areas most Westerners would consider poor, expect to end up rich. For some that means spending every Saturday at Happy Valley Racecourse. But for others, the opportunity comes only from working for yourself.

The pulse of the city is best demonstrated by standing in the heart of the action, in Central District, at lunchtime on a weekday…and trying to cross a street. The average person would be exhausted just watching the fast, decisive, forward movements at intersections. When hundreds of people at a time press against each other in the same place, the world does not stand still. In Hong Kong, you lead, follow or get-out-of-the way.

Pedestrians in Central, surrounded by all those skyscrapers and fast moving people, have to make a rapid decision to keep moving forward. There is no room for obstructionists on the street corners…

– Describing Hong Kong in Life Dream: 7 Universal Moves to Get the Life You Want through Entrepreneurship by Case Lane

 

The destination attracted an endless arrival line of high flyers. He hoped to avoid being recorded on entry as one of them. The area had too many eyes and ears for visitors of that profile. As an island section of the Pearl River Delta megalopolis occupying the beating heart of southern China, Hong Kong was not a stand-alone city, but a tightly packed magnetic entry point. While the bulk of regional economic action occurred further inland at Guangzhou, the foreigner-laden doors at Hong Kong and Macau on the coast, were sectors bringing uncounted billions…

Rogue technologists in the region preferred to dwell by the South China Sea where the island offered a broad international bend towards wealthy expatriates occupying dense skyscrapers around the water’s edge, on the Kowloon Peninsula, and to the edges of Shenzhen…

– Describing Hong Kong in The Motion Clue by Case Lane

 

Shanghai

…But our landing was on the place they had sought to preserve as a memory of time-stamped architecture and foreign occupation…the waterfront facade popularly known as the Bund along the Huangpu River in Shanghai, the commercial center of The People’s Republic of China. “Welcome to the future,” I exclaimed as we began to stroll along the embankment, which had been a magnet for traders for centuries…

…the Bund or around this area. This actually is historical preservation and a tourist attraction to maintain the buildings that once identified this city…Shopping malls, food courts, luxury sedans, creatively designed skyscrapers, English-language schools, breeding money as a way to display to a skeptical world that this development model imposed on this most ancient of civilizations could be made to work at a pace that was simply unprecedented.

Staying by the river, we followed the camera-toters to the view side leading to Huangpu Park then crossed Waibaidu Bridge and continued [traveling] towards the cruise ship terminal. Pushed inland by the ferry pier, we cut diagonally through the city passing hotels, apartment buildings, schools, temples, markets, restaurants, new villages, shopping malls, ecological gardens, industrial parks, shining metro stations, honking horns on crowded roads, indifferent crowds on jumbled sidewalks, work areas, farms and then again the water as we reached the Yangtze River at the Tongsha Ferry landing…Shanghai operated at a penthouse level of grinding urban torment. Gratefully I noted we were climbing into a boat…we were moving inland, bypassing Shanghai’s sprawl for its rural surroundings, following the Yangtze River into the heartland of the country.

As we moved further away from the coast, we noted the changing pattern of growth and development that marked the view in every direction. The shiny outposts of new cities would strike us along the way, some already literally crumbling under absent construction codes. But then the countryside would return and so would visible poverty. Struggling farm villages still clung to the river’s side, mud and stone huts marked the living quarters, we could see the crinkled faces and the worn clothes. This was not the fashionable, designer backdrop one sees on the coast. “Yes there are two Chinas,” I remarked as faces from the multi-million strong rural workforce stared towards us from along the shore…

– Describing Shanghai and the rural Yangtze River area in Walking with J by Karsten Quarters

 

Place: The People’s Republic of China, largest population in the world, third largest land area.  Ancient civilization and the living future in north east Asia.

Visited: Four times (not including only Hong Kong or Macao trips)

Most Recent Visit: 2007  (not including only Hong Kong or Macao trips)

Original sites: Overwhelming: Ancient and modern sites will take you through human history

Familiarity: High

English usage: Rare

Surprise: Try to decide if the products being sold in the antique markets are old or factory-built yesterday.

For Rising Entrepreneurs Expanding to Global Markets: You will find the world’s biggest market difficult to ignore.  For business-to-business commerce, there are more available roads than trying to reach consumers directly.  Recommended, and often required, is to have a local partner.

Country Details:  U.N. Country Data Stats for China

Reading Recommendations (click the book cover to learn more)

 

Want more details about visiting China: contactcase(at)readyentrepreneur(dot)com

 

 

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