What Kills Us Today!

Today we have a public holiday; the big one where we all sit back and watch Hong Kong burn.

Yup, it's the annual Ching Ming Festival, folks, where we're all meant to go out and enjoy the greenery of spring, only in Autumn, then burn it to hell.

Actually, it's meant to be when entire families gather together and everyone goes out en masse to attend ancestor graves, pulling out weeds, sweeping and polishing, giving all the annual once-over. In China they do it in Spring, but here we do it in Autumn, after a long hot summer, and I cannot believe that all over our wonderful SAR, graveside candles innocently fall over, as perpetrators always claim, setting the entire surrounding countryside alight. And since it happens on every hillside, mountain, island and forest, year after year, Ching Ming Festival is always endless screaming fire-trucks and those "Elvis Helicopters" with their dangling water buckets trying to douse the flaming hillsides.

Mmm, those are some wobbly candles we have in HK.

Personally, I think what happens is that folks these days are too lazy to simply pull out weeds so instead douse them with petrol and WHOOSH!, set them alight, but then they have trouble controlling the flames. Makes more sense than hundreds of wobbly candles, yes?

Different sets of friends are out hiking today. Having no ancestor graves in HK to attend, every year they instead go up into the mountains to enjoy the greenery. And, yes, most years they get caught in a fire. So far they've been very lucky and always there's some last minute something that's saved their lives, most usually the Wind Gods protecting them with a sudden shift in wind direction or whatever, but isn't the definition of insanity something about repeating things expecting different outcomes. Something like that, anyway! We were asked by various groups if we wanted to join them this year. "Umm, NO!"

Oh, a cute story from last night. We were on Lantau Island, at a village next to Pui-O Beach, enduring the noisy extended family gatherings at the communal barbecues downstairs, when there was this explosive burst of mass terrified screaming. Ran over to see what the matter was, and there was an enormous water buffalo eating everything off the salad buffet table. Seems Pui-O village water buffalo enjoy Ching Ming Festival as much as everyone else, and escape their paddocks to attack the barbecue areas to take whatever's on offer.

Buffalo On The Prowl.

That's how it must be for water buffalo: smell barbecue, think salad bar!

Tomorrow I'll download into here any great fire photographs from the newspapers so you too can enjoy HK's Ching Ming Festival.

Later: There were only 28 fires and, thanks to the entire Fire Department's well-distributed stand-by fleet of fire trucks and helicopters, and thousands of volunteers handing out gallons of water all day, they were all put out by 8pm. All in all, a great day and it just goes to show that sometimes Hong Kong's constant "Chicken Little-ing" comes in very handy.