Hong Kong contains multitudes

I've been a bit crap at the regular blogging thing, and I'm going to try to make up for it by posting something every day this week. I took over 1500 photos on my vacation and I've been steadily editing them down to the shots that are worth sharing. I hope to finish chronicling Hong Kong and Singapore this week, and talking more about Seoul on the weekend.

Hong Kong isn't just a dense metropolis of skyscrapers and shopping malls. It's an island with some stunningly beautiful mountains, forests and beaches. I saw them on the taxi ride from the airport and whenever I looked over the island from the rooftop of my hotel. I appreciate nature from a distance. I'm a city boy, through and through. I don't feel the kind of pull towards nature that so many of my peers do, so I wasn't planning on spending much time outside of the city.

The second day I was there, I met someone who lived near one of the beaches on the southern end of the island. She invited me to visit her one morning while she walked her dog before work. That's how I got to spend some time at Stanley beach. It's an easy bus ride from Wan Chi, through some winding, hilly roads. It's the location of an old fishing village and feels like a completely different world from the city.

I met her shortly after dawn and we hiked up one of the hills in the park that's right near the square. There was a lot of haze in the air, like most of my days in Hong Kong. That usually makes for less than ideal landscape pictures, but in this case it made for a spectacular sunrise:

After I took that shot, I turned around and got an excellent view of the rest of Stanley Bay. It's a good representation of what it's like-forested hills and smaller apartment buildings, quite unlike the rest of Hong Kong:

After spending some time in the hills we went down to the pier, where she insisted on taking a picture of me. She did the best she could with the subject, who doesn't exactly know how to pose normally for portraits.

Just a normal human doing normal human standing.

We checked out several of the smaller beaches around the Bay. It was still early and the sun was low in the sky, so I could get a shot like this:

Here's a shot at the same beach, just a few minutes later and from a slightly different angle.

We kept moving along the beach path, heading generally west and stopping at each one to let her dog run around and play with the other dogs out for their walks.

This is Jack. He is a Very Good Boy.

Here's another good example of what Stanley Beach is like: sand, water, forests, boats, and hillside buildings:

This is a closeup of those buildings on the hills. My friend told me that these are the more expensive houses in the area, which isn't exactly surprising. Real estate values follow the same rules all over the world, it seems.

I said earlier that I'm a city boy, but I could spent quite a few hours in a place like this:

I don't know much about this building, but I thought it looked interesting at the top of the hill.

As you can see, Stanley Bay is still very much a fishing village. Plenty of people supplement their diets with fish they catch, or take tourists out on the water.

I wish I would have taken more pictures to share, but I was enjoying the walk and talking with the woman who invited me there. I hope you all can understand that.

I appreciated the change of pace from the city proper, and it made me realize how much I had missed the sounds and smells of the ocean. I spent 20 years just a mile away from the Pacific Ocean, and I forgot how much the coast still feels like home.

Next time, I'll show you some other things that reminded me of home, including some authentic Mexican food. Just typing that sentence made me hungry for tacos.