On a clear morning, when by bus, taxi or on foot the brow of the hill above the village of Pak Tam Au has been reached, when there is more than a whisper of wind and the invidious mosquitoes will have gone to languish in the forest’s dark green shade, and when from the moist yellow sandy soil the cloying mist will have risen and escaped, there appears before the eyes one of the finest views in the world – the seascape of the northern arms of the Sai Kung Country Park.
For the best of viewing conditions, the morning’s first breath of warm southerly breeze from across the South China Sea must have chased away the humid blanket of cloud and mist that is much a norm in Hong Kong. In addition, the optimum time for atmospheric clarity will be before the daily weight of solar evaporation from coastal waters, city streets and forested park land will have soared to form the menacing anvils of intense summer rainstorms. Then, and only then, will it be possible to clearly see the long, warm, aquamarine finger of Long Harbour inlet firmly point towards Mirs Bay, the coast of China and the mountains of southern Guangdong province beyond.
On those extra-special clear days it is possible to make out the distant rampaging scars of modern Chinese progress; long rows of wind turbines that rotate merrily high up on the lofty hills, newly cut escarpments above the six lane Eastern Coastal Expressway, innumerable apartment blocks, a growing container terminal, vast building complexes and possibly one of the largest southerly-facing graveyards along the coast. Before them all container ships power up and down the sea-lane that rounds Hong Kong’s eastern approaches, their size and frequency increasing year-on-year, bringing trade, jobs and pollution ever closer and closer to Hong Kong.
Over to the right can be glimpsed the Daya Bay nuclear power station with its dinosaur reactor of the Chernobyl variety. That this power station leaks radiation into the sea is undeniable: that no one appears able to do anything about it is, to put it mildly, vexatious.
Further around the bay is the massive bulk of Qiniang Mountain that dominates the beautiful and dramatic Dapeng peninsula and beyond that, the extended eastern seaboard of China that greets the first rays of the rising sun.
Such is the state of things here: there is beauty and grace, heritage and natural wonder, and there is ugliness and greed, damage and pollution.
Comments