Ordinary Gweilo

Hilariously, Tim Hamlett seems to have filled a whole column in today’s SCMP by writing about the road that runs outside his window:

A veteran journalist and Baptist University academic, Tim looks at the issues facing the city.

Sui Wo Road has its origins at a small roundabout in the smoky industrial heart of Fo Tan. It winds its way upwards in serpentine fashion past housing estates and schools, until it reaches the top of the hill behind the Ten Thousand Buddhas Monastery. Here man and nature meet and contend, with mixed results. At the end of the road there is a car park. At least it was clearly intended to be a car park. There are neither “no parking” signs nor “P” signs.

At certain times of the year the police explicitly forbid parking. Behind this legal ambiguity there is a stretch of grass which runs round the back of the last estate on the left. It is separated from the back wall of the estate by a wide path. Eventually the path turns sharply to the right down the hill, and you come to a lookout point. This is a platform jutting out from the hill, with a pavilion constructed in the traditional Chinese style, if the traditional Chinese style admits reinforced concrete. It is sometimes known as the “Lions Lookout” because a Lions Club paid for it. I would like to name the benefactors, but the two large stones commemorating the original construction and a recent refurbishment have no English outside the Lions logo. They are munificent but monolingual lions.

The lookout was once of some administrative importance. Official visitors to Hong Kong would be escorted up there to look down on the huge building site in the valley below and would “be briefed” as the press release invariably put it, on the progress of the works. Nowadays the official guides have moved on to more recent wonders and the lookout point is left to morning visitors in search of exercise and evening visitors in search of a quiet place to cuddle in the dark.

Or for veteran journalists to practice the bagpipes, according to one blogger who may be a neighbour of Mr Hamlett. 

The stretch of grass continues, now pathless, past more housing estate until it reaches the top of the slope behind Sha Tin College. There are two other landmarks. One clump of bushes by the car park is popular with minibus and taxi drivers looking for a place where they can park and – um – “P”. You can smell it in the summer. Also by the car park the builders who levelled the hill top which became this flat place left some of the larger rocks they had come across. The rocks simply sat in a clump on the grass. A kind observer might have described it as a garden in the Zen style. For 30 years or so the grass was occasionally cut by a small group of ladies with Strimmers, and the clippings were taken away by the male members of the team in plastic bags. And that was all.

Stop already.  The excitement is too much for me.