Today I took myself off to Tung Lung Chau, an island off HK,
to go for a run somewhere new (and maybe suss out a future hash route).
Wait, wait, don’t stop reading!
I know I’ve done lots of blogs that go ‘I went somewhere
pretty, I ran around, it was nice”. So suffice to say that the run was nice, the island was pretty, see below. Let’s talk about
something else.
Tung Lung Chau is off the east side of HK, in the mouth of
the harbour. It’s very sparsely populated and only has ferry services twice a
day, at weekends. So pretty remote in HK terms.
Perhaps it is a product of this isolation and meagre tourism
(there were maybe 40 people on the island today), but today I saw the famously
yawning wealth gap at its most obvious; and I cannot think of a better picture to
show this than the one above, where you can see the floating village framed
against the sprawling high-rise city.
As we pulled towards the tiny pier, I was astonished as to
sail past this. From afar, I assumed it was something to do with fishing; up
close I could see that people live
here. The islands are fashioned from empty blue barrels lashed together with
planks, covered over with netting and wood, on which wobbly wood and tin shacks
are built. Dogs, children, wives, cooking, cleaning, sputtering to and fro in
tiny knackered old boats, socialising with their neighbours – this is where
they live their lives.
Onshore, the minute village clinging to the slope behind the
jetty was fairly ramshackle. One house was concrete all the way; the rest were
either concrete to knee high or just resting on a concrete base, with the rest
of the house built out of sheets of corrugated metal or wood. Most were clearly
home-made; and many covered over with flapping plastic sheets as waterproofing.
How on earth both villages fare in black rain or typhoon I have no idea.
Little light relief in this one, I don’t have anything much
funny to add here – this is just something that really struck me.
On the flip side, the people were incredibly friendly
compared to most HK Chinese I have met as a customer-cum-tourist. And I had
some pretty detailed chats with people in Canto. Which will be the feature of
today’s double-header blog, which hopefully will be much less serious and dull…
The little floating village is indeed to do with fishing. More specifically, it's a fish farm. Nets contain your fish beneath the wood-and-barrel structure; the dogs ensure nobody trespasses. Do people live on them too? I wouldn't be surprised.
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