year of the (wild) pig

Despite having spent much of the past 45 years in Hong Kong, I still find myself doing things for the first time occasionally. Dotting the eyes on a lion to bring it to life is a recent example, and yesterday produced another.

I was out cycling with my friend Vlad. We’d been to Plover Cove Reservoir as the first stage of an attempt to ride 100km in a day, and on the way back into Taipo I wanted to show him a little diversion that I knew he’d find interesting. It involved a series of narrow country paths that lead, eventually, to the Shuen Wan Temples:

However, we were still on a road when Vlad shouted from behind me.

“Look! A wild boar.”

I looked, but I couldn’t see anything. A feeling of frustration crept over me. I used to see wild pigs regularly when I lived and worked in the Sai Kung area in the 1970s and 1980s, but I’d seen only one since moving to Fanling—while descending a mountain path into the Lung Yeuk Tau area—and that had quickly disappeared as soon as it saw me, so I’d had no chance to take a photograph. I didn’t want to miss this one.

Then I spotted it:

Can you?

“There are more in the bushes,” exclaimed Vlad.

And so there were:

Then one of the animals from the bushes decided to join the first one we’d seen:

However, there was no social interaction between the two:

You may have noticed that all this time I’d been getting closer and closer, but shortly after a third pig arrived, they started to amble off into the ‘long grass’:

I emphasize that they were in no hurry.

I had thought that there were only three pigs altogether, but the previous two photos show a fourth that was too shy to show its face. This is the most revealing:

The pig on the left appears to be eyeing me curiously, perhaps wondering what I’m doing. The others have definitely lost interest.

By the way, in case you were wondering, the ‘new’ part of this encounter was taking the photographs. And, yes, we did complete 100km for the day—the first time this year.