New Year-Old hike

I am not sure how often you need to repeat something for it to become a tradition; however we repeated our Plover Cove hike again this New year(2nd year in a row). Why Plover Cove hike-quite challenging, old school(rugged)17.5km hike which is quite scenic and confers immediate boasting rights!

This attempt we were definitely better equipped in supplies and morale. We started from home on time with a good breakfast. Also the Mister found me a zero-tech sturdy stick to negotiate the slippery slopes, since last time I took a nasty tumble on this hike.

Our hike coincided with the New Year N.E. Mountain Race 2017, so we had lots of determined soul with bruised legs from company(this hike really gets you if you are not careful with the loose stones, root or rocky outgrowth). They were tackling the hike from the opposite direction hence it was easy to read the struggle etched in the red faces, deep breaths and shaky legs.
Since the trail is really tricky and quite narrow at places, we were slowed down by the traffic coming from the opposite direction. This time the initial gruelling 6.5 km took us longer and naturally a heartfelt curse escapes your lips when the distance post reads 11 km remaining..(just as last time).

The last 5.5 km is a gentle walk across the reservoir, so effectively the 11km heartbreak point is not truly a moment of crisis, nevertheless we steadied our pace after this milestone. We were steadily covering ground(as the runners had also mostly thinned out), when we were stopped in our tracks by the angry growl of potentially a wild boar. We didn't see the animal but were scared enough by the growls to retrace our steps and wait for fellow hikers to catch up with us before proceeding further. Meanwhile the animal had also returned to the safety of the deep woods.
The remaining hike was smooth and it was almost sunset when we reached the bus stop. It was also time for the whole bunch of picnicking-BBQing crowd in the vicinity of the reservoir to head back home. It was a long wait at the bus stop and a long snaky route through Tai-Po before we finally reached the MTR station.
We were back home exactly 12 hrs after we embarked on our journey on the first day of 2017.. So yeah Happy New Year!!!

Old blog post from 2016 can be found here:Plover cove 2016

Telling Stories

Be careful of the stories that you tell yourself when you start the day..
Be careful of the stories that you tell in the day when others are watching..
Be careful of the stories that you tell in the tipsy evening when your guards down..
Be careful of the stories that you tell to lull yourself to sleep..

Be careful of the stories you invent,
lest you trick your own mind and find it hard to recall the truth anymore..
Be careful before you sell them as your own,
lest you rehearse each delivery and peddle wares that don't belong to you anymore..
Be careful before you fall in love with them,
lest you annoyingly hijack all conversations without being aware anymore..

Be careful of these stories because eventually you believe and become them..

Look out for the One you keep coming back to, all the time
The One you tell with a twinkle in your eyes and a tickle in your spine..
The One that gnaws your insides every mundane moment
The One that burns in the pit of your guts and asks you to put a fight..
Don't ignore the Story of your life-the One it ought to be..

PS: This is just a photo i like, not the story of my life... especially not this life!

Another hiking post-MacLehose section 7

He can climb up briskly without breaking much sweat, while she breaths deeply taking each measured step uphill. She can run down the hill as a mountain goat, while he awkwardly tries to align the eyes, the upper half of the body and the legs so that he correctly heeds the call of gravity.
In short life is a difficult struggle for every individual and as a couple we have well guarded the exclusivity of our individual misery circles!

Going Up.. the challenge ahead..

Looking back from the other side...

Pictured above:Needle hill(altitude 532 mts.) located within Shing Mun Country Park. Stage 7 of the MacLehose Trail.

The picture is also an allegorical reference to the year waning away in the abnormal December warmth here in HK and the new one slowly inching closer day by day..

Quick note for someone attempting MacLehose trail 7: Medium difficulty hike with Grassy hill(647mts.) & Needle hill(532 mtrs) climb with gorgeous panoramic views of the reservoir, Kowloon, NT and HK island far off.
Trail access: Tseun wan Mtr(B2 exit)->Minibus 82 to Shing mun reservoir(Pineapple dam). Walk semicircle of the reservoir to get to Jubilee dam for the trail start point.
Alternatively you can take a taxi to Shing mun reservoir(Jubilee dam)-more convenient as it took us some time to find the minibus stop and then the long queue took us another 30mins.

I quite liked the trail, the views are gorgeous and this trail has a different feel especially around the grassy hill. There is a lot of sky when you take pictures-there is an illusion of height even when the gradient is quite gentle. The rolling hills with diverse flora(reforestation efforts by government) and grazing cows instinctively made me remember a W.H. Davies poem from school days:

What is this life if, full of care,

We have no time to stand and stare.

No time to stand beneath the boughs

And stare as long as sheep or cows.

I was just happy to make the time to have this perfect ‘Leisure moment’!

Getting out: The trail 7 ends at lead Mine pass mostly in the middle of wilderness. Trail 8 which starts at the Lead mine pass challenges you to dare ahead but we preferred to save it for next time. The other 2 options you have: 5km walk to Tseun Wan Or take Wilson trail 7(3km) to Tai Po market. We followed the Wilson trail 7 through the wilderness until it joined the metaled road(hill path in Yuen Tun Ha to Wun Yiu) then took the minibus 23Kto Tai Po market.

Rewalk in the hills

Cities are deaf to real conversations, words get lost all the time. If you go searching for the light banter and relaxed moments you shared with a friend some years ago, you will mostly draw a blank. There are no safe deposits where you can commit a memory and revisit it again to find your gold.

The slow moving camera, the long gazes, the deep breaths and gentle blues music in the background, that is how memories are made in movie and somehow it is true in real life as well. The world slows down, folds inwards closing out the outer chatter and accentuates the presence of the small space around you- the eyes, the smiles, the carefree words, the spying sun and may be the flutter of the leaves or the crashing waves or the singing birds. In the quite of the woods and the rugged hills, the words and smile, the sweat and the short breathe, the apple and the taste of wind are all frozen in time.
The real magic reveals itself when you retrace your steps and find the little nuggets of forgotten gold from your last visit still shining under the clear blue sky!

Thinking, fast and Slow-Book review

The author starts with a confession of a modest goal (enrich talks at the office water coolers) and then proceeds to reveal his decades of research on human cognition -how we make decisions, choices and memories. There are two systems, he posited, one conscious and slow and involved, the other devoted to jumping to conclusions, mostly subconsciously. The book fleshes two characters(System 1 & System 2) who embody these systems and we get to understand their individual traits and the dynamics of their interaction.

This cognitive model also helps explain illusions such as anchoring, non regressive predictions and overconfidence. The operative model of our mind makes us susceptible to these biases and in most cases we are not even aware of it. 

This is an extremely smart book, quite balanced in building its case and discussing the implications of the result. It requires attentiveness to work through the various experiments illustrated in the book to explain the different theories and ideas. Also sometimes you need to summon personal experiences to evaluate if the theory explains your individual behavior.
In the course of reading the book, there were times when the book seemed to decode my motivation for action or inaction in my daily decision making. 

If you are trying to make sense of the 2016 US presidential election, the book provides very useful framework to interpret human rationality, gains & losses perception, biases and data interpretation.

Human existence is defined by our mortality, rationality and emotionality ; our societies are shaped by the sum total and in turn feedback to the individual. Don’t worry the book doesn’t indulge in such convoluted logic, this is just my random musing inspired by the book. 

This is a well researched and logically articulated book. I am in complete awe of Daniel Kahneman's work, with his focus on understanding individual decision making, he has developed a framework for institutional decision making and public policy discourse.

As I flipped the last page, the one thought that surfaced in my brain was what am I going to do about it, now that I know how ‘it’ works? 

I guess just stop and look closely whenever I press 'Submit'!(and  submit,,,)

The Grapes of Wrath-Book review

The book is essentially a looking glass into the largest migration in American history within a short period of time. Between 1930 and 1940, approximately 3.5 million people moved out of the Plains states due to drought conditions and migrated towards the West coast only to find that the Great depression had rendered economic conditions there little better than those they had left. The large scale worker movement created demand supply imbalance, depressed earnings and created conditions rife for exploitation of the displaced migrant workers.

The novel is a commentary of the period with poverty, migration, labor rights and public policy as the key themes of the narrative using the trials and tribulations of a fictional family-the Joads from Sallisaw Oklahoma, who drove in a Hudson Motor car company saloon converted to a truck along highway 66 to reach California. When they finally reach the Promised Land after personal tragedies and loss, what they witness is unwelcome social treatment, colluding business interests and hostile law enforcement.
To a great extent the world interprets human history in terms of the stories, poems and pictures. The brilliance of the book ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ is that it distilled the undeserved poverty and displacement of the self-respecting White American Joad family as representative of the collective history of the nameless multitudes that lived the era..

Although simplification of history comes with its own perils, what we get in the novel are unfaultable heroes (the insufferable Ma Joad and Tom Joad the son who breaks the law but has a heart of gold). The writer doesn’t veil his sympathy for migrants and workers' movement so we have a clear annotation of the good vs. evil clash.
When preparing to write the novel, Steinbeck wrote: "I want to put a tag of shame on the greedy bastards who are responsible for this [the Great Depression and its effects]." He famously said, "I've done my damnedest to rip a reader's nerves to rags."

I guess when I weigh the book against the stated objective of the author, I agree that the book has served its purpose.

Ho Chi Minh city-Impressions

The people here(in Vietnam) have a mind of their own, about their destiny, their identity, freedom and they fought a long war for their sovereignty.
‘Hearts of Atlantis’ was my prelude to our Vietnam trip- the book mirrors the 70’s disillusionment with the Vietnam War in US. The trip to HCMC provided a more vivid perspective of the naked American aggression and the psychological warfare tactics of the Viet Cong and the Guerillas in the Vietnam War.

For every conflict there are two sides to the truth; the truth vs. optics and the truth vs. propaganda. The line between the two is blurred in war times but the truth is universal and becomes apparent with the passage of time. It was an ugly war just as each one of the other fought by mankind; losses on both sides, deplorable acts of brutality, misguided motives, conceited rationalization and money for someone.
The War remnants Museum in HCMC and the Cu chi tunnels are powerful reminders of the mistakes of past and a looking glass for the current plight in Iraq and Syria. However it is easy to reduce the wars of yesterdays to tourist attraction in the present and the message gets lost..

The city has a quintessential East meets West charm which is evident in the architecture, culinary and café culture. Case in point, the locals took the essentially French import- Baguette and transformed it into the tongue tantalizing Banh-mi(sandwich) and made it its ‘own’.
When the entire world has essentially surrendered to the Starbucks dominion, the coffee here holds its ground- it is robust and mean. It has an authentic well roasted coffee bean flavor and not the bitter slightly acidic flavor that masquerades as black coffee.

There are always two ways to explore a new place-the convenient off-the-shelf approach and the more immersive DIY approach. Our HCMC trip was overall more the former and less the latter, we opted for group day trips with tour operators which was informative but less about self discovery. 

We did the Mekong river delta group tour and got a glimpse of rural life and cottage industries(bee keeping/coconut candies). It was a well-planned trip and provided a glimpse into the everyday life/livelihood & culture. Also it is a good concept to funnel tourist money to rural locations and reduce migration pressure to big cities.
This trip brought back memories of the eventful Nagarjuna Sagar and Krishna river trip with a bunch of Deloitte colleague back in Hyderabad some 5 years before. This was one of my first trips in Hyderabad and an introduction to some of my greatest friends in the city. The memories of last minute arrangement for a 7 seater vehicle, ‘Shutter island’ like experience and a surprise invitation from a local Hyderabadi friend for dinner at his home are just as fresh and so is the friendship..
It is quite natural for me to compare my travel experience in Asian countries with India given the geographical proximity and broad similarity in the social-economic parameters. My perception is that a lot of these small south asian countries have done a much better job than us at building the travel logistics and service mindset to capitalize on cultural tourism(agree my version of India may be slightly outdated).

Moving on to matters of the stomach, I will have to give a shout out to this Vietnamese restaurant-Com Chay Mani (Comchaymani) for an authentic local food experience. We went in looking for a hearty vegetarian meal and stepped out a happy bunch. We tried the Mani special noodles, dumpling and a hot pot dish and were bowled over by the distinctively vibrant flavors in each of the dishes.
We had a meal at Hum restaurant(good ambience, extensive menu with lots of choices and ok food) & were lucky to get our hands on some tofu banh-mi at Mybanhmi, the spicy garlic version was our absolute favorite- repeated the order and gobbled up the sandwich with some healthy veggie soup... yum!

The current day Vietnam has come a long way since the end of the war in 1975 to become one of the world’s fastest growing economies and has set its sights on becoming a modern and industrialized nation by 2020. Politics aside, there is definitely something steely and gritty about the gentle natured people here and I would like to see their vision come true..

Completing a circle

Two years later, I was back at the place where it all started. The same building, the same faces, and the same roads, essentially nothing much changed. Sure few people left and some new faces were added but it was the same old Memphis.

All through the week, I had the song ‘That’s how I got to Memphis..’ playing in my mind as I tried to place the fork in the road, in hazy mental maps. I felt warmth and appreciation for the days I spent there but there was no tug pulling me behind. I guess that is something you feel only for your ‘home’..

Yet in some ways it was fulfilling, like completing a circle. When I left 2 years before, I did not bid farewell to the people around, mostly I just disappeared in my own uncertainties.
To keep me company on this trip, I was reading ‘Hearts in Atlantis’ by Stephen King. The book is essentially a mood that is deftly crafted in the interrelated stories. This is a ‘looking back’ book and I couldn’t have picked anything better to keep me company in this journey..

Taking my flight back, I found myself musing over another of King’s quote…. ”It's a little place on the Pacific Ocean. You know what the Mexicans say about the Pacific? They say it has no memory. That's where I want to live the rest of my life. A warm place with no memory.”