If it's Thursday it must be Hong Kong

After the most hectic two and a half weeks of my life, involving scary flights on 20 seater prop planes to the place where the sun comes up first in the world and across the horizon is the International Date Line, I finally flew from Auckland to Sydney to Hong Kong where I stepped off the plane into the most extraordinary place in the world, surely? It makes Manhattan look like a sleepy village in the Cotswolds. Visibly gasping as the taxi drove me to my hotel, Le Meridien Cyberport, I felt like a child in primary school with eyes like saucers.

After my overnight in Singapore, I have spent some time thinking about South-East Asia and its extraordinary dynamism, energy and its rampant capitalism. I have no idea what to say about it, except to absorb, absorb absorb. At 10 am Thoughtful Dresser reader Sarah will take me shopping.

Two small recommendations: Richard Ford's Independence Day, gently urged on me over breakfast in Adelaide by David Malouf, and which absorbed me on the journey from Auckland to Hong Kong; and a skin-care range new to me called Ultraceuticals, which was in the Qantas business class amenity bag. I thought the moisturiser and SPF30 sun screen were exceptionally good. It's available in SE Asia, parts of the US and Canada, but not Europe, annoyingly, and Sydney duty free only had $AUS$200 packs containing the full range, and weren't allowed to sell individual products.

Meanwhile The Clothes On Their Backs, only out a month, is already reprinting, and was, apparently, last week's most mentioned book in the Australian media. Normal service resumes on Momday. After I've been to the hairdresser's.