Taking the Mickey

When you enter the realm of Disney you're entirely in Mickey's hands. Picture / Reuters

In the Grand Stair Hall at the Hong Kong Disneyland Resort hang two enormous crystal chandeliers. A "cast member", winding up the staircase behind me, points out that, within these triumphs of ornate whimsy, are poised a number of crystal Cinderella slippers.

Halfway up the stairs is a cast member flicking at the banister with a duster.

At the very top I look down. Another cast member is on his hands and knees inspecting a possibly non-existent smear on the marble floors.

I wander a little further and come across two staff - that's enough of this cast member nonsense, despite what the Disney manual dictates - peeling off barely faded outer petals from a towering flower arrangement.

This is the flash hotel at Hong Kong Disneyland, a grand Victorian-style edifice designed to evoke those that existed in Hong Kong in an earlier era.

There are faux turrets, twinkling at night with fairy lights, red-shingled roofs and elaborate gardens, including a maze in the shape of the Mouse.

The Disney designers have dubbed it Micktorian. How cute. How bizarre.

If all this staged servility seems odd, wait until you get to the Grand Salon. You have just seen the virtual koi pond at the Crystal Lotus restaurant, you have noted that the ballroom here is oriented to ensure maximum feng shui advantage from the Green Dragon Mountain to the east and White Tiger Mountain to the west.

And, obviously, because you are in China, you can't have failed to notice that those staff, in their tidy little costumes (not uniforms, please) from an earlier era and another place, America, are all Chinese - except, of course, Snow White, Cinderella, and the Beast's Beauty.

Where Disney meets China there will be the occasional cultural misunderstanding.

The Aussies at lunch at the Hollywood Hotel - the more utilitarian option to the surreal delights of the Micktorian pile further up Magic Road - ordered chardonnay with their lunch. They got red wine.

Never mind. Everyone says: "Have a magical day."

Then to the Grand Salon where, at 10.30am, a woman in a ballgown is playing a harp and Mickey and Minnie are doing a little dance. They hold hands, and Minnie twirls and curtseys.

Take a seat on one of the Micktorian couches and the cute pair will approach you. Mickey gestures. Minnie simpers.

You say: "It's very hard to talk to two mice who don't talk back."

Mickey mimes laughter. He holds his belly, slaps his thigh.

You say: "It wasn't that funny."

He mimes heartier laughter.

You have the distinct feeling the Mickey is being taken.

You'll never hear anyone at Disney admit such a thing. At Disneyland there is no such thing as irony, or sarcasm.

This is how nice they are. In the bar at the art deco-inspired Hollywood I clamber up on a barstool. I say to the waitress who rushes over to help, "I'm too short for these stools."

"Oh, no," she says, with absolute sincerity, "it's the chair that is too tall." This is how diplomatic they are. Every character has a human with an earpiece and a radio telephone who follows them around, very closely. I ask a Mickey minder: "Now tell me, honestly, am I taller than Mickey Mouse?"

"Ooh," he says, "I cannot say. Ask Mickey."

I ask two of the minders whether they are minders and Mickey's one says: "I'm their friend."

Goofy's one says: "No, I'm his follower. Have a magical day," and moves Goofy off rather quickly.

In the trade they call the characters Rubber Heads. That is a little insight you won't read in the media guide. Under More Disney Insights, we are told: there is only one Mickey Mouse. I tell one of my minders that I don't believe this.

"You can believe what you want," he says, "there is only one Mickey."

So, what height do you have to be to be one of the Mickeys? "Mickey," he corrects.

Whatever. You have to be between 4ft 2in and 4ft 5in (127cm and 135cm), which makes you think that the mouse is quite likely to be a midget girl mouse.

So if Minnie is also a midget girl mouse ... No, this is an un-Disney thought, and when you are at Disneyland you are encouraged to have pure Disney thoughts and have a magical day. You are supposed to be buying the magic, not looking for the seams in the Mouse's costume.

All I will think later when we are at the park is: it's more than 30C, it's like walking in a sauna. It's so humid that when you take your sunnies out you have to leave them off for five minutes to de-fog. I think: I'm glad I'm too tall to be a Rubber Head.

Some things are larger than life. At the entrance to The Happiest Place on Earth is a fountain, the centrepiece is a huge bronze Willy the Whale and, look, there's Mickey surfing the spout. And, ooh, there's Mickey's face picked out in flowers, the first thing you see before entering the park, and arriving on Main Street, USA.

This is smalltown America, circa 1890-1910. Possibly. It is a place which probably never really existed but which people want to believe did. A place where cleanliness is next to godliness.

Cleaned and Polished by Design reads a section in the guidebook. Everything in Disneyland is "kept polished, swept and painted to look as new as the day it opened."

You'll never see any litter here (although you'll see plenty of rubbish under the guise of merchandise).

You should be sober and in good health to ride the dear little train.

You won't hear any bad language or see any bad behaviour. Okay, I'm sorry I yelled at that kid who pushed in at the Emporium where I was queuing to buy, ahem, Mouse ears. But he started it.

Just as Mickey will never age, the colours on the buildings of Main Street will never fade. The blancmanges and cookies in the window of the Market House Bakery will never get mouldy or go stale. They're not real.

Inside, you can buy a sausage in a roll, or a muffin, or Donald Duck jelly cups. You can sell nostalgia but you can't eat it.

At the news-stand on Main Street, I ask what papers they have. This is not playing the game. They sell Disney stuff, like every other shop in the park.

"We don't have newspapers," the young Chinese woman in the long checked skirt, the puff-sleeves and the frilly apron kindly explains. But news-stand, "it's such a nice name." Then, and this sounds like a gentle admonition, "Have a magical day."

Day after day the South China Morning Post arrives with more bad news for Disney. There are protesters shouting about cultural imperialism and poor treatment of staff. There are claims of food poisoning, doubts about profits and worries about air pollution from fireworks.

John Travolta didn't turn up for the grand opening, either. This was a great disappointment. His presence would have completed the bizarre cultural juxtaposition that is Disneyland in China.

"I don't want the public to see the world they live in, I want them to feel they're in another world," is how Walt Disney put it.

Who would be so churlish as to go through the gates which say "Here you leave Today and enter the world of Yesterday, Tomorrow and Fantasy" and not go on, say, the Cinderella Carousel?

In Today, you wouldn't do this. You would feel like a great lumbering idiot. But the candy-colours are so pretty, and the painted ponies go up and down so sweetly that you soon get over it.

We go to Tomorowland and to Space Mountain, opened by Mickey dressed as an astronaut.The indoor rollercoaster is supposed to career through the darkness, through a field of meteors. It took some convincing to get me on this ride and it doesn't help that halfway through the lights come on and we can see the tracks.

I don't scream but my rocket-ship companion notices that I stop talking.

"Most people don't get to do that," he says. "No," I say, "and they don't want to." The lights coming on is a glitch, we are told, and we can go again.

Even in Disneyland when I hear the words "just checking for safety", I hear "malfunction".

We are told it may be two minutes, or it may be 30. I've heard this before at Britomart, so we leave and go to Adventureland. Here we see a potted version of the Lion King which is safer and has a life-size lion which taps its foot and nods its head.

Outside I see Lucky the Dinosaur, a 3m tall feat of audio-animatronics which walks and giggles and coughs and snorts.

I love Push the burping rubbish bin in Tomorrowland, as do a bunch of 6-year-old boys. And like 6-year-olds we whoop and duck as Donald comes flying towards us at the cheesy Mickey's PhilharMagic 3-D show.

At night I go on the Congo Queen for the Jungle River Cruise, described as a wonderland of nature's own design, far from civilisation.

This is better than an "ordinary safari" because it "guarantees dramatic encounters with life in the wild 'performing' on cue for every cruise." On every cruise you will see the mom and baby elephant frolicking in the water. You will see the hippo rising right by your boat. You will hear the jokes, "written according to cultural tastes." English-speakers get this one about zebras: "You know why they have stripes?"

"Because they'd look silly in polka dots."

Even if you take this ride 100 times you'll always, but always, hear that joke - and get to see the apes having a camping party.

What you don't think is: why would apes be having a camping party?

At Disneyland anthropomorphism doesn't even come close. You get humans dressed up as cartoon versions of animals, doing human things.

And this is the really strange thing - after you see Mickey at breakfast, lunch and dinner, 20 times a day, it begins to feel normal to be shaking hands with a Rubber Head. In a dreamworld sort of way.

At Disneyland your perspective begins to go a little wonky.

Here, things are not real. Not really. Sleeping Beauty Castle and Main Street rely on an architectural trick called forced perspective. The buildings are normal at ground level and taper off upwards. They are not as tall as they appear

You know this, but when you watch the fireworks above the castle you don't remember it. You don't think: should they be letting off those fireworks when the newspapers are reporting dangerous smog levels? Nah, you just think: wow, cool fireworks.

Once you leave Disneyland, you will hear squeaking noises for days afterwards, like having a family of mice living inside your head.

On the Jungle River Cruise you get a bit wet. You should not worry about this. Your boat pilot will say. "This is magic water. It dries quickly."

Of course it is. This is the Magic Kingdom. And the greatest trick of all is this. We were given limited-edition Grand Opening bottles of Coke.

Two days after I got home, one of these bottles had sold on ebay for $213.38. This is the real magic of Disney - it can turn sugar water into cash.

* Michele Hewitson went to Hong Kong Disneyland courtesy of Disney and Cathay Pacific.

Getting there

Cathay Pacific offers up to 12 non-stop flights a week from Auckland to Hong Kong

Disneyland tickets

Weekdays: adults $55, children (3-11) $40, 65+ $32. Weekends and peak days: adults $65, children $46, 65+ $37

Ticket sales

Hollywood Hotel reservations hotline: 00852 1830 830

Disneyland Resort reservations hotline: 00852 1830 830

www.hongkongdisneyland.com