jeepers creepers #4: part 1

Although Chinese New Year is my favourite time of year, the festival was a non-event last year thanks to the pandemic—no dancing lions, no firecrackers, no roast pig, and, above all, what may well be the best such display in the world, no fireworks over Victoria Harbour on the second day of the new year. And it’s looking like a repeat ‘performance’ this year. At least there’s one thing that no bloody virus is going to interfere with: in the run-up to the new year: firecracker vines have, as usual, been intoxicating the eyes with their dazzling floral displays for the past couple of weeks.

Unfortunately, the weather hasn’t been particularly clement recently, so almost all the photos in this collection were taken within walking distance of our house and include new photos of locations that I featured in earlier posts, with hyperlinks to the relevant collection where applicable.

I’ll start with a car park that I think is in the village of Wing Ning Tsuen (all the villages in my neighbourhood south of Sha Tau Kok Road form a single suburban entity, and most of the time it isn’t possible to determine where one village ends and the next one begins). I included a couple of photos of this car park in Jeepers Creepers #2. This is a general view from the eastern end (access to the car park is possible only for pedestrians here):

…and from the western end:

I hadn’t noticed the path on the right of the previous photo on earlier visits, but this is what it looks like on the other side of the hedge:

…and from the opposite direction:

There is an equivalent alleyway on the other side of the car park, and I included photos taken here in Jeepers Creepers #3. The intensity of the flowering is similar in these photos, but with a different camera, I think that the following photos are better. The first photo was taken close to the entrance to the alleyway:

Before taking a photo from the far end, I lifted my camera above the flowers to see what I might capture:

…while this is the view looking back along the alleyway:

Finally for this location, here are three general views of sections of the car park itself:

The next photo is of a firecracker vine that I featured in Jeepers Creepers #2, with two photos taken in different years. It’s located close to the car park, but it’s on a path that I don’t think many local residents even know about:

The next photo shows the perimeter fence of what was, in colonial times, a British Army base known as Gallipoli Lines. It is now occupied by the PLA, which probably doesn’t employ any gardeners, so it has never looked particularly impressive, but this is the best I’ve seen it:

So far, I haven’t included any locations that I hadn’t known about before this year, but last week, Paula and I were walking along Po Kak Tsai (‘poke in the eye’) Road when she spotted a firecracker vine ahead that we hadn’t seen before:

I cycle along this road regularly, but my focus then is obviously on the road. However, walking gives you time to look around. This is what this vine looks like from a side road:

And there’s another firecracker vine on the opposite side of the side road:

The next photo illustrates a problem with recording firecracker vines that are beyond walking distance from our home, where it’s a matter of luck whether I capture a vine at peak flowering intensity. The next photo is of the same vine as that in the previous photo, taken nine days later:

I included two photos of the next firecracker vine, taken eleven days apart, in Jeepers Creepers #3 in the grounds of what I conjecture is a Buddhist nunnery but which I tend to refer to as the Tin House Temple (because Tin Hau is the goddess of the sea in Taoist cosmology, and I don’t think the building would survive a direct hit by a typhoon!):

Based on that juxtaposition, I shall have to take another look in a few days. And it never occurred to me when taking the earlier photos to look at the other side:

I also included photos of the car park in Siu Hang, the next village to the one where we live, in Jeepers Creepers #3, so a few days ago I decided to go there to see what the display was like this year. It was nowhere near as impressive as last year’s, so I haven’t included any photos here.

However, Siu Hang is a large, sprawling village, and I wondered whether there were any other firecracker vines here that I hadn’t see before. So I wandered along a path that I was already familiar with, and as I did so, I spotted a couple of examples some distance away among the houses. Although I did take photos from the path, the firecracker vines were too far away to justify including them in this collection. I did wonder whether I could get any closer though. And I could:

This is an inside view, but when I continued along the path, I found that the outside view was much more impressive:

And this is the closest I could get to the second vine, so I’ve no idea what the view looks like directly outside the entrance:

Continued in Part 2….