#hong kong hiking

[kyotohawaiihongkongtrail]

香港の大澳（Tai O）フェリー：山も飛行機もド迫力

ランタオ島は、香港国際空港、香港ディズニーランドのある島。しかしながら、島のほとんどに開発の手が及んでいない自然豊かなところです。

→香港トレイルINDEXはこちら

[fishmonkeycow]

Above Hong Kong | by fishmonkeycow

[mummer]

dawg it’s high up as hell up here

[cat-mess]

Had a great day with Leia today

[kenleleung]

[sewsoft]

Another sunset

[mechadress]

Hong Kong

[nfornaomi]

Yesterday was a hazy day but at least the rain held off and we had a nice hike up to the Peak. Views were limited but I was glad we could still see some of the skyline! We took a path up which consisted of many steep stairs and I had a flashback to Twin Peaks, albeit there was a tiny cool breeze this time around 😅.

Afterwards we spent some time walking around the various shopping streets in the Mong Kok area - women street, temple street, etc. It was the first time I noticed the prostitutes in various stairwells / doorways of temple street - for some reason I didn't think it would be so obvious in Hong Kong and it was sad to see. At first I didn't believe that two women sitting on stools on the sidewalk were sex workers, so I conducted an experiment and sent Rob up ahead as a solo man walking down the street. Sure enough, the moment he passed by (and he didn't even make eye contact), one of the women jumped up and tried to talk to him. After that I kept a tight grip on his arm to prevent any future solicitation, haha.

[placeswordsdreams]

Hong Kong

[dusk82]

Look back to 2019

This feels very surreal looking back ...my last trip in 2019, to Hong Kong and Shanghai, after gong gong's passing and just before the pandemic...are photos always representative of our memories, fully?

[kyotohawaiihongkongtrail]

香港のトレッキング：青嶼幹線轉車站～花瓶頂～欣澳（サニーベイ）周回

青嶼幹線轉車站（Lantau Link Interchange）でバスを降り、花瓶頂へ向けて歩行開始

山頂まで1305段！ありがたいお知らせを頂戴したので

ずんずん上っていきます

この階段、ネイチャートレイルというよりも、通信施設のメンテナンス用の仕様。途中に柵があったりします。

延々とのぼる

のぼってきた

のぼってきた

頂はまだかなあ

奥に見えるのが、汀九橋 (Ting Kau Bridge)、手前が⁦汲水門大橋⁩⁦（Kap Shui Mun Bridge）

ちょっと止まっちゃったみたいです

歩行再開

香港国際空港の通信施設

僕の役に立っています

頂ました、ランタオ島最北東部の花瓶頂 (273m)　Mount Fa Peng Teng in the northeast end of Lantau Island 15

３６０度のパノラマ、老虎頭⁩⁦Lo Fu Tauに連なる縦走路

香港ディズニーランドの方向

香港中心部方向のビル群

ランタオ島と向かい合う、新界西部と屯門（Tuen Mun）

今回は香港ディズニーランドを眼下に西側を周回し、⁦欣澳駅(⁩⁦Sunny Bay Sta)　へ向かいます。ちょっとルートファインディングが怪しいのですが、

とりあえずロコの皆さんに

くっついていきます。

花瓶頂を振り返ります。低山でありながら、高原ムードが〇

危険な個所はありませんが、トレイルが細いので、慎重に進みます。

藪漕ぎっぽい場所もあります

花瓶頂の上空を頻繁に航空機が離陸していきます

高原ムードのトレイルは、突然コンクリートの階段に出ます

小さな渓谷に一旦降りて

あとは車道に沿って⁦MTR欣澳駅⁩⁦へ

花瓶頂の西側周回トレッキング記でした

→香港のトレッキングのアーカイブはこちら　→香港トレイルINDEXはこちら

[justaguyinhk]

Up Garden Hill

I got to Mei Ho House in Sham Shui Po. It looked closed down. Under standard times it runs as a hostel, but with no one allowed to enter the city – there may be no one around. There is a hill behind the hostel giving good views of Kowloon, and I wanted to check it out. There was a sign and a closed gate. The security guard was nice enough to point me a different way.

The hike up was going up concrete steps in a typical HK hiking style. It is a small ‘hill’ compared to the mountains around but with the steps – it felt like more. Most of the way up was exposed to the sun. There were no trees or brush for the way up. I was sweating a lot and didn’t bring water with me – not thinking and not sure how steep it would be. Spring or fall would have been a better option.

Halfway up there was some shade and needed to stop not wanting to push myself. The hill and it is a hill not a hike – is called ‘The Garden Hill.’ It’s named after the big bakery below. The headquarters and were all the bread in the city lied below. The trees on the way up were small and random placed in the middle of concrete poured to make sure there isn’t a landslip when the rains come. The trees are small and resemble cactus with needles not leaves. Some provide a bit of shelter from the sun. Further up, near the top, there were more trees, more shade and thus more people.

Up on the hill was more shade from the trees. People lounged around on metal chairs shirtless. Most, if not all, were over 65 years old. The hike up and down as part of their daily exercise. Most had transistor radios blaring Cantonese or Mandarin Opera. Some talk or new shows. Not being able to tell the language shows how much I need to improve my Cantonese. Maybe the screams even make it hard for Marco as well. There were random dogs but not sure if anyone owned them. It was a community and I guess I was the intruder.

The views were worth the river of sweat. There were memories of the heat stroke in Japan – the last time. I had sweat as much. I should have brought water or something. There were old men doing stretches, smoking, playing chess. Below is Shek Kip Mei and wondered if coming up here was away to get out of their small, dark apartments and the fear of the virus.

It was time to head down, and not surprising, it was a lot easier. It was still exposed to the scorching sun. More rivers of sweat and a pounding heart. I still snapped some photos of a Banyan Tree with idols around it. Street cleaners were catching the shade under her. Then went down the rest of the way.

[howtofightwrite]

I'm writing a scene where a cultivater (chinese martial artists who fights ghosts) falls in a forest and I'm trying to figure out how someone who fights on rough terrain would train to fall. I tried looking at martial art/parkour/stunt man tutorials, but I feel like a lot of the basic techniques (rolling, and slapping the ground to distribute weight) wouldn't work well on uneven ground. I also tried looking at hiking advice but they just say to fall on your pack. Any insight?

Chinese cultivators don’t fall, they choose to reacquaint themselves with the ground.

That sounds like a joke, but the best way to understand Chinese cultivators and Chinese fantasy media is to realize that martial arts are the gateway drug to magic. And that will get you into a lot of trouble if you follow that all the way into Martial Arts Give You Superpowers, which is both the outgrowth of the western understanding of Chinese culture and a trope rife with orientalism. Cultivation seems simple on the surface when you’re watching Chinese media, but it’s more than martial arts, it’s more than religion, it’s more than mythology, (though it is all of those too) it’s a genuine transition into metaphysics that reorients how we understand and interact with the world around us. The concepts we see in cultivation come from real martial arts philosophy that you find in Tai Chi, Shaolin, and most other Chinese martial arts. They come from real religions including Daoism, Buddhism, a healthy dose of Confucianism, general mythology and mysticism from a wide range of subcultures, and, to an extent, Animism. If you aren’t doing your reading with the Eight Immortals, Journey to the West, The Legend of the White Snake, and others then you should dig in. I also really suggest watching the live action C-Dramas whether they’re true Wuxia or more Xianxia idol dramas (and in this case the idol dramas are better because the action is slower) so you can acquaint yourself with the stylized martial arts portrayals, a wide variety of choreography, character archetypes essential to motif based storytelling, and the most important aspect of all—wire work.

Understanding and conceptualizing stunt action done on wires is essential when you’re trying to visualize and create action scenes in any East Asian genre. Your first instinct might be to dismiss the stylized movement as unrealistic (it is) but remember that it’s also genre essential. Hong Kong action cinema has a very specific feel to it that’s very different from the way Western cinema structures and films their fight scenes. Even when you’re writing, you’ll want to find ways to imitate it through your visual imagery on the page.

Probably the best way to contextualize cultivators is that they’re wizards who do martial arts. They’ve learned to transcend the limitations in our understanding of reality through knowledge and study to perform superhuman feats. How superhuman? Well, it gets wild. They can be anywhere from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon/Who Rules the World fly through the trees levels to Shang Tsung’s “I’m going to slam my hell reality into your normal reality because commuting to work is too much of an inconvenience.”

Which is to say, they don’t always fight ghosts. Sometimes they fight other martial artists, sometimes they fight other cultivators, sometimes they fight demons, sometimes they fight gods, and sometimes they fight incredibly overpowered monkeys. They’re often monks living in seclusion on a mountaintop, but not always. Cultivation is more of a state of mind. Anyone can do it if they learn how to absorb spiritual energy from the world around them through meditation and breathing exercises. Gods cultivate. Humans cultivate. Animals cultivate. Remember, the demons and the ghosts cultivate too. Sometimes, your master gets reincarnated as a demon. Sometimes, you do. The amount of wacky spellcasting you can do is dependent on how much energy you’ve cultivated, which is dependent on how old you are and how good at cultivation you are. Using the power means you need to cultivate more energy, the greater the spell or difficult the battle then the more energy is lost.

This is important to the question of: how does a cultivator fall?

Metaphorically? Existentially? Physically?

When we’re talking physically, wire work becomes very important. Think of your cultivator as being on wires. If they have the knowledge and understanding to do it, they can slow their own fall through the air to land harmlessly on the ground or twist over like a cat and launch themselves back off the ground to fly at their opponent in a counter attack. If they have the knowledge and understanding, they can teleport. If they lack the knowledge and understanding or want to trick their opponent, they can hit the ground like a sack of potatoes. If they’re relying on basics, they can also smack the ground to counter and spread out the impact then use the momentum from that fall to roll back onto their feet. They’ll do it no matter what terrain they’re on because it’s a basic technique that’s trained into their foundation to the point it’s a reflexive action. Any force distributed away from, and reducing impact on, important body parts like your spine is better than nothing. It’s better to sacrifice your arm than be paralyzed. At its heart, that’s the point of the technique. If you’re able to walk away with a functioning spine, it’s done its job. Your shoulder hurts? That’s normal. Your arm is sprained or broken? Sucks, but that’s better than the alternative that is paralysis and death. For reference, learning to fall was the first lesson my Wushu instructor ever taught me. It is that basic.

A lot of the time when portraying cultivators in media, the goal is to show them as being beyond the limitations of standard martial artists. How vast the gap is between the cultivator and the average human is dependent on both the setting and the cultivator. So, the average martial artist who possesses superhuman talents but hasn’t dedicated themselves to a life of cultivation and cultivators who are new to the path are going to be on the rung below and more likely to be knocked on their ass. Cultivators in the mid-range are more likely to have crafted or trained in solutions to being knocked on their ass which put them in a less vulnerable position while recovering and empowered/enhanced their martial arts. Cultivators in the top tier are usually straight up masters at spellcasting, if they deign to fight at all. Gravity need not apply. Rember, the time it takes you to hit the ground and roll to your feet is time your opponent has to launch a counter attack or move to a better position. Also, it means you’ve taken your eyes off your opponent. This is bad enough against a normal human opponent. Against another mostly immortal or ancient magic user this risks a terrible outcome.

Cunning and strategy are both as important as skill. Wisdom, knowledge, and hard work outweigh talent and raw potential. You’ll have to decide how esoteric you want to be and what limits you want to set. I really urge you to do this because the danger of power creep is real and especially prominent here. A character’s growth in power is often linked to their growth in character or their arc, as they gain a greater understanding of themselves and the world around them their skill increases. The self-discovery/self-reflection/self-interrogation/intense suffering to reach enlightenment portion is just as important and intrinsic to the martial arts portion of Martial Arts Give You Superpowers. It’s easy to focus on the Superpowers or the Martial Arts parts of the equation and miss the genre necessity of character growth. This growth often happens through heaps of steadily increasing trauma. Or, failing to undergo that by being too powerful and thus unable to progress is the joke like it is in Qi Refining for 3000 Years. (Go to hell, Bai Qiuran, you hilariously overpowered monstrosity.)

The irony is that the trajectory in character growth is the same trajectory the average student experiences when practicing martial arts. The only difference is that the power arc is inflated. This includes overcoming ingrained truths that you believe about yourself, about your own abilities, what you believe yourself to be capable of (both good and bad,) about your biases toward yourself and other people, your biases about reality in general, your understanding of good and evil, the potential upending of right and wrong, and facing the greater complexity found in the world at large. The stripping away of these illusions, coming to terms with uncomfortable realizations in a more complicated world, and the gaining of new understanding and confidence are vital to that growth.

Skill isn’t just represented in the power creep, it’s also found in a character’s sophistication and complexity in their approach to combat and life in general. Their awareness both of themselves and of other people, their ability to read intentions, their predictive abilities, their complexity in initiating their own strategy and tactics while also recognizing and countering the plans of others. It’s their insight into human nature and their cunning. It’s not enough to be powerful. The world is full of powerful people and not so powerful people who have the capacity to be just as dangerous. This isn’t Goku and Freeza slamming into each other while the planet explodes in nine minutes. You also need to be smart. It’s also not about being a better person. It’s about being a self-aware person. A person who is self-actualized. Monkey’s growth is in his awareness of the world around him through his experiences and in approaching problems differently rather than becoming less of a little shit. If you grow up in the West, one of the issues you’re going to face is thinking of these hurdles as materialistic rather than emotional or intellectual.

A lot of Western media misinterprets the concepts of “giving up” as physical sacrifice. One of the popular examples is physically sacrificing the person we love. In order to have enlightenment, we must be separated from them. We can’t physically be with them anymore. Whereas under a Buddhist structure, what we are actually sacrificing is our own ignorance, our own preconceptions, and beliefs that keep the world comfortable. Under this structure, we’re sacrificing our preconceived notions of who our loved one is. The person that we invented when we first met and we must force ourselves to come to terms with who they really are. The outcome of this isn’t necessarily going to be bad, but it’s still painful. The person we think we love could be perfectly wonderful. However, they’re not who we imagined. If we choose to hold onto the illusion we created, to ignore the realization that the illusion is the person that we love, we’ll only end up causing ourselves and our loved one more pain. We must fall in love with them all over again. Coming to terms with that is painful. All pain comes from ignorance. In sacrificing, letting go of, or overcoming our ignorance, we grow.

These are the emotional, intellectual, and spiritual challenges necessary for a cultivator because they allow the cultivator to level up. Yes, level up. Whether this is coming from the influx of gaming culture into media at large or because the concept synergizes with the Buddhist goal of progressing through the Six Realms toward nirvana, leveling up is how a cultivator’s increasing power is often depicted. Of course, once we reach the next level we can’t go back except by falling or failing and are no longer the person we once were. This then gets mixed in with Daoist principles of finding divine understanding by living in harmony with the universe. The more understanding we gain of the world, the more energy we can absorb as a result, but our original goals may be lost or changed in the process. If a character begins their journey on the path of revenge, their newfound contextualization of the situation that caused them immense pain may force them to give that revenge up or find they don’t want revenge anymore.

Failure is also an option and often a common part of the story. These stories usually follow characters through multiple lives and rebirths over hundreds and even thousands of years, especially if they’re also gods. This is the existential fall. The fall to the Dark Side. All our heroes are going to go through it at least once. This is also why a lot of Chinese media ends in tragedy with hope for the next round.

-Michi

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[kenleleung]

I planed to have picture of city submerged in cloud sea like a city in the sky, but the cloud was gone when I reached to the top. But it was still beautiful to see the star move above the glowing city, for the time I did this photo it was freezing at top of the mountain in spring. 

[sewsoft]

Sunset Peak (but not at sunset)

[fredwkong]

Hi, I just wanted to say I really enjoy/appreciate the diversity of guys/characters you use in your stories! I'm a white guy who's into racial change as a kink, but I often feel weird about it because so much of the content dives headfirst into uncomfortable stereotypes/outright racism. When really for me the important bits are 'guys of all types are hot and it'd be fun to be a hot guy of another type', and imaginining a complete change like 'what if I suddenly woke up in South Korea as a Korean guy, what would my life look like?' Imagining becoming a new person, inhabiting a new culture etc. is something that's just fascinating to me. I'll admit I particularly like Asians myself and I enjoyed reading you writing about Asian immigrant experiences as it's not something you see much in these type of stories! I'm rambling a bit haha, just wanted to let you know I appreciate what you do in this area.

I think this is one of the sweetest things anyone’s ever said about my work. Thank you! You’re awesome <3

I really do think all guys are hot (yes, even you reading this) and it’s all about presentation and confidence. Some of the things that are hot about diverse guys fall into racial stereotyping, and that’s more than okay. However, there’s more to you than a stereotype.

What do you mean, you’re white? That’s ridiculous, you’re clearly Chinese. If I’m not mistaken, you’re from Hong Kong. I love the bustle of Central myself, but with your build and more rugged masculinity I bet you hike Sunset Peak every weekend. Yeah, it’s an incredible view, I’d love to see pictures.

You must live quite a regimented life if you work in finance while maintaining that incredible body. Ah, you’re the type who walks into the gym at 6 AM, aren’t you? Any later, and the heat would be unbearable, even though you love to feel the sweat drip down your perfect muscles. Still, you aren’t quite a cookie-cutter Asian finance bro, are you? You keep a bit of stubble, and your muscles are just a bit too pumped. Don’t tell me, you love going to the club to tear off your shirt and dance, right?

Well? You have a whole city to take on. Don’t let me stop you ;)