Last week we had a visitor coming in from Australia. On her way back to Europe, where she lives nowadays, she made a stopover in HK and asked us if she could stay at our place for a day or two. No problem of course – so on Wednesday evening I went to the Airport express station to pick her up. There was a fair bit of wind already – but nothing to get overly concerned about. We spent the evening talking our guest through the options for two days sightseeing in Hong Kong (city tours, temples, markets etc) and went to bed around twelve. That night – we didn’t get much sleep though. Howling winds coming down of the mountain – and from every other conceivable direction seemed to be wreaking havoc with the garden furniture out on the terrace. I was made to get out of bed twice to check if none of the chairs had been bodily lifted over the railing and sent crashing down on the playground 8 floors down. Luckily – that hadn’t happened, but our potted plants were suffering big time!

Next morning – I set off to work early – and on my way down I could see there was quite a bit of damage done. However – the traffic was fine and I got into work ok. Coming home that evening though was an entirely different matter. Sitting in the office all day – I had not really noticed that the typhoon had picked up in strength – and had uprooted trees everywhere, leaving hardly any of the roads debris free. Luckily, the enterprising taxi driver knew plenty of alternative routes and I managed to get home after 40 minutes or so. Our poor guest however had spent the entire day negotiating squalls and gusts. The borrowed umbrella was in tatters..

The airport was closed the entire day and thousands of would be travelers were stranded. It has taken at least three days for everything to settle down again – and most of the fallen trees outside of roads and paths still need to be cleared.

And the scary thing is – that the typhoon passed Hong Kong at a distance of around 300 km. They tell us that when it hits the city direct – that’s when it gets really scary!