Cheung Chau

Hong Kong is not only a land of skyscrapers and high density housing, it has hundreds of islands scattered throughout the territory. Lantau is the largest and now seems connected to Hong Kong, although it’s a pretty impressive bridge. When you fly into Hong Kong you will land on Lantau, also home to Disneyland. Yet, and because Hong Kong is a land of total contrasts, the other side of Lantau is like going back in time. You can take a ferry to a village called Tai O which typifies some of the traditional fishing villages, with houses on stilts and many houseboats.

Last weekend we went to one of my favourite islands, Cheung Chau, which lies to the east of Lantau and the south of Hong Kong and Lamma islands. Jo and I went here back in 04, took a sampan across the harbour and walked around the southern part of the island and had a nice cold Blue Girl before heading back on the ferry. It was a truly magic day. This time it was to celebrate my nephew Eddy’s 4th birthday.

To get to Cheung Chau you need to take a ferry from Hong Kong Island itself, under the shadow of the monolithic IFC tower. If you saw the latest Batman movie, this is the one he ‘flies’ down from. Across from this tower is the International Commerce Centre, which is still under construction and will be taller than the IFC when finished next year. It was planned to be even taller but had to scaled back to some regulation stating that buildings can’t be any taller than the mountains surrounding the city. It will be the third highest in the world. So between these two behemoths is the ferry terminal to Cheng Chau.

It’s a pleasant 50 minute cruise to the island and you approach the island from its western side, through a typhoon shelter ( I now understand why having been through one already) and this artificially sheltered harbour is filled with all sorts of vessels, from small sampans to quite large residential junks. We had a yum cha lunch at one of the many restaurants that line the waterfront and then walked to hundred metres or so to the other side. Cheng Chau is a bone shaped island with two wide clumps at the north and south. It is very resorty, but not in a glitzy way, it reminded me of a cross between the less touristy parts of the Greek Islands. On the other side there is a golden sanded beech and we settled down on the beech to have a swim and to relax.

The beach sits on a nicely concave bay and it looks over to Lamma Island in the foreground and the southern side of Hong Kong Island in the distance—that is if you could see it past the pollution. Not only air pollution but there were all sorts of things floating in the water—I need not elaborate. In a similar way that we advertise the fire danger there was a dial near the lifeguard station that read ‘water temperature 28 degrees; water quality, very good. I would hate to see what ‘bad’ was. But all in all, it was a relaxing time. True to what usually happens in public places there seems to an endless list of things you cannot do at the beech or park. One of these was play ball sports, so that put an end to the idea of beach cricket. A woman life guard came over to tell the kids off, whereby my sister-in-law, Natasha, asked her to get somebody to clean the beach up in a tongue-in-cheek way. A few minutes later, a Hakka woman in her ubiquitous black hat came along, cleaning the beach. Too bad about the blue condom still floating in the water.

Of course all good things must come to an end and we had to head home. On the way back to the ferry we stopped off to have a fruit kebab—frozen pieces of fruit on a stick. Totally delicious and thirst quenching. At the ferry terminal we bumped into a young couple from the restaurant who had been taking photos of the kids and asked to take more photos and to pose with us. At the beach I had taken Poppy to the toilet a couple of times and people stopped to take photos of her and us. I am probably on Facebook somewhere in China with my pasty white body walking topless and barefooted on the footpath with a little blonde girl.

When we got back to Kowloon after another quick trip on the Star Ferry we went o the biggest mall I’ve ever been to—Harbour View. Lily took us to the food court there, and no McDonald’s in sight. You went around and ordered your food, all displayed with very realistic plastic models and then paid at a central till and then collected your food. Talk about delicious and cheap. Across from the food court we spied a bookshop. This was exciting as Bookshops selling English books are not very common where we live in the New Territories. It was a PageOne store and made Borders look a bit silly really with its extensive collection. Books are the only things that seem quite expensive so far, about the same price as back home. Because I am reading a book a week here I could live with paying a normal price for something.