Friday 18 July 2008

I went to Shek O yesterday, a lovely little beach in the Southern District of the island. You get the MTR or tram to Shau Kei Wan, then Bus 9 to Shek O. It's a long, winding road to get there, often with precipitous drops straight down enormous cliffs. The beach was quite busy for a Thursday afternoon - lots of skiving students I think! Also quite a few kids. It's all about the inflatables, there are loads of them, and everyone is within the buoyed shark net, so it looks like a slightly comedic corral of blow-up animals and boats.


Here's a little vid of the beach:



Shek O is a tiny village by HK standards, and it feels completely different from anywhere else here. There are no recognisable stores, which is very rare here. There are plenty of little stalls lining the beach and the road by the bus stop, but they don't have air conditioning - in fact the old boys keeping shop use an old plastic tub and an abacus as their tills. The village is primarily made up of small, single storey Chinese houses, which are usually pretty small, and very neat. There are often a few clustered together around a little courtyard, which looks very sociable! More photos on Facebook.

If you walk up the hill out of the village you start passing the rather more upmarket dwellings, called things like "Cot by the Sea" (?!) Eventually you get to the top of the hil, where the road ends, and the view looks like this:
You climb down the steps, and cross a little footbridge to the rocky islet just off Shek O, which is called Tai Tau Chau - it really reminded me of that walk we did on Norman Island in the BVI. It was incredibly hot, and smelt of warm sand and the scrubby plants. An old guy doing some kind of weird ritual warned me about the snakes further along the path, so I turned back there! You can see all the way to the New Territories, directly north of the island.



















We went out for beers last night ($25 a pint, or about £1.60), then went to a noodle bar for supper. I ordered something in "superior soup" (but declined the "strange sauce") and I actually couldn't eat it, I think it had offal or bone marrow or something in it. So I went to Maccy D's instead. I know, I know, wrong on so many levels....and breaking the habit of about 5 years. Sorry.

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