Outward Bound

Outward Bound School is not a school, strictly speaking, but an adventure program, a chance to learn perseverance, or a life lesson. 

When I and my wife mention the Outward Bound sea diploma course we’d taken 27 years ago, it is impossible not to speak with fond memories. My heart still speeds up – and contracts with fluttering – when I think of the expedition from Sai Kung to the South China Sea and back to Lantau. That was when we just graduated from medical school, before embracing the year of internship. An ideal reason to get ourselves prepared physically and mentally.

We had not recently thought much about the Outward Bound course until my daughter is going to join their course next week. Our family are all excited, in ways no less than we were 27 years ago. To this day some of the Outward Bound challenging activities are unsurpassed – and are likely to remain so. We were antsy. Of course no Outward Bound students expect an extravagant trip. More of a jolt is the pre-course information that there will be no shower for the hiking and sea kayaking trip until the last day of the whole week.

"Okay," I said, wide-eyed, realizing the once-in-a-lifetime experience for my daughter next week.

Accomodation

The great thing about budget travel is minimalist travel style, including bare-bones, smelly backpacker lodging. 

I still remember my Youth Hostel Association membership card which worked like magical phrase "open sesame" during my university days. That worked well from Vancouver to Lake Louise, and Interlaken to Luzern. When I was a student, I could not afford hotel and, obviously, didn't have Airbnb. What I needed was pretty basic at that time: dorm beds, linen and kitchen. Most are lacking in ambience, but who cared? I would only be there for 12 hours, and eight of them I would be asleep.

I don't mean to create a false sense of nostalgia for the too-far-gone pre-Wi-Fi times, but we didn't really need signal thirty years ago. Indeed, if we were lucky, we might come across a small computer in the hostel, offering us free-of-charge five-minute slow dial-up modem connection. When I say slow, I mean ten times slower than whatever Wi-Fi signal you can snag from any nearby Starbucks nowadays.

Now that I can afford a better choice of accomodation, I haven't stayed in youth hostel for years. Not until this weekend, when our family chose to stay overnight next to the Lantau Trail. We didn't have other choices, honestly, if we wanted a location within a five minutes' stroll from the start of the Lantau Peak climb. Consider two contrasting takes on the accomodation within this same week for our family: one with just enough space for only two double bunk beds (without counting public washrooms), and another with almost 800 square feet size and one king bed. I am impressed by the way our brains can accomodate that quickly, from one way to another, as a true wayfarer from luxury holiday to minimalist's travel.

Wong Chuk Hang

To those of us who often attend fellowship conferment ceremonies at the Hong Kong Academy of Medicine, mention the place Wong Chuk Hang and we will associate that with formal dress code. When I say often, I mean seven times in one month. Yes, it’s that many.

To break the seemingly fixed rule, I booked a hotel located at Wong Chuk Hang during my daughter’s recent term break. That’s how I had chance to have casual wear and run along the Aberdeen Harbour. Venturing to the south of Hong Kong Island on a quiet Wednesday, we got chance to enjoy the long beach at Repulse Bay. 

It was truly unique experience, both magical and revival at the same time.

Irrational

As we navigate the pandemic, everything is new. We don't know what's under each rock. We don't know the path ahead. This, I believe, is why we are panic-stricken.

But as we get along, and the patterns become more obvious, we find the storyline predictable.

I guess that's the reason I borrowed Geraldine Brooks’s novel Year of Wonders. A story of the plague year, 1666, when we heard about how breathing would cease. More times than not, the patient's throat would give a wet gurgle, straining for air, and chest would rise and fall in a series of swift, shallow pants. After a moment or two, these would slow and diminish, until breathing stopped.

I read about the villagers' decision to quarantine themselves within Eyam, a village in the rugged mountain spine of England. And how the rector exhausted to dig graves. Day and night. How nobody was troubling with coffins, and how families simply carried their loved ones to their graves, or if they were not strong enough, dragged them with a blanket slung beneath the armpits of the corpse. And their great difficulty in poring through the book to find the repertoire of herbs: nettle for the blood, starwort and violet leaves for the lungs, silverweed to cool a fever, cress for the stomach. I felt every bit as similar as what was happening now and then, more than 300 years ago. Think of the way panic leads to a wealth of irrational remedies, from frantic attempts to resist contagion of plague, all the way to absurd judgment of who is right and who is wrong. Imagine the way to tell whether someone is a witch: throw her into water, and if she floats, she's a witch. If she sinks, she isn't.

All manners of falsehood. That was utterly nonsense. Okay, thank God, that was 1666. But I'm not sure we are anything better today.