photographic highlights 2021–22: part 1

I shall be heading off to the UK for the summer in a few days, and as usual I’ve compiled a collection of what I consider to be the most interesting photos among the more than 2,000 that I’ve taken during the past eight months. Also as usual, I’ve not included photos that I’ve used to illustrate other posts. Also, I don’t regard any of the photos in this collection to be the ‘best’ I’ve taken (check out Guess Who We Met Today if you want to see those).

The first photo is a night-time view of our local river, looking downstream from the first footbridge reached when walking from our village:

My bike ride ‘the final frontier’ passes through the village of Tai Po Tin, northeast of Fanling, and there is a field on the outskirts of the village that is usually flooded, but on one occasion I noticed that it had been allowed to dry out. I couldn’t resist taking a photo of the mosaic of cracks in the dry mud:

Whenever I went into town (not often), on my return journey, I used to catch a train heading in the opposite direction to that which would take me back to Fanling so that I could be sure of a seat. It meant sitting in an empty train for a few minutes at the terminus in Hung Hom, where I took this photo:

That photo was taken in a 12-car train, which had transverse seats at each end of each carriage, allowing me to look out of the window. However, these longer trains have now been replaced by nine-car trains, which have only parallel seating. Of course, I can still see out of the window, but seeing is not the same as looking. What’s more, Hung Hom is no longer a terminus—the line has been extended to Admiralty on the Island—and it is pointless to travel to the end of the line in the expectation that you will be guaranteed a seat. Nine-car trains were introduced before the extension to Admiralty, which can’t accommodate the longer trains, and I took this view of one in the old Hung Hom terminus:

This a photo of a swallowtail butterfly on the bougainvillea on our balcony:

Cheung Wah Estate is a public housing estate a few minutes walk from Fanling station. I wouldn’t usually have any reason to come here, but for some reason I did walk through the estate once, when I came across this bizarre mural:

This is a closer view of the left-hand side of the mural:

I will not attempt a detailed interpretation of the mural—I leave that to the reader—but the kaleidoscopic eyes of the creatures portrayed suggests that they’ve been eating the toadstools depicted here, although I should point out that they’re the wrong colour for Amanita muscaria, which is presumably what the artist had in mind. Notice too that most of the creatures here do not have legs, apart from four at the right-hand end.

This is another mural, presumably by the same artist, directly opposite the first one:

Once again, the captain and his mate have no legs, but the dog, rabbit and cat in the stern of the boat do. There is an artist’s signature on this mural, but there is no such identifier on the larger mural opposite. Incidentally, after discovering these murals, I scoured the estate to see whether there were any more. There weren’t.

The next photo was taken from the same point as the night-time view above. The river surface is rarely this smooth:

The previous photo was taken on 7th November, and the next was taken from almost the same position on 6th February. Notice that the vegetation on the left (south) bank has been completely cleared:

This is an impressive floral display that I photographed alongside the path that we now need to follow if we walk into Fanling:

I’ve been unable to identify the species, and I haven’t seen other examples anywhere else.

Paper-bark trees, which are extremely common in our neighbourhood, flower in autumn, and I photographed this example during a walk in November:

There is only one footbridge over Sha Tau Kok Road, the only road out of Fanling to the east—the usual way to cross this busy road is via light-controlled pedestrian crossings. This is a view along the bridge, with paper-bark trees on each side:

…and this is a close-up of the tree on the left:

There is a grassy area next to the Ng Tung River a short distance before it flows across the border into China that used to be a popular camping ground—until the Drainage Services Department installed a gate across the access road that prevented access by car. It’s also popular with the local free-range cows—they aren’t feral, because I’ve seen them being herded—and this is a typical photo:

Notice the cattle egrets.

This is another view of the same grassy area, taken on a different occasion:

Continued in Part 2…