Suggested soundtrack: Beast of Burden, The Rolling Stones (1978).
Life does not get much better than this.
Winter in Hong Kong is frequented by dense haze that shrouds the ocean like a veil. But today the skies were pristine. A strong breeze blew down from the ridges of Lantau Peak, the second tallest point in Hong Kong, just shy of a vertical kilometre. For hundreds of years, we have referred to it as 爛頭 (Lan-Tau), the 'broken head', after the tiny saddle that separates Lantau's subsidiary peak from its southern summit. Under a sun that never loses its warmth in these quarters, the boulder was warm, infused with the faintest scent of laurels and vines. Our legs dangled across the greyish outcrop. My fingers instinctively pressed onto the hard, volcanic surface of Lantau's rhyolite rocks. They were grainy, sharp, at times easily chipped, intruded by milky-white quartz veins through its silica-rich ash and lava that cooled overground when Hong Kong was a supervolcano 140 million years ago. Sprouting across the spurs of Lantau, brittle contractions had dissected the volcanic cliffs into a fine work of masonry, stacking each exposed rock face from stacking giant, rectangular bricks.
Our gaze followed the wind downwards. The vast mountains sprouted from sea-level, suspending us above a thick canopy of green. The valley below was lush with life, and the distant shores awash with sun-bleached waves. It was a very light sort of blue. Almost white from overexposure, gently brilliant, like starlight — the quiet blue of Orion's belt. Into the ocean, the 索罟 (So-ko) islands glistened, a chain of boomerangs, beyond which I could make out the tip of a remote archipelago, where a generation ago, the earliest days were spent barefoot amidst the thick undergrowth and snakes and burgeoning world of freedom and ambition. I had almost forgotten how beautiful the ocean was. She cradled the waves, the islands, and stretched to touch the sky with her cyan arms, and everything she touched turned blue, and we, too, were cyan souls in her embrace.
So we lay there, ACDC and I, after an hour of ascent and another off-trail, two lone souls on this day. The ground loomed from my headrest, the ocean quivered beyond my feet, and the woods murmured in my ears. The familiar sound of bluesy rock riffed from my Wonderboom. In between the winds, "I'll never be," I heard, "your beast of burden." Dum-dalum. "I've walked for miles," it whispered, "my feet are hurting."