sitting on the balcony

I realized recently that I’ve been taking photos regularly of the same view: what you can see looking southeast from our balcony. Of course, the photos are only superficially similar, and I took each one because there was something transient in the view that I wanted to capture. I thought that I would post these photos, in chronological order, to illustrate what I mean.

The first photo, taken on 26th October last year, was an attempt to capture the sunrise. Unfortunately, my phone camera isn’t very good at rendering colour:

However, I tried again six minutes later and got a much more satisfying result:

The long, narrow building is what in British army days was this base’s married quarters, although I’d never seen it occupied since we moved here in 2008. The high-rise blocks are part of the recently constructed Queen’s Hill Public Housing Estate, which has yet to be occupied. The mountain is Lung Shan (‘Dragon Mountain’).

I took the next photo, on 4th November, because some clown had decided to make a bonfire of grass, leaves and other organic matter. Not much land is under cultivation in that area, but I do see smoke rising from that location from time to time. Not a major contribution to global warming, but I’ve never seen evidence of composting, which to me is the obvious course of action in such circumstances, anywhere in Hong Kong:

I mentioned not having seen the former married quarters being occupied above, so this was the first time (2nd March):

The soldiers of the PLA, which now occupies this former British military base, do a lot of coordinated shouting, starting from reveille at 6 o’clock, but a few days before I took this photo, I’d become suspicious around 10 o’clock because I’d heard no shouting that day. Perhaps there had been a covid outbreak, and shouting had therefore been banned. Obviously, this is the kind of news that will never be officially confirmed, but the former married quarters do make a handy isolation unit for suspected cases.

Notice too the number of lights on in the right-hand tower block. We had heard rumours that this block had been earmarked as an isolation centre for suspected covid cases in the general population (Hong Kong has subsequently endured its worst outbreak of the disease since the start of the pandemic).

Its often foggy as winter gives way to spring in Hong Kong. This photo was taken early in the morning on 18th March:

…and this one was taken 11 minutes later:

I often see huge fields of grass flowers in the more remote areas of the New Territories in springtime as I cycle around, something that I don’t see back home in the UK because grass is used for grazing or is mown as hay. This is scarcely a ‘huge field’, but I took the photo because it shows grass flowers—this field used to be maintained by outside contractors but hasn’t been since the start of the pandemic (26th March, late afternoon):

I simply had to take this photo of a low-level streak of mist early in the morning of 10th April:

Two photos of the Moon rising over the housing estate in the late evening of 18th May, taken 13 minutes apart:

The next photo was taken on 25th May, shortly before sunset, which meant that the housing estate was quite sharply illuminated. However, it was the positioning of the clouds that prompted me to take this photo:

The mid-level mist in the next photo, taken on 27th May, was much more regularly defined when I first saw it, but it had begun to break up by the time I’d got my camera ready. However, this photo also shows flowers on two flame trees in the foreground. These trees are native to the savannas of East Africa and therefore have a wide spread. They usually flower in June but have been early this year. Unfortunately, heavy rain has since washed off all the flowers on the right-hand tree, and whether it has time to make a comeback—flowers normally cover the entire tree—is debatable:

You can’t miss the pylons on the slopes of Lung Shan, but I don’t recall ever seeing the actual power lines, which is why I took this photo in the afternoon of 29th May:

My final photo was taken on the same day, shortly before sunset, hence the slight redness of the clouds. Our balcony faces east, and, surprisingly, I often see more redness in the clouds from here than I would if I went up to the roof and looked west. This phenomenon is, I believe, caused by the absurd amount of air pollution over southern China, which diffracts the light when the Sun is low in the sky:

And the power lines are still visible!