Happy valley

Like much in Hong Kong, Sybil's apartment mingles a certain glamour -- old Chinese furniture and Asian textiles -- with a cold-water-only galley kitchen shared with ants and a plump gecko. Besides mastering its intricacies, I had to shop and do laundry and other errands in Happy Valley, which is where Hong Kong began to insinuate itself into my affections. Happy Valley is, as Sybil puts it, ex-pat- friendly, and has been since the 1840's, when the British carved out a racetrack in the swampy north-central part of Hong Kong Island.

Happy Valley, nestled in the hills of Hong Kong island, is a tightly populated, up-market residential area next to the Causeway Bay shopping district. There has been a horse-racing track there since just after British colonial rule began in the mid-1800s.

For decades, the Hindu cemetery in Happy Valley, tucked behind the community’s large temple on Wong Nai Chung Road, had fallen into disrepair.

Though a night of more wakeful and anxious thought had never been passed in the Happy Valley, yet, when she rose in the morning and her Ladies came round her, to assist in the adjustment of the bridal ornaments, they thought they had never seen her look half so beautiful.

It is however to the northernmost portion of this immense mountain range that I wish more particularly to draw the attention of my readers; for here, beyond the rugged ridges that skirt the Punjab, whose snow-clad peaks are discernible by the traveller long before his arrival at their base, lies the country we are about to visit—the far-famed Vale of Kashmir, the ‘Happy Valley,’ the scene of the poet Moore’s inimitable Lalla Rookh.

In between, we travel on a luxurious houseboat in “Happy Valley,” the famed Vale of Kashmir, as well as visit the “Chang Thang,” the desolate plains of Tibet, sometimes called “the roof of the world.”