Hong Kong has two monsoons. The winter monsoon which begins in October is blown in on south winds from China. Those winds now come from Shenzhen and Guangzhou. Shenzhen was a fishing village until a couple of decades ago. Now it’s a manufacturing powerhouse where 11million people live. Factories making tee shirts and trainers are stacked up against barracks for workers for miles and miles. The pollution from all this activity blows down to Hong Kong and gathers in Victoria Harbour. As a result when you get the star ferry from the central terminal to Kowloon, by the time you arrive in Tsim Sha Tsui a few minutes later the famous Hong Kong skyline is covered in a muddy brown haze. IM Pei’s knife like Bank of China building and the giant finger of IFC2 are hardly visible.
Few tourists bother to get the ferry from pier 4 at the central ferry terminal to go to Lamma Island. The ferry chugs across the front of the harbour, leaving the glass and steel skyscrapers behind and passing rows and rows of high rise flats, past Hong Kong University and out beyond the western end of Hong Kong Island. In this outer part of the harbour there are only small islands around. They are hilly and verdant, not built up at all. You also leave behind all the frantic seaborne activity of Hong Kong Harbour. The ferry only passes the odd large, flat barge loaded with containers for Indonesia or Malaysia. After about half an hour you arrive on Lamma Island. The atmosphere here could not be more different to Hong Kong. No cars, no high rise, no flyovers, no walkways in the sky. When you leave the ferry, what looks like hundred of bicycles are tethered to the railings on the jetty. The municipality has built some narrow concrete trails to navigate pedestrians and hikers across the island with helpful signs pointing to pagodas, temples, beaches and villages. The dark green, monsoon-fed hills extend up to the skyline, as once they must have done on Hong Kong Island and Kowloon, before all that flat land was reclaimed and created with sand imported from Singapore and Indonesia. Victoria harbour has been pushed back, narrowed and become more turbulent, especially at typhoon time.
A few hundred metres down the jetty a small village straggles along the shore line. The buildings barely extend back a couple of streets. Little blocks of six or eight flats are built behind concrete yards. Colourful, homely washing blows about on washing lines on balconies or out of windows. The buildings are clad in white or grey ceramic tiles, as they are in many places in China, giving them a shiny, slippery look, but they still seem a little unfinished. Telephone and electricity wires enter and leave the flats at unlikely points, their trajectory determined by random functionality. The need to keep facades uniform and clear, a lesson we learnt in the UK from the Georgians and Palladians, is neither here nor there. On the ground floors, all the front doors are open and the dark, the stark interior is covered with a bead curtain. The sound of a TV filters through from some houses. The front yards contain selections of fishing nets, tyres, boat engines and all manner of other objects, each in its place notwithstanding the disorderly appearance. A few enterprising locals have acquired coca cola fridges and are selling bottles of water and fizzy drinks from their front yards. People sit around in the shade of the front yard, playing cards, chatting or fanning themselves, staring out in a preoccupied or vacant fashion. You might have seen a similar scene on Greek islands or in the south of Spain, though perhaps not for much longer. This is not a place where people go away from home to work. They either put fishing boats out when the right time and tide comes, run restaurants and cafés from the front of their houses or sell drinks to passers by. Many do all of the above. There is no industrial division of labour. The ferry to Lamma Island seems to have taken you back fifty years in half an hour.
On the other side of the island are some larger, swankier restaurants where fresh fish are kept in tanks aerated by pipes. You choose the one you want and it is cooked up for you to eat at a plastic table overlooking the sea. You can have a decent bottle of Australian wine to go with it. Just below the restaurant balconies in the sea fisher folk wearing large, traditional straw hats (for sale for HK$10, about 65 pence) are out on their own on launches spreading fine white nets near the shore line. But the fish served in the restaurants was probably flown in live from the Philippines or Thailand. Eating out on Lamma Island is popular with Hong Kong people and some of the restaurants have their own boats plying back and forth.
If you follow the path for 15 minutes or so, you come to a beach, not a big beach, not Bondi or Venice, but nevertheless a golden sandy beach, where people in their swimming costumes play with beach balls, children build their own sandcastles and destroy those created by other children. Complex irrigation systems are constructed with plastic buckets and spades, the hilarious fun being in watching a small wave overwhelm the six inches of sand barricades in an instant. Under the trees the adults keep out of the sun and smile benignly. Some go swimming. A portion of the sea is roped off with yellow ropes and buoys for safe swimming. A handsome lifeguard in a surprisingly large concrete watchtower surveys the scene apathetically. The dangers are minimal. No one is taking any risks at all. The swimming is sedate, the swimmers keeping their heads out of the water. Some swim with their sunglasses on. The tinies are ankle deep in the shallows, clinging to their parents’ fingers.
A young couple come down to the beach for a photo shoot. The photographer has an enormous paparazzi lens. The girl is dressed in a flouncing white cotton gypsy dress. The boy is wearing a bow tie, cream silk shirt and white trousers with a sharp pleat. They pose in numerous informal poses on the rocks and on the beach. Then they go into the sea fully clothed, get themselves soaked and adopt various suggestive poses, rolling in the surf, the boy bearing the girl in his arms while emerging from the waves. She is obviously hysterical with pleasure. Her worlds of fantasy and reality have finally aligned. He looks more nervous and wary, perhaps a little embarrassed. He needn’t be. Everyone gathers to watch; everyone has an approving look; small rounds of applause ripple round for particularly good magazine-like poses. Other people’s happiness is contagious.
The photographer has presumably taken care to screen out of shot the enormous coal fired power station that flanks one side of the beach. The chimneys are huge and billow clouds of white steam and there is a mountain of coal standing in readiness to feed the hungry beast. This power station is owned by the richest man in Hong Kong, Li Ka shing, and provides all the electricity for Hong Kong Island. Those lights that dance across the buildings on the harbour waterfront as you return, celebrating hypermodernity, start their journey in that mountain of coal amidst the fisher folks, the swimmers and the newlyweds.
Few tourists bother to get the ferry from pier 4 at the central ferry terminal to go to Lamma Island. The ferry chugs across the front of the harbour, leaving the glass and steel skyscrapers behind and passing rows and rows of high rise flats, past Hong Kong University and out beyond the western end of Hong Kong Island. In this outer part of the harbour there are only small islands around. They are hilly and verdant, not built up at all. You also leave behind all the frantic seaborne activity of Hong Kong Harbour. The ferry only passes the odd large, flat barge loaded with containers for Indonesia or Malaysia. After about half an hour you arrive on Lamma Island. The atmosphere here could not be more different to Hong Kong. No cars, no high rise, no flyovers, no walkways in the sky. When you leave the ferry, what looks like hundred of bicycles are tethered to the railings on the jetty. The municipality has built some narrow concrete trails to navigate pedestrians and hikers across the island with helpful signs pointing to pagodas, temples, beaches and villages. The dark green, monsoon-fed hills extend up to the skyline, as once they must have done on Hong Kong Island and Kowloon, before all that flat land was reclaimed and created with sand imported from Singapore and Indonesia. Victoria harbour has been pushed back, narrowed and become more turbulent, especially at typhoon time.
A few hundred metres down the jetty a small village straggles along the shore line. The buildings barely extend back a couple of streets. Little blocks of six or eight flats are built behind concrete yards. Colourful, homely washing blows about on washing lines on balconies or out of windows. The buildings are clad in white or grey ceramic tiles, as they are in many places in China, giving them a shiny, slippery look, but they still seem a little unfinished. Telephone and electricity wires enter and leave the flats at unlikely points, their trajectory determined by random functionality. The need to keep facades uniform and clear, a lesson we learnt in the UK from the Georgians and Palladians, is neither here nor there. On the ground floors, all the front doors are open and the dark, the stark interior is covered with a bead curtain. The sound of a TV filters through from some houses. The front yards contain selections of fishing nets, tyres, boat engines and all manner of other objects, each in its place notwithstanding the disorderly appearance. A few enterprising locals have acquired coca cola fridges and are selling bottles of water and fizzy drinks from their front yards. People sit around in the shade of the front yard, playing cards, chatting or fanning themselves, staring out in a preoccupied or vacant fashion. You might have seen a similar scene on Greek islands or in the south of Spain, though perhaps not for much longer. This is not a place where people go away from home to work. They either put fishing boats out when the right time and tide comes, run restaurants and cafés from the front of their houses or sell drinks to passers by. Many do all of the above. There is no industrial division of labour. The ferry to Lamma Island seems to have taken you back fifty years in half an hour.
On the other side of the island are some larger, swankier restaurants where fresh fish are kept in tanks aerated by pipes. You choose the one you want and it is cooked up for you to eat at a plastic table overlooking the sea. You can have a decent bottle of Australian wine to go with it. Just below the restaurant balconies in the sea fisher folk wearing large, traditional straw hats (for sale for HK$10, about 65 pence) are out on their own on launches spreading fine white nets near the shore line. But the fish served in the restaurants was probably flown in live from the Philippines or Thailand. Eating out on Lamma Island is popular with Hong Kong people and some of the restaurants have their own boats plying back and forth.
If you follow the path for 15 minutes or so, you come to a beach, not a big beach, not Bondi or Venice, but nevertheless a golden sandy beach, where people in their swimming costumes play with beach balls, children build their own sandcastles and destroy those created by other children. Complex irrigation systems are constructed with plastic buckets and spades, the hilarious fun being in watching a small wave overwhelm the six inches of sand barricades in an instant. Under the trees the adults keep out of the sun and smile benignly. Some go swimming. A portion of the sea is roped off with yellow ropes and buoys for safe swimming. A handsome lifeguard in a surprisingly large concrete watchtower surveys the scene apathetically. The dangers are minimal. No one is taking any risks at all. The swimming is sedate, the swimmers keeping their heads out of the water. Some swim with their sunglasses on. The tinies are ankle deep in the shallows, clinging to their parents’ fingers.
A young couple come down to the beach for a photo shoot. The photographer has an enormous paparazzi lens. The girl is dressed in a flouncing white cotton gypsy dress. The boy is wearing a bow tie, cream silk shirt and white trousers with a sharp pleat. They pose in numerous informal poses on the rocks and on the beach. Then they go into the sea fully clothed, get themselves soaked and adopt various suggestive poses, rolling in the surf, the boy bearing the girl in his arms while emerging from the waves. She is obviously hysterical with pleasure. Her worlds of fantasy and reality have finally aligned. He looks more nervous and wary, perhaps a little embarrassed. He needn’t be. Everyone gathers to watch; everyone has an approving look; small rounds of applause ripple round for particularly good magazine-like poses. Other people’s happiness is contagious.
The photographer has presumably taken care to screen out of shot the enormous coal fired power station that flanks one side of the beach. The chimneys are huge and billow clouds of white steam and there is a mountain of coal standing in readiness to feed the hungry beast. This power station is owned by the richest man in Hong Kong, Li Ka shing, and provides all the electricity for Hong Kong Island. Those lights that dance across the buildings on the harbour waterfront as you return, celebrating hypermodernity, start their journey in that mountain of coal amidst the fisher folks, the swimmers and the newlyweds.
2 comments:
bmw water pump problems grand theft auto vice city stories theme car levers auto glass installation guide bill clinton draft dodge
top [url=http://www.001casino.com/]001[/url] coincide the latest [url=http://www.casinolasvegass.com/]casino bonus[/url] unshackled no set aside perk at the foremost [url=http://www.baywatchcasino.com/]casino games
[/url].
Post a Comment