Thursday, June 08, 2006
Off To The Beach
Although the southern coast of Hong Kong island seems to be becoming more heavily populated it's still relatively quiet, and probably the last thing you'd expect to find if all you've ever seen are photos of skyscrapers around the harbour.Our first stop was at Aberdeen, home to the 'Jumbo' floating restaurant which really is as large as it sounds. The harbour is also known for having many of its residents living on house boats. I think there are far fewer houseboats than there used to be but you can still go out on tours which will take you out so you can have a peek into people's lounges and kitchens. The boat trip industry must have been having a quiet week when we were there because the boats seemed to outnumber the tourists on the day we were there. We were 'adopted' by one woman as soon as we got off the bus, and she proceeded to keep cropping up in front of us somehow (how do they do that?!) trying to sell us a boat trip.
I guess that the real reason for people moving ashore is probably something to do with the increase in the size of the fishing boats and the building of tower blocks of apartments within walking distance. However, another good reason would be that it's really not very pleasant out there, the big fishing vessels and the many tourist boats have resulted in some fairly foul looking water, and we didn't really want to think about what the houseboats use as a water source!
From Aberdeen we went as far southeast as Stanley. The island really isn't very big, so the total journey time from Central to Stanley is about 45 minutes on the bus and costs about 40p. Stanley is known for it's market, although what was once a small village now seems to be spreading up the hillside quite quickly. The market basically sold much of the same stuff as we'd already seen in Kowloon but on a weekday lunchtime it was much quieter and easier to move around. Of course this made us even more of an obvious target for the traders. Also, if you want to get your Beijing 2008 Olympics merchandise early this is the place to come (can't guarantee how genuine they are of course!).
Between Stanley and Aberdeen are the beaches at Deep Water Bay and Repulse Bay so we stopped for a look on the way back. There's not much to say about Repulse Bay really, it's a beach, although it's not a bad beach and it does have some pretty impressive looking lifeguard 'huts' as you can see in the photos.
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