Rocking on a Boat in Hong Kong Harbour

Trip Start Jun 03, 2006
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128
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Trip End Ongoing


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Flag of Hong Kong  ,
Monday, February 18, 2008

Sometimes in the midst of a journey or a hectic schedule, you find a moment of peace with which comes clarity; or perhaps it is the clarity that brings the peace and calm. I'm not sure which way around it works. Whatever the source and sequence, I was visited by just such a moment today.
 
In Hong Kong, one might expect to be inspired by the towering buildings or frantic fusion of cultures, but I found my moment beneath the Hong Kong Macau Ferry Terminal where the shiny commercial empire above gives way to the grime, dirt, splashes of paint and oil and billows of engine smoke of a dockside. I watched it all through the gently rocking, salt splashed window of my ferry back to China.  As the boat moved, I would lose sight of the bottom of the ferry moored alongside us, and suddenly the splashes of salt and the bottom of the boat were all I was aware of right in the middle of this huge, vibrant, rocking city.
 
It was as if the world was taking a new focus, and through these new eyes I really understood that I was leaving Hong Kong and Southern China behind - probably for a long time, and maybe forever. Until that moment, I hadn't really understood how fond I was of what I'd never really accepted as anything more than a temporary home, but at that moment I knew and understood. I wasn't sad to be going, just glad to understand what it had all come to mean to me. It's just weird how this kind of thing creeps up on you in the most mundane of surroundings like when you're rocking on a boat in Hong Kong Harbour.
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