Ryan Ho Kilpatrick

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Hong Kong’s Outcast Islands

  • by Ryan Ho Kilpatrick
  • Posted on August 21, 2018
  • Islands

Hong Kong’s Disappearing Islands

  • by Ryan Ho Kilpatrick
  • Posted on August 1, 2018
  • Islands

On the Far Edge of Hong Kong, Unexpectedly Thriving Coral Reefs

  • by Ryan Ho Kilpatrick
  • Posted on July 4, 2018July 4, 2018
  • Eurasians

No Mixed Blood, No Mixed Bones

  • by Ryan Ho Kilpatrick
  • Posted on June 8, 2018
  • Marine conservation

There’s Something Fishy About China’s Salmon

  • by Ryan Ho Kilpatrick
  • Posted on May 30, 2018June 8, 2018
  • Marine conservation

Pressure Mounts to Take Blue Shark Off the Menu

  • by Ryan Ho Kilpatrick
  • Posted on May 24, 2018May 24, 2018
  • Maritime history

Hong Kong’s Lighthouses and Their Eurasian Sentries

  • by Ryan Ho Kilpatrick
  • Posted on April 18, 2018May 1, 2018

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All around Malta, if you look real close at the weatherworn walls you’ll find graffiti carvings of the various vessels that have visited, traded at and invaded these islands over the centuries, from traditional Mediterranean galleys to, like this one etched onto the National Library, a Royal Navy brigantine. It’s like a secret language that, once learnt, seems to call out to you everywhere. The ships are also intimately connected to another distinctively Maltese tradition: ex-votos. When sailors were confronted with disaster at sea, they often prayed to God for deliverance, vowing to make an offering to the Church if they survived. When they finally washed ashore, they would commission a painting of their ordeal alongside the letters V.F.G.A. for “Votum Fecit et Gratiam Accepit” (“a promise was made and the grace was given”) for the nearest chapel. These intricately carved craft, too, were thought to bring good luck in subsequent sea voyages for those who couldn’t afford to engage a professional artist.
“Dear, I know nothing of \ Either, but when I try to imagine a faultless love \ Or the life to come, what I hear is the murmur \ Of underground streams, what I see is a limestone landscape.” . These are the colours of Malta: a horizontal tricolour of muted yellow limestone sandwiched between the deep blue of the Mediterranean and the azure sky. It’s a banner that follows your every step along these ancient shores, where buildings new and old are all made from the soft, porous rock and left unpainted to breath out the salty summer air and wintry rains. This entire island could be one elaborate sculpture chiseled over the centuries from a single limestone block, then lodged in the middle of the sea like the centrepiece of some impossibly grand fountain.
Daylight fires its final salvo into the limestone rock pools at the foot of Fort St Elmo’s seaward ramparts. In 1565 these embankments saw some of the fiercest fighting of the Great Siege of Malta, as Ottoman forces fought to take the strategic Sciberras Peninsula that divides Marsamxett and the Grand Harbour, commanding the entrance to both of the island’s main waterways. Not a single Knight of St John survived to see it fall into the enemy’s hands. Today it stands at the head of the capital Valletta, the haunt of dog-walkers, divers, stray cats blinking sleepily into the twilight, and fishermen standing still as the statues of saints you see on every street corner. Like so many places in Malta, it feels like two parallel worlds, past and present, draw breath in unison. As above, so below.
Under sail and on the trail — the Hong Kong I always miss most. See you in a year, HK frens (unless you come visit me in Malta!)
Lit in 1901, Cape Byron Light stands at the easternmost tip of the Australian mainland. The country’s most powerful lighthouse, by night its light sweeps 27 nautical miles across Byron Bay, burning with the intensity of 2.2 million candles. If it could keep shining boundlessly over the inky ocean waters, though, it would illuminate some 13,000 kilometres of unbroken fetch before meeting the rising sun on the opposite shores of the Pacific, a few hardy candelas making landfall upon the Chilean coast. Also pictured: the Catholic Cathedral of St Stephen in Brisbane, a sloping street of traditional Queenslander homes in suburban Bulimba, the River of Light show on the Brisbane River, and dawn on the Great Barrier Reef.
The sun sinks into the seas off the Great Barrier Reef on one of my last days in Australia. In my short time here I’ve dived for the first time with grey nurse, reef and wobbegong sharks, giant Queensland grouper, bumphead parrotfish and marble, bull and eagle rays. I did my first wreck penetration dive and liveaboard and shared the water with breaching humpback whales and great pods of dolphins. Back on dry land I took my first furtive steps into a continent I’d barely thought of before but now can’t get off my mind. Can’t wait to see you again, Great Southern Land.

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