Last week a friend said she wanted to show me a good place to go walking in the neighborhood. Great, I thought, I'd love to see it. I pictured some rambling path up the mountain, lots of trees, some blooming shrubs, a snake warning sign or two. Not...this. Across the street from Belcher Bay Park is a cargo wharf that's at least a half-mile long. It's not pleasantly scenic in the usual sense. But people of all ages come out here to go walking, running, and biking, particularly in the early morning and in the evening when there's little commercial activity. It's wide, flat and mostly free of vehicles. You don't find many places like that in Hong Kong.
On the left in the above photo are bundles of bamboo that will be use for scaffolding. There were lots of other construction materials sitting on the wharf--concrete blocks and slabs, pipes of all sizes, steel beams. Some of these are likely destined for the subway construction going on only a couple blocks away.
I never would have found this place on my own. You have to cross a busy street and walk through a gate past a security guard and a sign that says if you can't account satisfactorily for being on the premises you can be fined $HK2000 (love that leftover polite British verbage). Even if I'd made it past these intimidating hurdles, I wouldn't necessarily think it was a good idea to walk here. But it kind of grows on you. I've gone back a couple times in the evening on my own since my friend first took me here.
What really appealed to me was rounding the corner on the east end of the wharf and then walking out on the pier you see in the distance in this photo. You catch a breeze off the water that feels great on a warm humid evening like tonight. Even better is that you can smell the salt water instead of the usual traffic fumes. It's relatively quiet. Out on the tip of the pier you can watch the ferries hurrying across Victoria Harbor. Kowloon and the hills behind make a postcard-worthy backdrop.
Walking a little more slowly in the rain on the way back tonight, I stopped to take pictures of some of the homey offices on the wharf that have been made out of retired cargo containers from the ships. Here a pallet makes a step up to the door. Not only is there some kind of festive red good fortune poster on the door, but there's a red sidewalk altar down near ground level similar to what you see outside the doors to many business in the neighborhood, where the proprietors burn joss sticks and leave food offerings to the house deity. At lunchtime the black table is most likely pulled out to the middle of this space under the awning and a bunch of people pull up plastic stools to eat lunch together. One person can sit up to the table on the black seat that's attached to the pole. Some of these container offices had lots of big, healthy potted plants sitting in a cluster to one side under the awning. You can't see them here, but there were a few plants sitting off to the right of the door to this office.
I wonder how many other unique neighborhood sites there are like this one, sitting right underneath our noses.
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