Looking northwards from The Peak minutes before sunset
A view from The Peak minutes after sunset
Whenever I go hiking in the vicinity of Victoria Peak, it's almost always in bright daylight. And although I've been up on The Peak at night a few times, I had never been there at sunset until today -- when I decided to go up there an hour or so before I was due to meet a friend for dinner at a restaurant in the Peak Tower (which, if truth be told, was so mediocre that I can't be bothered to name it!) to enjoy the views from a northern point in the Peak Circuit trail which offers up panoramic views of the city below, Victoria Harbour and the area to the north of that iconic body of water.
As luck would have it, the sunset was not particularly spectacular today. I heard a couple of people blame the air pollution for the lack of a visually striking sunset; which I found rather funny, since when I went to college in Beloit, Wisconsin, years ago, the beautiful orange-red sunsets that one regularly caught sight of there -- along with the significantly less pleasant "cheese breeze" -- tended to be ascribed to the big presumed-to-be-majorly-polluting Frito-Lay factory across the river!
With time to spare, I decided to hang about to see if the views would get more glorious after sunset. And so it proved, with the switching on of each light inside and outside a multitude of buildings below adding a bright spark to the overall visual display.
In all honesty, so beautiful was the sights that lay there before me that if I hadn't had that dinner date with my friend, I could easily have spent 10, 20, maybe even 30 minutes enjoying gazing out and down at the sprawling urban landscape below; and this without the artificial -- and, to my mind, really unnecessary -- addition of the Symphony of Lights, the daily light and sound show that the tourism folks make quite a big deal of but I've never felt inclined to go and check out! ;b
2 comments:
Hi YTSL,
This blog yet again shows why HK is pretty much in a class by itself among the world's cities for harbour views, from the water or from the mountains, especially during the magic of twilight. Let's hope that reclamation doesn't narrow the harbour any further. You're right about the fireworks, that would be overkill - kind of like eating a pleasant meal and then ruining it by overstuffing oneself with sweet desserts.
If I may use this space to change the subject...Like true fans of the whirlwind phenonenon of 80's-90's HK cinema, when I find the time, I still get a jolt when a play a dvd from that golden age. This week I watched Her Fatal Ways, with the mercurial Carol Cheng at her peak, and a film that held up surprisingly well, and not as dated as I thought it might be. It was enough to make me think: "They certainly were making some good movies in pre-Handover days!
Bill
Hi Bill --
I'm not a big fan of big fireworks displays as well as electronic light shows -- and would agree that Hong Kong's harbour views don't need either of those to be spectacular.
As for 1980s-1990s Hong Kong cinema: that remains my favorite period for a cinema that I still love but sometimes find it hard to do so when watching a terrible or just plain underwhelming contemporary movie... ;S
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