Bunking Down in Old Hong Kong

HONG KONG —  Bamboo scaffolding still clings to numerous new high-rises in this city that will be handed back to the People’s Republic of China in 1997.

At one prime location, in Kowloon, the YMCA is being expanded. When completed late next year, the 400-bed Salisbury Street YMCA will have a fifth-floor section with four bunk rooms for student travelers. The rate will be $150 Hong Kong (about $20 U.S.) per bed a night.

Comfortable twin rooms, complete with minibars and refrigerators, are available for $480 Hong Kong, which, although expensive for students, still is considered one of the city’s best buys.

The YMCA is between the upscale Peninsula Hotel and the Star Ferry pier, facing the harbor and the new Cultural Center.

Reservations should be made at least two months in advance. You must send the first night’s payment (bank draft or money order, in Hong Kong currency) to secure your booking. Contact the Salisbury YMCA, 41 Salisbury Road, Kowloon, Hong Kong.

Budget travelers often are steered around the corner to Chungking Mansions on Nathan Road. It’s a 16-story building with guest houses and restaurants. I saw lengthy lines at its two tiny elevators, the entrance was filthy and the stairwells were being used as garbage dumps.

You will probably rest a lot easier if you hop onto the city’s clean, modern and inexpensive subway system, get off at the Mong Kok stop and take a three-minute walk to 255 Reclamation St. There you’ll find the much more attractive hostel accommodation operated by Hong Kong Student Travel Bureau.

The STB Hostel offers clean, simple lodgings on the first three floors of the building, with 24-hour security. There are men’s and women’s dormitory rooms with beds for $50 Hong Kong a night. Twin rooms are $250 and triple rooms are $300. You can reach the hostel from the airport in 20 minutes on bus 1A for $6 (80 cents U.S.). The hostel is a short walk from the fortune tellers, singers and watch hawkers of the lively Temple Street night market.

Free maps and information are available from any of the Hong Kong Tourist Assn. offices in the city, including one at the International Airport and another at the Kowloon Star Ferry Concourse. Their Hotel Guide includes addresses of other budget lodgings. A section of the book entitled “Places of Interest by Public Transportation” also should be very helpful.

More than 1,600 businesses offer youth and student discounts. For a list, contact STB Travel, 10th Floor, 833 Star House, Tsimshatsui, Kowloon.

In spite of what Hong Kong’s many high-rises might signify, you can still discover much of the traditional Chinese life style.

In the early morning, residents practice tai chi exercises in a park.

The Kowloon area’s neon jungle of stores has earned the city a reputation as a shopper’s paradise, but just a few blocks away it’s a different world. Vendors reach elbow-deep into crates of live grasshoppers, a favorite food for the caged birds that elderly men take with them on their morning walks.

Also, herbalists’ shops provide crushed pearls as a beauty treatment and snake soup to strengthen the blood for the cold winter season.

After a 10-minute, 15-cent, first-class ferry ride to Hong Kong Island I popped into a dockside fast-food shop for coffee, which I found . . . three items past the marinated chicken’s feet.

Buses travel to beaches at Deepwater and Repulse Bay, plus the popular shopping stalls in Stanley Market and the Aberdeen community, where 5,000 people live aboard houseboats.

On Hong Kong Island you can take the 101-year-old tram to the top of Victoria Peak for 80 cents U.S., and look down on the tall, round Hopewell Center building.

The Chinese still practice Fung Shui, a 2,000-year-old tradition of belief in the favorable design of buildings in relation to their natural surroundings. So when a Fung Shui expert suggested that the Hopewell Center looked too much like a candle, a swimming pool was added to the roof.

For more information on travel to Hong Kong, contact the Hong Kong Tourist Assn., 10940 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 1220, Los Angeles 90024, (213) 208-4582.