Tag Archives: hiking

There’s a digging machine at a construction site near my workplace in Hong Kong Central. Enormous, cylindrical, and piston-shaped, it prepares the foundation of a new building on Pedder Street by driving a sheer metal shaft at least two feet in diameter into hard, raw concrete. When steel collides with stone, the ground shakes and an ear-splitting clangor pulsates through the air as the threatening piston trembles and rises to strike again. An auditory manifestation of the city's pace of development, the piston slams into the ground again and again – a metronome beating out the urban tempo.