Hong Kong airport 2 A.M(1)

2007-10-22 13:32:36 [ Big Normal Small ]    　Comment

Hong Kong International Airport and it is 2 a.m inside the largest enclosed space in the world.



A flight crew makes its way through a deserted lounge to an awaiting plane. Airports are often stressful prerequisites to air-travel and post 9/11 security checks have added to the pressures. But airports are sometimes major engineering feats. None less so than Hong Kong’s airport. When undertaken almost two decades ago it was the largest engineering project in history and cost $20 billion. Its predecessor was Kai Tak in Kowloon’s crowded Mongkok. It had provided the most hair-raising descent of perhaps any airport as the plane plummeted over high-rise roof tops just before landing. But it had no room to grow in the booming enclave. As Hong Kong lacks sufficient level land an audacious project was born-to site a new airport 16 miles offshore on the coast of Lantau Island. This required building a huge platform by levelling two small islands and reclaiming the additional land needed from the ocean floor. The remote location was then rendered readily accessibly by land links which include a 24 minute rail link to Hong Kong’s CBD.

Hong Kong Airport never sleeps as its location removes the need for curfews. But sleep was uppermost in my mind as I disembarked at 9 p.m from a ten hour flight from New Zealand already armed with my boarding pass for a Beijing flight the next morning. There is accommodation within the terminal in the form of sleeping cubicles for HKD600 per night but they were booked out. But I had my camera and as midnight approached an eerie calm replaced the earlier bustle. The crowds had melted into the night but this Coral snack bar remained open for these police officers on night-shift.

Related: