The circling birds, a Lamma Island adventure

In the last few years, a friend here told me, a quarry was closed, and under SAR law, the owners had to clean it up. A reservoir was created.

It is far enough, equidistant in fact, from Lamma Island's two main villes and off the beaten track enough to be deserted, most of the time.

And, owing to its newness, it is a broad, flat plain, without the heavy monsoon vegetation of the rest of the Island. As such, rather than seeming barren, it is a refreshment to the eye and strangely similar to Illinois prairie. It will overgrow in time.

Boxing day was fair and not cold. The trooping visitors disappear in the back-country of Lamma Island. I don't mind them, they look like Song Dynasty paintings, but solitude rewards the walker as you ascend the main track, through vegetation at this time of year, a small dead time, is watching and waiting for the hot months.

You see containerships arriving through the channel, laden with not much of anything when arriving from the West, departing laden with treasure when leaving China, in a reversal return of the old times, when Asia and Africa were the West's shopping mall, having tea, monkeys and lapis lazuli when "we" had barley, turnips and wool.

I swim as well as run, so I wanted to swim solitary across the broad reservoir. Please be advised that I take a conscious risk in so doing, and that people really should swim with a buddy. I prefer solitude, I'm a reasonably strong swimmer, I'm willing to take a calculated risk, and I try to assess the environment as I was taught in Outward Bound, but don't imitate me if you feel at all threatened in the water.

I plunged in: although the calendar said Boxing Day, the water was refreshing, not cold.

But, as I after ten minutes approached the opposite shore, I was semi freaked out.

Kites, birds of prey, had congregated above me and were conducting what seemed a Parliament about whether to descend. The Alpha kite was lowest, a leader who was marshalling his forces, with a magnificent wingspan, impaled heraldically across the broad sky. A Kantian sublime vision, which the traveler by land or water sees might slay him, but blesses all the same.

Panic can cause one to lose one's life, and I didn't want to walk all the way back around on land, for the wind was picking up and the water warmer than the air.

I therefore resolved to make the return trip by water. I made it in record time with many an excess splash, and my friends the kites decided, collectively, that whatever I was, I didn't look or act like dinner.

Nonetheless, it was a rather spooky experience. To be prey to wild animals seems a comment on the way you've lived a life.

There are wild boars in the wilder parts of Lamma Island, and Scots-English poet Ted Hughes says that in the Shakespearean myth, he who rejects the Goddess' love (Adonis, or Lord Hastings in Richard III) must carry a boar-spear.

Nothing shall make me give up workouts under the sheltering sky: but I think I will find somebunny to swim with.

Or perhaps history shall repeat itself as farce, and the next time I go for a swim, I shall do so with a snorkel and a mask, underwater. There's something extraordinarily geeky about that, something plastic and excess.

The kites might die laughing.