The train to Lo Wu

Thirteen years had passed since I last travelled to Lo Wu, en route to Shenzhen with my family. Today I was at Lo Wu again but stopped this side of the crossing, bidding goodbye to a friend who was returning home to China, having got a job at Shanghai after the successful completion of his Masters here in Hong Kong. Send-offs often find me jittery and abnormally silent, and this one was no different as I tried to determine the nature of the feelings I was experiencing amidst rushing billows of people headed towards the Mainland in eager anticipation of joining their families for a festival tomorrow. Those feelings themselves may be worthy of another post, but here I will merely talk about the train journey that took me and my friend to Lo Wu.

On a dark afternoon when clouds closing in on every speckle of blank sky threatened rain but instead brought immense relief with loving and intermittent drizzles,  a train journey seemed like the most solemn way to relax. During my current innings I had hitherto not gone beyond Shatin on the East Rail Line, and that gave me  added incentive to travel with my friend even though his heavy luggage, he believed, should deter me from doing so. The journey turned out to be both emotionally relieving and aesthetically uplifting, making this yet another evening worth celebrating in my memory about life in Hong Kong. 

As the train careered past Shatin, I could see that the final traces of ultramodern urbanity that characterises Asia's World City were giving way to something wonderfully appeasing especially on a rainy day. Soon, all that I could see on either side were oceans of green. Along narrow countryside paths, abutting hillocks, around lakes, near houses, with thatched and concrete roofs, and on the slopes of hills (or chains of a hill) I witnessed a festival of my favourite colour in myriad shades that the mind can catch but the tongue cannot tell (so I shall not try). Recent rains - and their residue in the air - made the pervasive green carpet, which  rose and fell with the pattern of the land, appear even fresher than it actually was. 

At the far end - a nebulous point to which my sight extended - even the grey-becoming-black horizon seemed like a fine frame to the canvas that was the landscape en route to Lo Wu. The heart could not have wished for more. The mind, too, only made a suggestion this time rather than pick a bone: a splash of Sun and a smidgen of a rainbow would have made it perfect. There is something poignantly beautiful about imperfect though, an acknowledgement that shall always elude reason.

On my way back I de-trained at Sheung Shui on a whim and decided to take a bus. And even though I dozed through a good deal of the bus journey, I saw enough to suggest that it would not be a bad idea to travel the same route by bus again. Regardless of how that experience turns out, I will always remember the train to Lo Wu. And not since that expectant evening bus ride to Mangalore three years ago have I found a suffusion of green so moving.