The City’s Wonders
“You take delight not in a city's seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours.”
Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
I grew up in a city. Not a particularly large one, but a city nonetheless. And for all the peace and restoration that I find when I venture onto backroads, by lakes and in forests, up mountains and secluded on islands, there is a sense of relief I feel anytime I return to the city.
I felt it in Bangkok, after the winding streets of Phuket; with every chime of the metro doors opening, every crosswalk, every lit up building. A return to an environment I understood. A city many, many times larger than the one I’d grown up in, or even lived in since, but a rhythm that made sense to me.
After an overcast week on the island of Boracay in the Philippines, arriving to Hong Kong was the sweetest relief of all. Boracay hadn’t enough nature to feel restorative, but not enough town to feel familiar. I’d wandered lost for a week, amongst the families and honeymooners and backpackers, no place among any of these groups. The glorious pink sunsets, when the clouds broke and the sun peeked through just before bowing its head, were not enough to lighten my mood much.
It’s about 15 degrees colder in Hong Kong and I am tired and cold and ravenous, but I am beaming nonetheless as I walk from the few hundred metres from the metro station to my hotel. The spindly little trams zip past, traffic steady yet quiet, at least in comparison to the blaring horns I was used to in the big cities I’d visited before. (Or, maybe I’d just spent enough time in Vietnam, where honking horns are there own language, to cloud my memory.)
Unlike my barred window, facing-a-brick-wall cell of a room in Boracay, here I am towering above the city, looking out over Victoria Harbour. The city skyline at night is as bright as day and under the warm gaze of its lights, I head out for dinner nearby.
I get ill, inevitably; the sudden cold has shocked my body or maybe I’m just starting to get run down as the finish line creeps into sight. I sacrifice one day of walking the streets of Hong Kong to my enormous hotel bed, and recover with a healthy dose of bánh mì from the Vietnamese café nearby and Japanese ramen from the convenience store.
It’s hard to answer to what I did in Hong Kong, for that day aside, I mostly just walk. Exploring corners of the city on foot, occasionally jumping between districts with a quick bloop of my Octopus card on the reader. It is a city that has been built upon itself, time and time again: the older buildings as narrow as they are tall, interspersed with their glass-encased contemporaries. Every street hides tiny shops and restaurants that have likely stood for generations. At lunchtimes, the best ones can be spotted by the line of locals out front, marking their choices on slips of paper.
On my last full day in Hong Kong – my last full day of my entire year of travel – I walk to Wong Tai Sin Temple with a bittersweet taste on my tongue. I am ready to pack up my bags for the last time and head home; to return to a sense of routine after a year with little more than the bag upon my back and the next day’s itinerary. But to be ready did not negate the heartache that it brought, for it was still an ending.
At the temple, I receive my box of bamboo sticks and kneel under a cloud of fragrant incense to shake them out. It takes a while. My mind turns over hopes and manifestations for this year, and further into the future. A bamboo stick comes loose.
“Better luck than usual, this year,” the fortune teller informs me. He scribbles “not bad luck” on my fortune sheet and hands it to me.
I’m confused. Is it better than usual or not bad?
He stares back at me, equally perplexed. “Better than usual is not bad.”
Fair enough.
I would miss this. These small encounters and experiences that came from opening up to a new destination. Moments so different to your everyday life.
But it wasn’t as though I would never travel again. And as I spend 20 minutes going around in circles trying to find a bus stop and its bus, neither of which seem to exist, I remember just how glad I am to be going home.
