One (This week's Photo Hunt theme)

This week's Photo Hunt entry is one of those rare ones for which I'm offering up just one photo. This isn't because I only have one suitable candidate of photo to fit the theme but because I thought one photo would be appropriate considering what this week's theme is. For those of you who'd like to check out some more photos, however -- and specifically for those looking for more proof that there really are cows to be found in Hong Kong -- here's referring you to some previous entries on this blog including this, this and this. So... enjoy? :)

What to do in Hong Kong on hot summer days

At Lido Beach (underneath the Ting Kau Bridge)
one weekend afternoon this summer

View at one point in a hike up on
the Ngong Ping Plateau last summer

"What are you going to do this weekend?" is a question that my mother frequently asks me since I moved to Hong Kong. My usual response involves a combination of cultural activities (e.g., viewing a new film or an old movie, going to a classical music concert, dance show or theatrical play) -- normally on Friday or Saturday evening -- and outdoor activities (most likely hiking). But it's also the case that what I do over a weekend is very much dependent on the season and weather.

By season, I mean the cultural one as well as the natural seasons: with the former's high activity period being during the early part of the chronological year (with the Hong Kong Arts Festival taking place in the early months of the year and Hong Kong International Film Festival starting as the other arts fest is coming to a close) and quietest time being in the summer months (when many arts groups go on hiatus and vacation); and the latter speaking to sub-tropical Hong Kong's year being divided into our four seasons like in the more temperate climes.

As for weather: suffice to say that Hong Kong can get very hot as well as surprisingly cold considering its latitudinal location -- and also has its markedly dry along with super wet and humid months together with typhoon seasons.

This time of the year, it often gets so hot that a number of people try to minimize their time spent outdoors. And when they do something outdoors, it often involves going to the beach (to just hang out there and sunbathe or actually take the plunge and swim in the waters).

Since I'm not by nature a beach goer, I didn't go to many beaches my first couple of years in the Big Lychee. But after discovering the existence in Hong Kong of beautiful beaches like those at Cheung Sha and Sai Kung's Tai Long Wan, I've become more inclined to check out -- and spend time at -- various beaches in the territory.

For all this, however (and unlike many people I know), my preferred outdoor activity even during hot summer days still is to go hiking. At the same time though, the heat and humidity plays a part in making me more inclined to opt for easier hikes and/or hikes either at higher (and cooler) elevations in Hong Kong (like the Ngong Ping Plateau and the Victoria Peak area) or along more tree-shaded trails during this time of the year.

Put another way: While many people's instincts are to seek comfort in some air-conditioned indoor area (be it a cinema, shopping mall, museum or some place else) during hot summer days, my feeling is that time spent outdoors at this time of the year doesn't have to be unpleasant. Instead, it's the rain -- rather than heat or even humidity -- that's far more likely to drive and keep me indoors; hence my ideal being for it to rain on weekdays (when I have to work and thus am stuck inside an office) and then to be dry on weekends! ;b

Fung Hang Family Walk (Photo-essay)

On one of Hong Kong's super hot and muggy summer days, my regular hiking companion and I decided to go for an easy hike: specifically, the just 2.25 kilometer long Fung Hang Family Walk up in the northern New Territories, near Starling Inlet (AKA Sha Tau Kok Hoi) and the border between the Big Lychee and Mainland China.

As it so happened, we decided at the end of this family friendly hiking trail that we still were game to hike some more. Those photos from our second mini-hike of the day I'll leave putting up for another day. In the meantime, hope you'll enjoy this photo-essay of a hike that was short but still came with its share of cool sights:-

Let the hiking begin -- near the village of Kai Kuk Shue Ha! ;b

The flowers of the plant known as
Wild Bean (Shui Huang Pi in Cantonese)

This being a Hong Kong summer hike, it seemed inevitable
that we would come across some big spiders along the way
(To better see how big this one is, click and enlarge this photo!)

Believe it or not, this Giant Golden Orb Weaver
was bigger than the spider in the previous photo

On a less than super clear day, one still could just about
see Shenzhen over on the other side of Starling Inlet as one
went along the trail that went by the body of water's shore

How green is "my" Hong Kong? Pretty much so! :)

The hike took place inside of Plover Cove Country Park
but bordering rural villages and homes

A picturesque area where people enjoyed themselves
leisure fishing by the side of Bride's Pool Road (near hike's end)

Skinks alive!

The first of many lizards (particularly skinks)
spotted while hiking in Tai Po Kau today

A brown skink is pretty easy to spot on a green background
(but less so in areas with lots of brown roots and twigs about)

Continuing with my documentation of fascinating wildlife spotted while out hiking in the Big Lychee (N.B. Those interested can look here, here, here and here for some earlier examples!)... :b

In reaction to going up to Devil's Peak (on my own) last Sunday and not finding much shade nor breeze up there as well as along the way, I decided today to go with my available again regular hiking companion to Tai Po Kau Special Area. A heavily wooded 460 hectare nature reserve set in a valley on the eastern slopes of 647 meter high Grassy Hill in the Central New Territories, it proved to have many shady areas indeed.

Less expected was how the further as well as higher we went along into the nature reserve, the cooler as well as breezier the air would feel. (However, this is not to say that we didn't sweat buckets as today was another very hot summer's day in Hong Kong -- with temperatures reported by the Weather Underground of Hong Kong website reaching up to 36.5 degrees Celsius in Sheung Shui, 35.5 degrees Celsius in Kowloon City and 35.1 degrees Celsius in nearby Tai Po.)

Due in part to the heat, my hiking companion and I's pace proved to be considerably slower than the estimated times given in a guide we were using. But another major reason we took quite a bit longer to go along the 7.5 kilometer trail was because we kept on spotting interesting sights that we wanted to not only stop to admire but also try to capture with our cameras.

This being a fairly thickly forested area, there weren't many scenic views to capture our attention. As if to compensate, however, we spotted plenty of examples of Hong Kong wildlife -- including a number of skinks whose territory a certain part of the trail looked to have crossed into.

All in all, we spotted more than 10 skinks -- many of which we spotted as they did their best to scurry away towards areas where they would be better camouflaged. Happily for us shutterbugs however, a couple of these lizards -- whose precise species I still can't identify with certainty after looking at sample photos in the University of Hong Kong's School of Biological Sciences' reptile photo database -- reacted to our presence by freezing and presumably hoping we wouldn't do anything to harm them (which, of course, was the case!).

Were the reptiles we spotted (and photographed) long-tailed skinks, slender forest skinks, brown forest skinks or Indian forest skinks? If pushed to say, I'd opt for the last mentioned but I'd be happy for others to correct me if they know otherwise! :)

Painted (This week's Photo Hunt theme)

Around this time last year, I went to the Hong Kong Museum of Art to check out its special exhibition entitled Lofty Integrity: Donation of Works by Wu Guanzhong. Held between March 26th and October 10th, 2010, it featured 51 works by the Chinese painter, including several that he had himself donated to the museum.

Sadly, Wu Guanzhong passed away in the middle of Lofty Integrity's exhibition period. But as a look at his artworks shows (and a read of such as the long-lived individual's obituaries confirm), he led quite the full life and left the world with much to admire and treasure.

Viewing his works chronologically, it is interesting to see how in his old age, Wu's paintings grew increasingly abstract. However, the Victoria Harbour scenes he painted on clear glass on a 2002 visit to Hong Kong (two photographs of which are included in this Photo Hunt entry) -- and displayed once more at the Hong Kong Museum of Art (which happens to be located by Victoria Harbour) in 2010 -- contain easily recognizable representations of buildings, boats and waves that are very evocative.

Also on display as part of the Lofty Integrity exhibition were the highly respected artist's paint-splattered palette and other artistic tools. As a light-hearted aside: When viewing the palette, I got to thinking that it could be easily mistaken for an abstract painting, albeit not an abstract painted by Wu himself!

Wu Xia (movie review)

The Hong Kong-Mainland China martial arts drama that
had its world premiere at this year's Cannes Film Festival

Wu Xia (Hong Kong-Mainland China, 2011)
- Peter Chan Ho Sun, director
- Starring Donnie Yen, Takeshi Kaneshiro, Tang Wei, Jimmy Wang Yu, Kara Hui Ying Hung, etc.

Before the 21st century began, if you asked Hong Kong movie fans who they reckoned was the filmmaker who was Shaw Brothers director Chang Cheh's spiritual successor, chances were high that they'd point to John Woo. In recent years, however, another candidate for the title of Chang Cheh's contemporary equivalent has come to the fore in the initially unlikely shape of Peter Chan Ho Sun -- who back in the 1990s was best known for crowd-pleasing romantic comedies like He's a Woman, She's a Man and critically acclaimed romantic dramas like Comrades, Almost a Love Story.

For just like Chang Cheh moved from writing scripts for cross-dressing comedies like You Were Meant For Me to helming period actioners like The Blood Brothers and The One Armed Swordsman, Peter Chan Ho Sun has morphed into the director of The Warlords (which is a remake of sorts of The Blood Brothers) and now Wu Xia (which pays homage to Chan's favorite Chang Cheh movie, The One Armed Swordsman, by, among other things, giving a prime role to that old Shaw Brothers movie's star, Jimmy Wang Yu).

Way before Jimmy Wang Yu (and another former Shaw Brothers star in the form of Kara Hui Ying Hung) appears in this 2011 martial arts drama, however, it is made clear that the movie's main luminaries are two younger men -- and that it's the interactions between, and stories of, their characters that are the Aubrey Lam scripted film's primary foci.

Set in 1917, the period in China's history when it was a republic but still decades away from being a people's republic, Wu Xia has as its main characters a villager who looks to be leaving a happy life as a husband, father (of two young sons) and paper mill worker (Donnie Yen), and a government detective (Takeshi Kaneshiro) with interesting detecting methods who's called in to investigate how it came to be that the apparently ordinary villager was able to fight off -- and kill -- two hardened criminals who had stopped by in the village and decided to go and rob the general store.

Right from the way that incident gets recalled and shot, the people behind Wu Xia show that they aren't going to go the conventional storytelling as well as filming route. More specifically, we first get shown the fight between Donnie Yen's character and the two bad guys the way that Donnie Yen's character would want to have people view it, then we get shown the fight occurring in the way that Takeshi Kaneshiro's detective character deduced that it actually occurred! (Suffice to say that there are marked differences between the two viewpoints -- but that it really is clever how it also is shown how the fight can be conceivably viewed in these two alternative ways.)

After this bravura section, things not only calm down somewhat but also invariably feel anti-climactic for the most part -- and I'd go so far as to state that the scenes involving Tang Wei generally seem like a drag. Put another way: she who so thoroughly impressed in Ang Lee's Lust, Caution appears badly miscast in the throwaway role of Donnie Yen's character's wife since she is not only quite a bit younger than him but also comes across as being of a different time, from a different place and in a different movie from much of the rest of the people in the film.

Fortunately, the veteran pair of Jimmy Wang Yu and Kara Hui Ying Hung arrive -- though at an admittedly late stage -- to perk things up. In all honesty, I -- who have watched several others of their movies, including those from their younger days -- didn't know until Wu Xia that they could have such incredibly strong, threatening presences. Furthermore, I think it is a real credit to these two thespians that they were able to so very convincingly portray such villainous characters vested with so much fury as the ones they were called upon to essay in this particular cinematic offering!

Still, and probably not too surprisingly, I feel that Takeshi Kaneshiro (who seems to be quite the favorite of Peter Chan -- having appeared in recent years in the director's Perhaps Love as well as The Warlords and Wu Xia) it is who emerges with the major acting honors from this film. Doubtless Donnie Yen may be the main draw for many Hong Kong movie goers these days -- but he impressed with his action directing more than acting in this generally well made work as far as I'm concerned! ;)

My rating for this film: 8.0

From Wong Nai Chung Gap to Kornhill (Photo-essay)

Before anything else: yes, I'm really behind in posting hiking photo-essays. To give an idea of how far behind I am: I'm only now posting a photo-essay of the September 2010 hike I went on in which I spotted these wild creatures I previously posted about!

So without further ado... except to note that the day my regular hiking companion and I went on that hike was one of those beautiful "after the rain" days: one where the ground was still wet -- so paved trails weren't completely unwelcome -- but conditions were otherwise pretty good for being out and about in Hong Kong's beautifully green outdoors... :)

A large black spider with a "face" on its back spotted
hanging about at one of the many rest pavilions
to be found within Hong Kong's country parks

A waterfall flowing into the Tai Tam
Upper Reservoir atop a landslide area

For Fili who previously asked about waterfalls in Hong Kong
on this blog: here's a second photo of a gushing waterfall,
albeit another seasonal one, in Tai Tam Country Park :)

People atop the Tai Tam Upper Reservoir's Dam

Slow moving tortoise surrounded by
fast swimming fish in Tai Tam Upper Reservoir

On Mount Parker Road inside Tai Tam Country Park
headed back and down into the city

Ruined storage facilities dating back (like with
the outdoor stoves that were built but never
actually used) to the second world war period

Near hike's end, we looked back at the ridge
that we had crossed over from the south to the
northern edge of Tai Tam Country Park near Kornhill