It was a day you couldn't order from room service. It was too perfect. It was pure tonic. A public holiday covered in sunlight in a town desperate to breathe again, desperate to exhale. There was an unusual calm in the streets of this leper colony that belied a searing sense of insecurity. The town was reeling.
There was an NBA and an NHL playoff game on TV to enhance my mood. But how was that going to help Hong Kong in its most desperate hour? Maybe I was full of the same hollow rhetoric I abhor. If I really wanted to make a sporting gesture, I would turn the games off and go find some hope, go spread some good.
I decided to make myself accountable. I would search for a way to help and I would use this public holiday to find some hope in a place I had called home for the past 12 years and for the foreseeable future. So I took to the sprawling hills that majestically frame this town in search of hope. The great outdoors are easily the most underrated asset of this metropolis. From the causal walkers to the hard core sports-nut, it was all there and it was all waiting. The only question was: Should I bring one beer or two on my hiking odyssey?
The trails above Braemar Hill were bustling with faces that were gleefully liberated, nodding and even smiling. They were so excited that many surgical masks had simply been discarded on the side of the trail. A couple passed me in a most provocative way. They were dressed in laminated sandwich boards, the husband leading the pace. On the front, he had a drawing of someone coughing without covering their mouth. His wife followed with a pair of oversized salad tongs in her hands and a blaring message on her front in English and Chinese: Please collect your trash!
They looked rather peculiar, some of the other hikers may have even thought silly. But they hardly cared so I had to ask her: 'Excuse me, are you a city worker?'
'No,' she replied, 'I'm a volunteer, my husband and I do this with some friends.' She told me her name was Vicky Lam and that she lived nearby. When I asked her what was in the trash bag, she became downright evangelical. 'I have plastic bottles,' she said opening the bag, 'and look at all the dirty tissue! You know the lady come up here and go like this!' She turned and squatted like she was positioning herself over a loo. 'And the dog do the same and they use the tissue and leave the mess with the tissue on the trail and the sun and wind come and the germ get in the air and everybody get sick!'