1/7/18 – A Strenuous Stroll

On our first totally free day, I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to do. After finally overcoming my jetlag and waking up at 11:30, I saw that Keileh and Haley were going on a walk, so I decided to join them. We meandered around the residential area outside the university to a small Buddhist temple set into a hillside. It was nice, all in all – the weather held (a welcome surprise, since yesterday’s forecast was all rain) and the temple complex was beautiful and serene. But after an hour or so, we had more or less seen what this neighborhood had to offer. On a whim, we decided to head towards a small swatch of green behind the temple, and our leisurely walk became a hike. We climbed up a drainage culvert, went along the top of a huge dam, and began trekking uphill along a river until, after a good three hours of strenuous climbing, our trail brought us to the summit of a huge peak, one that we had initially seen from the town below but had thought to be quite aways farther than a day’s walk. The view was breathtaking – with crystalline ocean, verdant mountains, and colossal skyscrapers, it could have easily been from a postcard. What was the most wild to me, though, was the tight proximity of it all. While in the US one might expect to see from such a height either an urban sprawl or a rugged wilderness, here the two were tightly intermingled. Little snippets of towering buildings, the sort that could have been copied pasted from downtown New York or Chicago, were nestled in the crannies between mountains covered in lush foliage. The very fact that we could walk, in only a few hours, from the concrete jungle of Tuen Mun to the very real jungle on those mountain slopes is a testament to the close relationship that exists here between humans and nature, and the adventure got me excited to learn more about how this relationship plays out.