Day Tripping in a Fishing Village

(Sadly, we're behind in our blogging, both because we've been moving around a lot, and also because it's been difficult to find reliable and reasonably quick internet connections.  Such is life!)
It's commonly said that unless you've taken the Star Ferry across from Kowloon to Hong Kong Island, you have not "done" Hong Kong.  And so it was in that frame of mind that we paid the equivalent of about $0.30 to head across the harbour on Friday, August 20th.

Once we were there, we decided, spur-of-the-moment, to head to another pier and take yet another ferry to a place I'd read about in my guide book that sounded quaint.



About 45 minutes later, we ended up in Cheung Chau.

This is very much an active fishing village.  Things seem to be done the old-fashioned way.  Everywhere you walk, there are screens laid out in the sun, on which rows upon rows of fish are drying.  Amazingly, the birds don't seem interested.  There are families that live aboard the fishing boats.  All along the boardwalk are various restaurants, and a few little stores selling odds & ends (along with some souvenirs).  There weren't a lot of tourists, however, and so we were getting some bemused glances when we settled down at a restaurant & attempted to eat freshly cooked scampi.  This is hard to do.  They are the tiniest little morsels that you have to figure out how to peel and eat with some semblance of dignity! 

Since I love any kind of seafood, and Aron is a little ambivalent about it, he chose the type of fish that we would eat from the vast array of tanks at the front of the restaurant.  So this is the before picture:




Then the restaurant cooked it up for us.  It was reminiscent of calamari, but with the shell on.  It was a little spicier too, and we washed it down with a couple cheap Tsingtao beers. 

Really not too sure what one was to do with the chopsticks.  How could you possibly eat scampi with them?  Perhaps you peel them first and then eat with the chopsticks? 





With hardly any vehicles on the island, it's fairly quiet, after the hubbub of Hong Kong.  The police actually drive Smart Cars, but outside of emergency vehicles, there are no cars at all.  People either walk or cycle, and there is the occasional atv for business use.  We half-heartedly followed the walking tour recommended in our Lonely Planet guidebook and came across a temple.  The next stop on the journey was an ancient carved stone from hundreds of years ago, which was encased in plexiglass, and so we didn't bother with a photo.  We did take a photo down a standard side street.

When the sun started to set, we decided to head back on the ferry.  Up until that point, this was, by far, our favorite place.  It was such a relaxed, laid back atmosphere.  We highly recommend a short jaunt over Cheung Chau if you ever find yourself in Hong Kong.  And don't forget to check out our Picasa link for more Cheung Chau photos.  If all goes as planned, we will be uploading the rest the photos to Picasa, hopefully today.