NOV 27 — Are you one of those people who link a smell to a particular place?

Strange as this may sound, Europe has always had a “smell” to me, like a scent that can be bottled up and released whenever I step out into a European airport. I don’t know why this is the case, but my memory seems to have archived this smell from my first trip abroad 22 years ago.

Lately, for me, it’s been about buses and the places they take me to.

The public light bus (much like the minibus that used to terrorise the streets of Kuala Lumpur and Petaling Jaya) I take to nearby Aberdeen (Hong Kong, not Scotland) where I do my weekly shop reeks of fish.

This is to be expected as the Aberdeen wet market is known for its cheap and fresh seafood (but really, if it is all that fresh, surely it should not smell?).

Yet, the bright yellow double decker Citybus that plies the same route does not suffer the same fishy predicament. I have deduced that this could be because the Citybus stop is farther away from the market and perhaps by the time our wet soles step into the bus all fishy aroma would have transferred onto the streets of Aberdeen.

On Friday, however, I encountered another odour, one I was certain should never be on a bus in the first place.

I had ventured to the Eastern tip of Hong Kong Island to attend a birthday party. This was not my usual stomping ground so my senses were more alert than usual.

I was in Kornhill, a densely populated private housing estate packed with shopping malls and towering apartment blocks built above the Tai Koo MTR station.

Shortly after boarding the bus back to my little southern tip of the island, a stench began to waft around. I tried to figure out who the culprit was. But first, what was this smell? It was bad, for sure. It was somewhere between stinky-taufu bad and body-odour bad.

Could it be from the man who had just sat down in front of me, who seemed to have a scalp problem? Snowy white flakes hung precariously from the tips of his short, permed hair. Smart move on his part though, wearing a white windbreaker.

Or could the funk be coming from the lady who had just rolled her cabin-sized luggage to the rear of the bus?

My son, in his sleepy state, mumbled about the “chow-chow” smell. By this time I realised why it was familiar. I had come across it many times while walking my dog. Usually it would involve a rotting carcass of a bird or rat. I hoped the lady with the suitcase wasn’t harbouring any dead animals.

So that will now be our Kornhill scent. “Chow-chow” rotting corpse in a suitcase.

There is also the Central stink, which, if you find yourself waiting for a bus at the Exchange Square bus terminus, will be that of burnt rubber and gas fumes.

A short distance away along Des Veoux Road in Sheung Wan, even while ensconced in an air-conditioned bus, you will not be able to escape the overpowering dried seafood smell from the dozens of shops specialising in exotic marine delicacies, some of which line the pavements as they bake under the scorching sun.

Anyone living in Hong Kong will be able to tell you about the non-stop pounding and grinding that takes place everywhere. It seems we can’t travel more than a few hundred metres without encountering some kind of road work or building construction work.

Accompanying these sounds are the smells — burning metal, choking dust, wet concrete. It is no wonder some folks choose to walk around with surgical masks even when they are not ill.

And strangely enough, even though we are surrounded by the sea, all I smell when walking past the sampan docked along the Aberdeen Typhoon Shelter is... diesel.

While this is about the smells of Hong Kong, let us not forget what else goes up our nasal passages: The annual mean roadside reading of fine particles in Central is 35 micrograms per cubic metre. Only seven cities of 565 surveyed by the World Health Organisation around the world exceed this reading.

My favourite bus journey smell though has to be when I alight at Stanley Market on a quiet Sunday morning. This is before tour buses arrive, before cars and buses choke the narrow winding coastal road.

I can pick up the faintest hint of salty sea air. For me that will be Stanley, fresh with a hint of salt and greasy French toast fried up at the “dai pai dong.”

* The views expressed here are the personal opinion of the columnist.