Cheung Chau Biking

On what was Chinese New Years Eve, aka last Sunday,  I took a ferry to meet up with my pal Marco on the island of Cheung Chau (長洲), one of Hong Kong's 'Outlying Islands', near Lantau Island to the west of HK island:

Its about 35 minutes from Central by ferry.  Cheung Chau is a dumbbell shaped island about 2.5 sq km with about 30,000 residents (dangerously underpopulated by HK standards), most of whom live in the center portion of the island.  Because of the small size of the island,  there are no cars on the island aside from mini police cars and firetrucks and some delivery trucks.

As soon as I got off the boat I immediately recognized that this was the location for Wu Jing and Celina Jade's film "Legendary Assassin" (which reminds me, i never typed up my review!)

But Cheung Chau is perhaps best known for its annual 'Bun Festival' (包山節) , where guys climb up a christmas tree like tower covered with chinese buns and compete to see who can get the most lucky buns from the top...  it was stopped after a tower collapsed in 1978 but brought back a few years ago in a muted 'safe' version. :-P

anyway, here's my pics once I arrived:



its still mainly a fishing island apparently.  Although nowadays there is a lot of tourism and also people who commute downtown daily for work.

Before biking,  Marco and I stopped at a local restaurant for lunch:

ok, maybe I shouldn't have eaten so much right before... but I was hungry! :-P


Then a nice ride around the island to reach a road that led up to the top of one of the hills on this side of the island.

I didn't take a good shot of the hilltop, but suffice it to say, the hill getting there was steep.  I could have probably made it on my own bike if I hadn't had all that lunch...    but with this rental cycle I only made it about 2/3 of the way. :-P

There was a walk way up to a pagoda type rest station at the top of the hill.  It afforded some good views of the entire island:

Apparently the beach on this side is quite busy in the summer. There are also beach houses for tourists. There were a lot of copycat suicides there in the 90s. 


in case you forgot which island you just hiked to the top of...

looking to the north:

That's Lantau on the opposite side of the channel... all the high speed ferries go through this channel on their out to Macau. (yes, a red Turbojet hydrofoil on the right).


Next we headed back through the main part of the island.  It was quite difficult, the alleys between the buildings are quite narrow:


at times i felt like that scene in Return of the Jedi w/ the speeder bikes. (yet I managed to take a picture while riding anyway).


One of the local Daoist temples, dedicated to the God of the North (北帝), who is good for smooth sailing or something like that...

Marco brought me over to the local association's office.  They had some interesting old pictures on the walls:

thats what it looked like in 1927 apparently.  Except for the McDonalds (there is one),  not that much different actually...

During the bun festival, which takes place during the Buddha's Birthday holiday period, they do a lot of other random local tradition stuff... including apparently forcing children to do bizarre things like this:

Its not very clear from these pictures, but apparently they get two kids to stand and take photos for tourists.  One kid looks like their entire weight is being held up on the outstretched arm of the other kid... but in actually there's some metal frame going through their clothes to support their weight.   I guess it may fool some kids at least... and to keep it fresh every year they give them a new costume theme... sometimes its civic minded, sometimes its for comedic purposes only...


most of the outfits were traditional Chinese costumes, etc.  But they also throw some funny ones in...    It was hard to tell how old some of these were,  some of the newer ones were only 10-15 years ago, but some were more like 50+...

I should have taken better photos, but I managed to zoom in on a few funny ones:

on the left you left Royal HK police officer with a girl "balanced" on his service revolver... and on the right, they apparently recycled and turned the kid into a 1920s style Chicago Gangster...

So as you can see, the usually put something in the hand of the kid on the bottom to conceal the metal frame...

You can't see from the pic very well, but the kid on the bottom is dressed up like an old school Chinese drug addict with an opium pipe in his hand instead of a gun....    and appropriately he is being stood on by the Hong Kong Police... with his billy club out ready to knock some heads.  The sign next to them was some sort of anti-drug message.

No idea how old this thing is,  but i'm guessing it must be from the 50's?

Last but not least:

I'm guessing this was in preparation for the 1997 handover...    welcoming the People's Liberation Army to Hong Kong!

We rode around to the south side of the island,  they have a nice bike path there too:

Afterwards e also got a New Years dinner w/ some of Marco's relatives who live there on the island.   I didn't take any pictures there... doh. :-P

It was a fun visit.   I am tempted to go back during the bun festival to see how it is...