Adam Au @Executive Sports Challenge

Day one felt like a homecoming. I started in Kennedy Town, slipped past the tram terminus and the old piers, and traced the waterfront to Sun Yat Sen Memorial Park before looping back. Finished with a gelato near the new Kennedy Town Praya street sign. Typhoon signal 3 was up, the air thick with late‑summer heat, and the promenade wore that pearly, wind‑rippled light Hong Kong gets before a squall. It didn’t stop me. If anything, the weather sharpened the edges—salt in the air, gulls riding crosswinds, runners bargaining with the clouds.

I used to do this at lunch, obsessively, counting steps like beads on a string—in my worn‑and‑torn leather shoes, no less. Treadmills never stuck; a moving belt feels like a half‑truth. Pavement gives you context. Streets have memory. Out here, the old and new keep talking to each other. You feel it in Western District—in warehouses turned cafes, tramlines under glass towers, and a distant hint of the new Kai Tak Sports Park across in Kowloon, glimpsed between hoardings and skyscrapers. Scaffolding and cranes along the harbourfront sketch a future against a skyline that doesn’t sit still.

The harbour did its best impression of proximity. Kowloon felt close enough to touch—ferries stitching the distance, container ships idling, the water shifting from slate to steel to green. It’s the kind of view that shrinks your world and enlarges it at the same time. This is my home. Love it, plain and simple.

People ask why I like walking. The answer is unromantic and true: it’s the easiest, most soothing way I know to reset. One foot in front of the other, Audible in my ears, a steady drumbeat of steps that makes room for thought without demanding it. Progress measured, not rushed. Much like life: you don’t have to conquer the city to know it; you just keep moving through it.

Kwai Tsing, thrum and graft

Started at Kwai Fong Station and let the morning spill me into Kwai Chung Plaza—my favorite hangout. Covid or not, this place is always packed: snack stalls and old‑school fish balls, escalators jammed, bubble‑tea sugar haze, sneaker shops stacked to the ceiling, aunties negotiating over phone cases like futures traders. I cut through to the lobby, glowing with posters and popcorn salt, then slipped back to street level where delivery trolleys ticked across tiles like metronomes.

Kwai Tsing wears its work on the surface. You feel it in container yards shouldering the horizon, flyovers ribbing the sky, and the steady tide of shift changes. I took the footbridges, elevated walkways stitching over Castle Peak Road, a river of traffic underfoot. Rails and roads braided around me—moving parts you usually blur past from a car window. A vantage point I’d never bothered to stop and appreciate.

I kept it flat and aimed for the water—the Rambler Channel promenade—industry on one side, quiet on the other. Fishermen with patient lines. Joggers pacing the railings. The water doing its slate‑to‑green mood shift. Stonecutters Bridge pulls your eye whether you want it to or not, that elegant span threading container ships and tug wakes.

Across the channel, the towers of Tsing Yi keep watch, trucks flashing by on the viaduct like quick thoughts. The promenade isn’t perfect—poignant smells drift in places, and the nearness of the Tsuen Wan Slaughterhouse throws a stark, ironic contrast against the postcard bridge. Industry is not just backdrop here; it’s in the air.

I looped back to Kwai Tsing Theatre and a small scoop of ice cream as reward. The foyer felt like a civic heartbeat—posters for Cantonese opera next to contemporary dance, teenagers rehearsing steps in the glass, ushers comparing notes about a sold‑out weekend. I love these places: the city’s nerve endings, where logistics make room for culture and the day’s exhale happens under stage lights.

Why walk here? Same answer as always: it resets the dial. One foot, then the next; the hum of buses, the click of trolley wheels, a bridge breeze cutting through diesel heat. Audible in my ears until the street took over and I hit pause to let the ambient thrum do the talking. Progress measured, not rushed. A district usually seen from an expressway suddenly becomes legible at 5 km/h.