It’s like something out of a dream sequence. As I chase two ageing Cantonese pastors through the Aberdeen Wholesale Fish Market on the southern coast of Hong Kong Island, I slip through a puddle of fish refuse. Left ankle inverts into a right angle and compresses sharply; there’s an audible snap as a major ligament in my foot splits apart like a too-taut guitar string.
45 minutes before, I sit at a restaurant nearby named Sun Yung Kei, when Stephen and Wilfred join the table. Stephen is 62 and wears a white tracksuit. He’s about to retire from the church, and Wilfred will take his place as head priest. I’ve already ordered, but they take control, make revisions, steer us toward the restaurant’s finest dishes.
The flagship is deep-fried sweet and sour pork served on a plate of ice with halved cherry tomatoes, blueberries and pineapple triangles. When it arrives at the table, it looks like a 1970s culinary fever dream: ambrosia salad or tomato aspic. However, once bitten, it’s apparent why it’s so hyped. High-vis batter shatters like glass candy. “The ice keeps it crisp,” Stephen explains.
There are hundreds of kilometres of hiking trails in Hong Kong
CP Colectives
We share food and beer. Stephen and Wilfred recite a litany of recommendations of things to see, eat and do on Lamma Island – until we realise we’re running quite late. Bill paid swiftly, the holy men insist on accompanying me to the ferry terminal. Stephen, who spent his childhood growing up on a boat – his mother and father both plied their trade on the waters as Tanka fishermen – suggests that we take a jogging detour through the fish market so that we can experience the culture of Aberdeen Harbour, where floating villages of thousands of families used to live and work on Chinese junk houseboats as recently as 50 years ago. Then, disaster strikes. My ankle combusts as I crumple onto the damp, malodorous concrete of the fish market. The two priests ferry me, hobbling, to the ferry. I board in a fugue state of pain and pork.
The boat thrums its way through the bay. Like the deepening waters, I go increasingly green, elevating my leg and hoping for the best. Within minutes, my ankle swells to the size of a grapefruit. Moments later, it’s a pomelo. By the time I arrive at Lamma Island I’m struggling to walk. I limp to a flat slab of concrete and lie supine, watching freighters, tankers, and junks cross the horizon, listening to the susurration of wind through the reeds, the murmur of water along the shore.
I limp to a flat slab of concrete and lie supine, watching freighters, tankers, and junks cross the horizon
Tucked southwest of Hong Kong Island, Lamma is car-free, which prevents me from exploring it in my current state but cultivates a sense of peacefulness, making it a haven for bohemians, artists, and expats. The filmic tranquillity of the place seeps beyond the painful throbbing in my foot. A man fishes from a pier. A woman makes an offering at a shrine. The clamour of Wan Chai, just a few miles away as the crow flies, feels aeons removed.
There are over 200 islands off the coast of Hong Kong, covering a territory of over 1,100 square kilometres. Many of them are rural, if inhabited at all. In many ways, they are the inverse of the city itself, which boasts 7.5 million residents as well as some of the highest population density and property prices in the world. In fact, it’s estimated that there are 6,700 inhabitants per kilometre, but in the busier areas, such as Hong Kong Island and Kowloon, there could be up to 20,000 people per square kilometre.
Back in Kowloon, where I’m staying, I drink a yuenyeung. It’s a mixture of tea and coffee. It takes its name from the traditional Chinese philosophy of duality (yin yang), which holds that there are opposite but complementary forces at play in the universe; bringing to mind the dynamic between Hong Kong and its wild places.
The Kerry Hotel in Kowloon, Hong Kong
Nearby, I’m patched up at the Kerry Hotel. A massage therapist named Edith reports my condition to the guest and relations officer Ellie who then enlists the security detail Kenji to ice my leg and diagnose the damage. It might be a few weeks before I can walk without pain. It’s time to take a moment and reassess. I had initially planned a feature on the mountains of Hong Kong, but with only one ascent under my belt – a 13km loop from Central Pier up, around, and down Victoria Peak – I’ll have to pivot. And the archipelago is singing its siren song.
The next day, I catch a taxi from Kowloon to the Sai Kung Public Pier in the northeastern part of the city and meet Bryan Ng, who runs Blue Sky Sports Club, represented Hong Kong in the stand-up paddling world championships in Denmark in 2017 and is chairman of the Hong Kong surf and SUP association. Yesterday, over 40 paddlers joined him for his father’s memorial service. Sam Ng, Bryan’s dad, won the first Hong Kong Dragon Boat international race in 1976 and competed for Hong Kong in the Olympics in 1976 in Montreal and almost a decade later in Los Angeles in 1984. Like the pastor Stephen, Sam was also brought up on a boat; both his parents and grandparents worked as live-aboard fishermen.
With my left foot held aloft, I use my arms to crabwalk down from the jetty onto the speedboat. The vessel is captained by a compact, middle-aged surf instructor named Wah. It’s a chilly winter morning in Hong Kong, the weather is 10°C and there’s a steady wind teasing the waves into white caps, but it’s sheltered where we dock the boat, on the leeward side of Sharp Island at the public pier. We take off around the breakwater and warm up quickly, churning jade water with double-bladed paddles from the decks of magenta-coloured kayaks.
I disembark for a comfort break at Hap Mun Bay, a crescent of soft sand backdropped by green and fragrant camphor trees and Chinese banyan, and then continue southwards around Elephant Cave and a peaked basalt promontory where 50-metre cliffs ascend in hexagonal columns. Sharp Island is part of a Unesco global geopark, designated as such for its unique geological formations formed when a supervolcano erupted 140 million years ago. Residual erosion carved out steep, cartoonishly beautiful islands that rise like pulpits from the sea. It’s like the Ionian islands, but only a 45-minute journey from the centre of the city.
Tai O Fishing Village
CP Collectives
I ask Bryan if there’s any cliffdiving in the area. “Not unless you’re OK with dying,” he responds. Then, as if on cue, we watch a body tumble 10 metres from a precipice. A crimson pool of oxygenated blood forms on the ledge around it. An immature wild boar has slipped and fallen like Piggy in The Lord of the Flies. We prepare to call the SPCA, but the animal rouses itself from the rock, bleeding profusely from its snout yet seemingly unperturbed, and leaps into the seawater. “Boars are good swimmers,” Bryan Ng notes as it piggy-paddles around the point. “It’ll be alright.”
After crossing the channel to Kau Sai Chau island, I’m shivering when we alight at Whisky Beach. The British imported a hearty drinking culture to Hong Kong. “Alcohol consumption is still allowed on boats,” Ng mentions. “You’re allowed to drink in front of harbour police when captaining a vessel” (New legislation which passed on 1 January 2025 prohibits this).
Wah retrieves us from the dock, and we cruise over to Tiu Chung Chau island to admire a sea arch before returning to Kau Sai Village. Tiled two-storey houses line the harbourfront. Fringed flags riffle in the breeze. Three women shepherd me, limping, up portable wooden stairs into a traditional fishing boat, then place a large bell-shaped wicker hat on my head for a photo.
There’s a small but ornate temple at the end of the village with characters painted in gold leaf on red lacquer, and two cerise ribbons waving in the wind. Incense burns inside. Ng and I both make a cash offering and light five sticks. Built 180 years ago to honour the deity Hung Shing, the temple was popular with fishermen and the Tanka boat people who would have lived off-land on this sheltered anchorage. Many of these same people, including Ng’s father at the age of 20, converted from polytheism to Catholicism when the church offered to build and gift them houses.
I return to Sai Kung to meet Bryan Ng two days later for a longer paddle. We travel further east into the fringe islands, past Dai To Jo, a cemetery island studded with gravestones and mausoleums. Only fishermen are allowed to be buried on the islet, and both Ng’s maternal grandfather and uncle were interred there. We watch a helicopter dip a large sling into the water and shuttle it toward the horizon. “There are often fires around Hong Kong. People like to burn things at graveyards to make offerings,” Ng says. “They’ll burn anything they think their relatives might need: money, food. Factories even make burnable iPhones so that they can stay in touch with their friends and loved ones in the afterlife.”
A view of Hong Kong Island from Victoria Peak
We kayak around Bluff Island to a sea cave that extends through the entire landmass. “That’s not formed by erosion, you know. It’s manmade,” says Ng. In April 1973, the British Navy used the island as target practice in a live-fire training exercise, deploying heavy artillery to simulate the bombardment of a coastal target, and blasting a hole through the island as a result. Bryan Ng’s father, Sam, decided to risk obliteration to go out paddling that afternoon, a fact that still triggers his mother to this day.
I paddle into the orifice (nota bene: this is not recommended by local authorities due to the hazard of falling rocks). The sunlight wanes and the volume of the ocean increases. The weather is gentle, so we don’t have to worry about smashing our heads on the cave’s roof. I take short, choppy strokes to avoid contact with the walls. Barnacles and limpets cling like white knuckles to the black rock. There’s something expiratory about the way the swells rise and fall in the crevice. Then, almost abruptly, you’re spat out the other end, below blue skies.
We do a few laps in and out of the passage before paddling a couple kilometres across the channel to High Island and Sha Kiu Village, which can only be accessed by boat. At High Island Seafood Restaurant we eat deep-fried pork chop wrapped ssam-style in Chinese lettuce; razor clams in black bean sauce; and everyone’s favourite, sea urchin served in a steamed egg custard.
As we sink bottles of Tsingtao, Ng remarks that not many people from the city centre come out here – maybe the older generation, who lived closer to nature. The ones that do, he says, are smiling when they leave. The ocean, he thinks, helps to heal the high-pressure stress fractures created by urban living.
Egg custard with sea urchin at High Island Seafood Restaurant
Nick Savage
On the way back, we stop off at a disused pier to explore a two-storey concrete building being reclaimed by nature, screw pines and banyans insinuating their branches around it like reaching fingers. Its yellow-washed walls have been tagged with a palimpsest of graffiti.
The structure is rumoured to be haunted and has been the subject of various television shows about paranormal activity (Ng informs me that nothing violent ever happened here; it just looks a bit spooky). The abandoned resort is famous for the zoo of artificial animals on its second-storey terrace. As we pick our way up the iron staircase of the fire escape, Ng comments that it’s probably the most dangerous thing we’ve done today.
Only one member of the menagerie remains. The others, such as a famously dilapidated giraffe, have been dismantled and removed. On the opposite side of the terrace, an elephant gazes out at the sparkling blue waters of the bay. Its ear is in tatters. Its grey trunk descends a few inches before the skin sloughs off, revealing a rusty metal spine of thick roller chain. Two Chinese characters have been tattooed on its flank with lime-green spray paint. “What does that mean?”
因果 or yīn guǒ, a Buddhist and Taoist concept prevalent in the East. Ng explains: “Yīn guǒ is cause and effect – sort of like karma. Everything happens because of something that took place before. So when you met those priests and sprained your ankle, it led you here, standing with me in front of this elephant.”
Just like the links of chain in the animal’s trunk, my experience in Hong Kong has been a concatenation of interlocking occurrences; determinism in motion. No matter how pleasant or painful, mad or mundane, every moment is met by the next. As I consider the characters on the grey hide, I wonder what that might have meant for the elephant.
