ADVENTURE #76 — HONG KONG — THE IDYLLIC ADVENTURE

Some adventures are rewarding because you prove your toughness and resilience through constant hardships, grueling encounters with mile after mile, freezing rapid after freezing rapid, snow drift after snow drift, or just some really hairy technical challenge.

And then some adventures are just as cozy as a day at home with a book, a hammock, and a blue sky.

There have been those in my life, those perfect adventures of energetic rambling that never cross the line into tiring or difficult.  One feels accomplished, but with the sun (not too hot, not too cold) on your face and the wind (cooling rather than cold) in your hair.

No long drive, no jacket, no heavy pack, no bland trail food or gallon of water.  Short sleeves, a bottle of Pocari sweat, and all the views of city, ocean, and mountain pasture I could want.  It was just bliss.

THE RUNDOWN

In brief, I took a clean, uncrowded train to Man On Shan station, followed the thread of my long-past memory up a peacefully deserted mountain road to the entrance of the country park, then skipped over the peaks and hopped down the stairs to Sai Kung, a bright little market and fishing port where I had a (literally) world-class meal, tea, and a Cuban cigar right on the harborside.  I strolled and bought a book in a little bookshop.  Then I swiped my Octopus on a double-decker’s scanner and took the front seat on top for a thrilling little drive back to modern civilization … make that extremely modern civilization.

Below is the photographic journey.  Click on the gallery to make it a slideshow.

Down past a cemetery and then out

Man On Shan waterfront area

Getting started

Ridgeline

The Christmas tree farm; proof I’m on the right track

Pavillion on the way

Random giant disco ball on the roadside

The playground area and entrance to the country park’s trails

Where I’m headed

A look back down

Into the country

Mountain path

This IS the trail, straight up that rocky patch

A pterodactyl perch

I will eventually cross the sharp ridge seen here

But first…

CAAAAAWWWWWWW

Steep bits coming up

The ropes aren’t really necessary; you can clamber

Looking back

Almost there

I will eventually be on that peak

Straight shot now

Though green, the mountainside extremely steep

My happy place

I’m so artistic :)

Views of the sea from the mountains do me good

Looking back

Where I came from

VERY steep

Mountain meadows to cross

Looking off the top of the “wave,” the cliff curves back in below me

Follow the brown ribbon

The soft grasses

Hillside on the left

Powdery blue sky

Behind me

Next pinnacle coming up

Sai Kung, where I’m headed … eventually

Observing my progress

The flat meadows

Starting down

AS FOR THE VIDEOS…

Okay, I decided to do something a little different this time:  use music with my videos.  What I’ve noticed in the past, though, is how completely an otherwise cool video can be ruined by inappropriate soundtrack selection.  For example:  rock climbing videos set to some scratchy Metallica song, or some Frenchy jazz cafe music to a kayaking video.  Or my favorite:  some awful gansta rap song about killing and taking drugs to a hiking video.  What were these people thinking?  So I decided to use a song that is appropriate:  nature-y, peaceful, serene, with nothing inappropriate in the themes or language.  … … … and I would never lie … … enjoy.

FYI:  The end of the second video is just me trying to hold the camera steady as I jostle in a double-decker bus, which go surprisingly fast in Hong Kong.  I posted it to give a taste of the top floor double-decker experience, truly an blissful little accoutrement to Hong Kong life.

SOME THOUGHTS

I sometimes think that the very soul of adventure is in actually experiencing things dreamt of.  It is easy to romanticize about frolicking through the woodlands, of camping by a pristine mountain stream or scaling sun-kissed sandstone walls.  But as any adventurer knows, it’s not all campfire cooking and petting baby deer out in the wilds.  But to do those things one idealizes, to live those perfect moments, is the adventure, is the joy, and the way.

That said, not everyone dreams of taking a kayak down the perfect river perfectly, skiing down miles of powder, or of leaping off cliffs into the ocean.  But the same applies to those idealized notions of relaxing.  Retirement isn’t often the hammock, lemonade, and golf rounds people want it to be.  But when one plans a day of hedonistic descent into carnal pleasure and it all comes off, it gives one that same feeling of bliss which adventure has so often welled-up in me.

Travel is often a bittersweet mixture of appreciating the new and also stressing the hassles of not knowing anything about anywhere or what the hell you’re doing.  If people loved having to wing it with logistics having sketchy or no information, as one often must while traveling, no one would be making money selling GPS units in phones and cars.  But Hong Kong is MY city, a place I am totally comfortable and more free to enjoy all its delights than the richest dweller therein could be.  I am apart from all its troubles and and yet attuned to its workings and customs.  I am not desensitized to it’s charm by citizenship, it is as exotic to me as when I first saw it, but the locations and methods of getting everything I could want are just as ordered in my mind as the English alphabet.

Something about just sitting at a white linen-covered table, with tanks of recently abducted crustaceans clicking behind me, the ocean in front of me, and my favorite eats, drinks, and smokes before me, hit that sublime button.  And I had to just sit and feel the life in me, and the life around me.  All my hurry disappeared and I didn’t want to leave that table.  I’ve said before rather arrogantly that the world is my playground.  But there I was, surrounded by delights, safe and as home as I’ve ever been.  I got to hold something in my hand for a while and contemplate it, turning it over from fingers to palm, twiddling it with my fingers:  the cheerful contentment of the human heart, that we all seek, but can rarely hold onto.

ADVENTURE #75 — HONG KONG — NORTH POINT TO STANLEY

THE SETUP

It was a perfectly simple matter to visit a few backpack places — numerous and trendy in a city where everyone is a pedestrian — and select a light backpack I could climb in unencumbered but which also had the sort of theft-proof design features I’ve come to rely upon in a crowd.  Then I had only to find a hiking store, pick up a few maps and Sport Beans, and make my plan by spreading said maps over the glass-topped dining table of my friend’s apartment.

I had never done “The Twins,” two green-domed features just inland of some of Hong Kong’s most beautiful beaches.  Judging by the kilometer markings on the map, it wouldn’t take all day, so I got the idea of starting quite a bit further north …

NORTH POINT TO STANLEY

North Point is, as you can see on this simple map, the northern point of the island, and, more importantly, accessible by MTR.

simple map of Hong Kong Island

Locate Stanley on the map.  The question was straightforward:  can I walk from North Point MTR Station to Stanley on trails and backroads?

THE VIDEOS

It was a glorious hike, sunny and windy with the saturated blue of the sky and the bright green of island tropics ever going as my companions before me.  I started a few blocks from the harbor and ended right on the sands of the ocean.

The videos tell the story, but I should mention Pocari Sweat is a particular vice of mine and one which demands a daily budget, especially on hiking days.  If you are in the US and want to try it yourself, head to your local Asian supermarket.

The first video shows the more urban part of the walk, the second the main hike, and the third my look around Stanley and a temple there.  You can turn them up to HD.

AFTERWARDS

I had just time to catch a double-decker bus (which you will see something about in a future post) back to the harbor-side of the island and have a delicious dinner.  Perfect day.

WAKING UP

My eyes open and I inhale deeply and quickly, blinking the sleep from my eyes.  The flight attendant is asking me, in her beautiful Cantonese accent, what I’d like for dinner.  We are making our descent with less than an hour to go.  I realize I’ve been asleep for a long time, 8 hours solid at least.  But as I slide the thin plastic window-shade up to be blasted by a bright white light, light of dazzling cloud and blinding sun — harsh but welcome — I realize I’ve been asleep for much longer than that.

Back in the States, over the 5 or 6 previous years, I had been subtly haunted, on-and-off by the same kind of dream.  Perhaps 40 times, maybe 50 times, I would wake in my bed, having dreamed so convincingly that I was in Hong Kong.  Often it was some single street:  a back alley of Shenzhen, for example.  Other times, I was in Victoria Park or on some green peak with windswept grasses.  Sometimes I was just walking down a store-lined street.  Sometimes it was a place I didn’t know specifically, but I knew it was in Hong Kong.  Sometimes I have a recurring dream of a stony mountain path and an ascent with no trees, rather a certain kind of stone … but that’s for another tale.  And I dreamed more than once that I was on the great plane journey over the seas to that paradise on the other side.  I endured these consistent pangs of waking so many times, always having to drag myself up and go to work, wanting to lie back down and return to far-off places in dreams.  Maybe these dreams were just the subconscious clutter of deep desire, the knowledge that, pretend as I would, I could not keep my heart away from Asia.  But it felt like more than that.  It felt like a glimpse of what was to come, a window into my destiny, a reminder that some invisible clock was ticking, some plane was, even then, waiting to carry me away from all my American adventures.

The path I’m on, the adventurer’s quest for the ultimate ride, must at points have dramatic and costly twists and turns.  It is a mistake to think it is a line of steady progress moved forward in the free time of a stable lifestyle.  On the contrary, these earthquakes can be paradigm shifts in thought that require one to bitterly (or gladly) eat one’s former words, near death experiences and physical hardships, the sudden necessity to learn a new language, or the sudden Star-Trek-esque “beaming” from home, friends, family, country, and culture.    I had become a stronger person over those years past — I got a degree and, more importantly, had had a host of new and wild adventures.  My brain and my body became equipped with the experience of all those hikes, the freezing swims, the muddy caves, the leaps off cliffs, the plunges down whitewater rapids — but I knew the Life of Adventure doesn’t allow stability for long, a necessity of “feeling alive” and of embracing the truth.

Every time I had one of those Hong Kong dreams, I thought, for a moment, the time had finally come.  But I always woke to my own bed in America.

Imagine the shock, then, after my 8 hour slumber, as I woke to see the first mountain peaks on the other side of the Pacific, floating on roots lost in the white mists of the sea.  Fishing boats came into view below, and then the coast.  And I realized, though it seemed just a few hours since I’d left my old routine of American life, it was no dream.  At long last, after more than 5 years, I was back.

As if prompted by the ringing of some far-off church bell, as if seized from the water’s edge by a long-waiting crocodile, I had been ripped from those 5 years of stability and shaken from one world to wake in another.  I had vanished from all I had known to be real, and come at last into the place I’d dreamt about so often.

And I realized, in that moment, that the plan worked.  The plan, which I had kept inside, despite the hours of paperwork, the doubts, the problems, the tense waiting for responses from the consulate, the late night visits to FedEx/Kinko’s Office, the days and hours of walking through parking garages thinking, planning my next moves, waiting for the email which would hit my phone to confirm another step had been completed.  I had lit a fuse and gone on with my life as if it wasn’t burning, knowing, waiting for that long fuse to run down to zero and blow my whole lifestyle away — my possessions, house, girlfriend, friends, job, language, habits, and even my name would crash all around me, and I would wake up in a whole new place.  And I did on that plane.  The fuse struck, and in the matter of a few hours and a deep sleep … it was all gone and the barriers of an ocean and 13 hours on the clock had admitted me.

What happens to a dream deferred?  I don’t know or care, nor do I ever want to.  I know that the realization of a dream is the ambrosia of immortality — a moment of smiling, laughing glory which will live forever in my memory and my history.  My “homeland” is now a foreign land utterly out of reach.  Right now, as I write, I can turn my head to look back, but all I see is a Taiwanese street (and a stray, usually black for some reason, dog).

This is my dream world — now in hi-def.

ONTO NEW QUESTS

After that dinner and that descent, I got up from my seat with my immigration forms and my jacket, gently hefted down my carry on, and walked, smiling, back into Hong Kong.  It was then onto the Airport Express, then the MTR system with all the familiar stops, and then to the home of a great friend.  Then came days of revisiting old explored places along with many new ones.  Then it was onto a whole new country, a whole new world of adventures.  I’m gonna show you some of what I experienced.

HONG KONG

As much as I’ve changed in the last 5 years, the city still stops me in my tracks to awe and gape.   Maybe it’s the crowded yet almost dinner-plate clean MTR subway system.  Maybe it’s mahjong parlours with sliding, frosted glass doors and the sound of a thousand clinking tile pieces being shuffled within.  Maybe it’s the Maxim’s Cakes bakeries, suckling pig and roasted whole gooses hanging in the butcher-shop windows, the shops of Gucci, Piaget, G2000, Giordano, Bossini, Swatch, Tiesot, Armani; the electric tramcars, the slippery fish markets where every kind of edible sea creature swims in tanks or lays on beds of ice still flopping, clawing, crawling.  Maybe it’s the dim sum restaurants with round tables covered in white table cloth, the custom of washing your white bowl, soup-spoon, and chopsticks with tea and then pouring it all into a glass bowl to be taken by the waiter.  Or maybe it’s the custom of setting the teapot lid angled out of its slot to show the waiter you need them to “ga di seui” (add water).  Maybe it’s the powerful earthy, herbal smell of the Chinese medicine shops which can be found just about everywhere.  Maybe it’s the sound of Cantonese, spoken in that super-fast, sing-songy way normal to tonal languages, or maybe its the sound of Octopus cards beeping passengers into buses, subways, trains, cable-cars, trams, 7-11s, DeliFrance, etc.  Or maybe it’s that globally recognizable skyline featuring IFC 1 & 2, “the Triangle Building,” Lippo Center, HSBC World Headquarters, the Peak, the Bank of China Tower, and all the others — a skyline that’s visible from the mountain peaks and the bustling harbor-side.

The grand answer is that I don’t know.  But there is something … magical, about the place; some intangible force of modernity, of opportunity, of paradise.  And I cannot resist it.  Even if I could, I know I wouldn’t.  Much as I am in love with the natural world, a love that is always returned to the giver, I am in love with this part of nature, this place on the globe.  The city has a soul, and its very akin to mine.

I will try, in an utterly ineffective way, to show you that paradise over the next few posts.  I explored the city, parts old and new, went on 4 hikes, and went surfing in a storm.  That last one gave me 4 distinct injuries.  But I’m fine now … no, no, I’m better than fine.