Hong Kong

We’re sitting in our respective twin beds in a hotel next to Narita airport, waiting for our flight to Chicago this evening. I thought we might be able to go visit Narita city today, but the rain had other plans. Over the next two weeks, we’ll be circumnavigating the globe, having left Hong Kong yesterday en route to Beijing two weeks from now, via Chicago and the Middle East.

The past week in Hong Kong was a welcome change from Southeast Asia, and marked our first time in a major metropolis in months. Both of us were pleasantly surprised by how much we enjoyed this city. Unlike Tokyo, a city so seemingly endless you almost want to give up exploring it before you begin, Hong Kong felt more knowable. It wasn’t quite familiar, but it was closer to that, to home, than anywhere we’ve been since we left Manhattan.

Taking it easy

Hong Kong was close to a perfect stop for us at this point of the sabbatical. There were attractions, but not so many and none so crucial that we felt like we’d be missing out if we didn’t see them. There was amazing food, and we didn’t have to be constantly vigilant about defensive eating to enjoy it. We could spend most of our day catching up on errands, planning the next few months, or napping, and still fit in a quick hike in the mountains surrounding the city. I don’t think we realized how much we missed the sense of home we found here.

Asymmetric payoffs

We spent sunset at Lion Rock with two new friends, Barry and Teraj. Alice had noticed the Air Canada logo on Barry’s backpack as we were hiking on the trail, and a question about it led to a long chat as we sat on an outcropping overlooking the city. We climbed down the mountain in the dark, and Alice invited them for dinner at a hole-in-the-wall in Sham Shui Po, where the regulars would walk in and have their orders brought out for them without needing to say a word. It was a good reminder that the act of reaching out to other people is hugely asymmetric, that the upside of looking for human connection is so much richer than the downside.

City among mountains

I had no idea how close the city was to nature. I’m not sure where else you can hike up mountains while watching the tops of nearby apartment buildings and skyscrapers approach and eventually pass below you. Even walking through some parts of the city itself often felt like moving through an obstacle course, navigating the corners and descents of the natural landscapes hidden beneath the paved streets and glass buildings.

Reasons to visit

Michelle said that she thought Hong Kong was the best food city in the world, and I think we both agree with her. Things that stood out: the cartilage-like crunchiness of wonton soup noodles, the silky sweet sauce and charred bits of char siu, the flavor of the sea in a dried abalone. In six days, we covered a lot of ground, but nowhere close to enough: stir-fried rice noodle rolls in XO sauce and tangyuan are just two of the many reasons that we have to come back.

Emblazoned zones

An outing to Victoria Peak for the sunset unexpectedly turned into a thousand-foot descent by foot along a quiet back road, a ferry ride, and a stroll along the Tsim Sha Tsui waterfront back to our hotel. The Hong Kong skyline might be my favorite in the world, and Victoria Harbor at night was just as I remembered it to be more than a decade ago from the window of my plane. All I could think of were these lines from a poem I read in freshman year: The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there / As the night descended, tilting in the air / Mastered the night and portioned out the sea / Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles / Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.

On the way to a laundry break

The back half of our time in Hong Kong was spent largely in our hotel room, as we tried to figure out what we wanted to do between Beijing and Korea at the end of March. We considered going on a Great Walk in New Zealand, backpacking in Kauai, and seeing more whale sharks on the Ningaloo Roof, but in the end we decided to go to Hawaii to learn how to freedive, a goal of mine since the start of the sabbatical. I also decided that I would learn how to properly drive, and also maybe how to drive stick, in my week on my own in LA at the end of April.