HONG KONG — It's been uncommonly cold here. Whitecaps frost the channel between Kowloon and Hong Kong Island, where an ominous cloud has shrouded Victoria Peak for days. The whole city has an unhealthy pallor: gray skyscrapers, gray streets, gray dawn. Even the trusty and venerable Star Ferry, at 6:30 making the first of its 420 daily crossings between mainland Tsim Sha Tsui and old Victoria (now called Central) on the island, looks like a gray ghost in the mist.
I'm on a different ferry, riding hard over pewter waves as a stinging salt spray rinses the bow, and somber Chinese women clasp handbags to their bosoms. The Hong Kong skyline looks like a badly exposed black-and-white negative fading over the stern.
January is not the best time to be fooling around this channel, and I think about how much this city has changed since I was last here four years back and in many visits before that. Since the British ceded control two years ago, Chinese bureaucrats, in their fixation with numerical metaphors, have insisted that China and Hong Kong will remain "one country, two systems" for another 50 years--decades in regular calendars, a mere nanosecond in the Chinese way of thought.
But Hong Kong is still Hong Kong, the most astonishingly beautiful and exotic of Her Majesty's former possessions, with its skyscrapers squeezing against mountains, its anthill of humanity riding double-decker buses and boarding high-speed hydrofoils that churn the channel--a sea of people packed in a staggering city-state, crowded and improbable. I'm staying with friends in Central--and I'm on this ferry, getting away from it all, heading for what Hong Kongers call "the outlying islands." A group of schoolgirls on what's no doubt a class outing shriek happily on the stern as the ferry splashes water on them and Lamma Island--about five square miles and the third largest of the outlying islands--emerges from the gray.
The ferry docks at Yung Shue Wan (Cantonese for Banyan Tree Bay), a fishing town on a horseshoe-shaped bay where most of Lamma's 8,000 residents live. There are no cars anywhere. In fact, Lantau is pretty much the only outlying island with drivable roads. There are good bargains in Lamma's craft shops near the pier, but buying things here would mean having to carry them all day.
Day-trippers might prefer to rent bicycles in the quaint village, whose most prominent landmark is the 100-year-old Tin Hau Temple, dedicated to the Taoist goddess of the sea. This is a typical house of worship in the boondocks, dark and thick with incense smoke. Tin Hau, veiled and beaded, glares from behind a spirit stand (something like an altar rail), warding off evil spirits.
Lamma is crisscrossed by hiking paths winding through rolling hills and along spectacular seascapes. The walk to Sok Kwu Wan (Picnic Bay), Lamma's second largest village, is over a concrete path bisecting the island through hills and valleys, passing the mouth of some nifty caves, once the redoubt of pirates.
In this village, one of the hidden culinary treasures of Hong Kong, one finds a row of waterfront restaurants--modest, efficient and clean. Lacking in frills, they make up for it with the delectable meals that pop from their kitchens. It's difficult to pick the best one, but a friend who should know recommended Rainbow Seafood, and she wasn't exaggerating when she told me that a meal there was well worth the trip to Lamma.
I ordered sweet and sour fish, vegetables with scallops, fried rice, chicken with prawns, and sweet rice cakes and tea for dessert. The tab? About $8.
I lingered in Sok Kwu Kwan the rest of the afternoon, bantering with fishermen and cooks before reluctantly continuing down the path to Mo Tat Wan, a tiny village on the lee side full of expatriates and with the best beach on Lamma, to wait for a ferry to Aberdeen and a cab back to Central and the bustle of Hong Kong.
It's morning again and I'm on another ferry ($2.20), this time heading for Cheung Chau (Long Island), a one-square-mile dot just off the southeast tip of Lantau Island that the British called Dumbbell because of its shape. There are no cars and only one serious settlement, although it's the most populous of the outlying islands. I hopped off the ferry to be greeted by a McDonald's at the end of the pier.
Hamburger joints notwithstanding, the town is entirely Chinese in character and fully dependent on its fishing nets.
Every May for three days Cheung Chau holds its Ta Chiu festival, which honors the Taoist god Pak Tai, ruler of darkness and protector of fisherfolk. There are dragon lines, Chinese operas, lion dancers and bands. So-called "floating children," elaborately costumed, appear to dance over the crowd; actually, they're held high atop bamboo poles, cleverly strapped into metal supports hidden under their clothes.
