We walked by one restaurant just as a man reached into a tank and hauled out what looked like the world’s biggest newt. It had legs and a tail and buggy eyes, and I swear it was the size of a small dog. The man displayed it to some diners, who looked at this thing, thrashing around inches from their faces, and instead of sprinting to a safe distance, as I definitely would have, they were nodding thoughtfully, the way you might approve a bottle of Chablis.

A few minutes later, we came to a larger restaurant that had an elaborate window display, with colored spotlights shining on an arrangement of strange, triangular, withered, vaguely evil-looking things.

Shark fins,” said my wife, who reads all the guidebooks. “They’re very popular.”

At least they were dead. Around the corner we found another restaurant window display, consisting of a jar full of—I am not making this up—snakes.

“Come on in!” was the basic message of this display. “Have some snake!”

So as you can imagine we were a tad reluctant to eat local cuisine. But one night in Hong Kong we decided to give it a try, and we asked a bouncer outside a bar to recommend a medium-priced Chinese restaurant. He directed us down a side street to a little open-air place decorated in a design motif that I would call “about six old card tables.” Several men were eating out of

bowls. We sat down, and the waitress, a jolly woman who seemed vastly amused by our presence, rooted around and found a beat-up hand-written English menu for us. Here are some of the entrees it listed:

Ox Offal and Noodle Sea Blubber Sliced Cuttle Fish Sliced Pork’s Skin Pig’s Trotters Clam’s Meat Goose’s Intestines Preserved Pig’s Blood

Using our fluent gesturing skills, we communicated that we wanted chicken, beef, and pork, but definitely not Preserved Pig’s Blood. We also ordered a couple of beers, which the waitress brought out still attached to the plastic six-pack holder. Our food arrived maybe a minute later, and the waitress stayed to watch us eat it. Several of the other diners also got up and gathered around, laughing and gesturing. We were big entertainment.

My dish, which was probably pork, tasted pretty good. My son refused to eat his dish, which I would describe as “chicken parts not really cooked.” My wife’s dish was apparently the beef; she said it was OK, although it was very spicy and caused her nose to run. There were no napkins, but the restaurant did provide a tabletop roll of toilet paper in a nice ceramic dispenser, which we thought was a classy touch. The whole meal, including a generous tip, cost about eight U.S. dollars. We were glad we hadn’t asked the bouncer to recommend an inexpensive restaurant.

I should stress here that Hong Kong is famous for fine dining, and has a mind-boggling array of restaurants offering a vast variety of cuisines, including many that even provincial wussies like ourselves can eat. I should also stress that there are other things to do in Hong Kong besides eat and shop. You can ride the ferries, which are cheap and romantic and exciting. You can teem around the streets and pretend that you are some kind of slick international businessperson. You can take a tram that seems to go straight up the side of a mountain—in the old days, Chinese servants used to carry their British masters up this mountain on sedan chairs—and look down on an indescribably glorious view of the city and harbor, and be moved to say, in unison with 350 other tourists, “Look at that VIEW!” And you can take a day trip to the People’s Republic of China, future landlords of Hong Kong. We took such a trip. Here’s how it went:

HONG KONG, 7 A.M.

The tour-company bus picks us up at our hotel early on a day that promises to be rainy and blustery, thanks to the tail end of Typhoon Fred. We’re each given a sticker to wear on our clothing; it has the name of the tour company and the words “IF NOT PICKED, CALL 544-5656.” At various other hotels we gather the rest of our group, about 20 people from the U.S., Australia, and England. We’re taken to a ferry terminal, where we stand next to a sign that says BEWARE YOUR OWN PROPERTY, waiting for our guide.

“Don’t lose your sticker,” an American man is saying to his family. “If you lose your sticker, you have to stay in China.” This is of course a joke, we hope.

Finally, our guide arrives—a very tall, thin, easygoing young Hong Kong man who says we should call him Tommy. (We found that guides identified themselves to us by Western nicknames, on the assumption, no doubt correct, that we’d have trouble pronouncing their real names.) Tommy briefs us on our itinerary.

“Because we have only one day to see China, maybe our tour will be a little bit rushed,” he points out.

After an hour’s ride on a hydrofoil ferry, we arrive in the People’s Republic at a city called Shekou, which Tommy tells us means “mouth of the snake.” We line up to go through Immigration and Customs, next to signs warning us not to try to bring in any hot peppers or eggplants. I personally would not dream of attempting such a thing. God knows what this country does to eggplant smugglers.

Next to the Immigration area is a counter where you can buy duty-free cognac and American cigarettes. This strikes us as a pretty decadent enterprise for the People’s Republic to be engaging in.

Outside Customs Tommy introduces us to another guide, John, who’ll be escorting us around the People’s Republic in an aging bus driven by Bill. John is an earnest young man who possesses many facts about the People’s Republic and an uncontrollable urge to repeat them. He tells us that our first stop is a museum where we’ll see the World Famous Terra Cotta Warriors and Horses, which have been called—at least 20 times in our tour bus alone—”The Eighth Wonder of the World.” These are life-size clay statues of horses and warriors; 8,000 of these statues were buried with a Chinese emperor in 221 B.C., to protect him. This was before the invention of burglar alarms.

A few dozen statues have been placed on display in the Shekou museum, which is actually the second floor of a commercial-type building. On the first floor is a store that sells industrial equipment; the window has a nice display entitled “Compressed Air Breathing Apparatus.”

The museum itself, in terms of space allocation, is about 25 percent exhibit and 75 percent gift shops. Aside from our group, the only visitors are sticker-wearing tourists from other tour buses. We look briefly at the exhibit of World Famous Terra Cotta Warriors and Horses, then browse through a half-dozen shops selling jewelry, silks, jade, souvenirs, postcards, and other authentic cultural items. Your money or credit cards are more than welcome here in the People’s Republic.

Back on the bus, John informs us, over and over, that Shekou is part of a Special Economic Zone that the People’s Republic has set up to encourage economic development. The relatively few Chinese who are lucky enough to live inside the Special Economic Zone, he says, are allowed to engage in all kinds of wild and crazy economic activities such as actually choosing their own jobs and maybe even own small businesses—in short, they’re totally free to do just about anything except say or do the wrong thing, in which case they’ll be run over by tanks. (John doesn’t state this last part explicitly.)

John also discusses the plan for the “recovery” of Hong Kong in 1997.

“Hong Kong will enjoy a high degree of autonomous,” he assures us.

Our next stop is what John calls the “free market,” which turns out to be a line of about 25 fruit vendors who are aiding in the development of the Chinese economy by selling apples and pears to busloads of sticker-wearing tourists for what I suspect is 10 times the local price. We dutifully file off the bus in a pelting rain and walk over to the vendors, who are attracting us via the marketing technique of waving pieces of fruit and shouting “Hello!” Being a savvy free-market Westerner, I am able, using shrewd bargaining techniques, to purchase an apple for what I later calculate is two American dollars.