Ryan Ho Kilpatrick

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This is Hong Kong, our island home. Enjoy it, treasure it, celebrate it, and most important of all, take care of it. Treat every day as if it were #WorldOceansDay.

Two views from Sharp Peak and the Mai Fan Teng ridge on the most brutally hot day of 2018 so far—en route to Tai Long Wan for a much-needed dip after 12 hours hiking overnight from Sai Kung town. The best thing about hitting the trails in the dead of night, besides avoiding the worst of the heat, is the hours upon hours of uninterrupted solitude and silence broken only by the sounds of wildlife and, in this case, an audiobook of Billy Budd, Sailor. Melville’s words have a way of sticking with you no matter what, but listening to the scene of Billy’s early morning execution just as the first embers of dawn crept over the mountain tops stopped me in my tracks: “The hull deliberately recovering from the periodic roll to leeward was just regaining an even keel, when the last signal, a preconcerted dumb one, was given. At the same moment it chanced that the vapory fleece hanging low in the East, was shot thro' with a soft glory as of the fleece of the Lamb of God seen in mystical vision, and simultaneously therewith, watched by the wedged mass of upturned faces, Billy ascended; and, ascending, took the full rose of the dawn.”

心如止水，不動如山

Urmston Road, the channel between Lantau and Tuen Mun, is named after a man who called Hong Kong "an utterly useless island." Once the East India Company's China chief, Sir James Urmston was one voice in a chorus of condemnation against Charles Eliot after he accepted the cessation of Hong Kong in the First Opium War. Eliot's critics believed that Britain should have seized an established port to the north, near the tea-producing regions of Fujian or in the Chusan archipelego off the mouth of the Yangtze River, China's greatest shipping artery. "Nothing can be more futile, indeed, I may say preposterous," than Hong Kong becoming an emporium of trade, Urmston wrote in a contemporary pamphlet. Nonetheless, he is still remembered here, in the sheltered waters where East India Company ships would ride at anchor when foul weather disrupted the Canton run. He didn't think much of this place, and I'd like to say it doesn't think much of him either—but how many people in this "utterly useless" metropolis of millions has even heard of Supercargo James Brabazon Urmston?

Awakened by the low sounds of lapping water lit up by a Tung Ping Chau sunrise after another underwater cleanup cum camping trip. The romantic visage of a fisherman labouring upon the lonely shore was just slightly soured by the fact that I later recovered three ghost nets from where he had been standing.

Sundown just around the bluff from Sulphur Channel, named in honour of the first British warship to sail into Hong Kong waters and claim the island for Queen Victoria at 0815 on 25 January 1841. Royal Navy vessels have lent their names to more than a few local features, including Plover Cove, Starling Inlet, Hebe Haven, Repulse Bay, Rambler Channel, Blenheim Avenue, Minden Row and of course Tamar. If I’ve forgotten any there, please let me know!

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