Here come the dragon boats

It’s ‘May Madness’ as the annual climax of the quintessential Hong Kong sport, dragon boating, approaches.

The biggest and best-known event is the Stanley Regatta on the May 30 holiday, but there’s plenty of local racing before then.

This Sunday is the Mui Wo Dragon Boat Race Day, with 35 mixed, 15 men’s and 11 women’s teams registered to compete.  The Cheung Chau races and the distinctive Tai O Dragon Boat Water Parade take place on the 30th, with the Discovery Bay competition on May 28.

Training run: Nicole Cromwell (left) and Lucie Element set the pace for the South Lantau Buffaloes

Dragon boats evolved out of the death of a loyal official, Qu Yuan, in the third century BC, who drowned himself by walking out into what is now Miluo River in Hunan. Historians still argue over why he  took his life.

But according to legend, local villagers paddled out to throw glutinous rice balls called zongzi to stop the fish from eating his body. From those origins we get the holiday – known variously as Tuen Ng, (or Duan Wu 端午), Qu Yuan, Zongzi Festival or the Dragon Boat Festival – and the boating tradition.

Contemporary dragon boating attracts plenty of non-traditional competitors as well as traditional village teams. At Mui Wo this weekend, Silvermine Bay, Tai O and Shap Long entrants, local outfits South Lantau Buffaloes, Lantau Boat Club and Discovery Bay Pirates and corporate teams from HK Disneyland, Li & Fung and Microsoft will also line up.

Buffaloes on the water: coach Darrin Dalton (rear) calls the shots

Tung Chung set to flush with fresh water for another six years

Twenty years after the first residents moved in, Tung Chung households are still flushing their toilets with drinking water and will be for at least six more years.

Currently all of Tung Chung’s 80,000 population uses freshwater from the Shek Pik and Tai Lam Chung reservoirs for flushing, in contrast to the use of saltwater in most of the city.

Pipes to carry saltwater have been installed but a pumping station won’t be built until reclamation for the Tung Chung East development has been completed in approximately 2023.

At an Islands District Council meeting last month, a senior Water Supplies Dept (WSD) engineer acknowledged that the pipes have been in place for many years.

District Councillor Eric Kwok, who raised the issue, said he had been told by the Water Supplies Dept (WSD) in 2009 that the pipes were already installed and asked why a temporary pumping station had not been built.

The WSD engineer said the original plan was to build the pumping station in the land reclamation area, but this was cancelled because the scale and planning for the new development changed.

He said WSD was working with Civil Engineering and Development Dept to make sure a pumping station, salt water service reservoir and pipes would be a part of Tung Chung reclamation and expansion. This was forecast to be complete in approximately 2023.

WSD told Legco last year that 345,000 of Hong Kong’s 2.5 million households, mostly in remote New Territories or islands districts, are still using freshwater flushing.

In a new report on local water supply, think tank Civic Exchange said Hong Kong was one of the world’s highest per capita consumers of water, with steep growth in demand since 1990. It says despite abundant rainfall the city is “actually more water scarce than parts of the Middle East.”

Photo: Shek Pik Reservoir (Lantau News)

When the movies came to Lantau

Lantau has never played a big role in Hong Kong’s storied movie history, but it has picked up enough cameos create its own, occasionally fleeting, back catalogue.

Without further ado, let’s find Lantau’s greatest movie moments.

Enter the biopic

Bruce Lee & I  李小龍與我

Lantau made two cameos in the Bruce Lee biopic, Bruce Lee & I, made three years after his death.

The movie is told from the point of view of girlfriend, Taiwan-born actress Betty Ting Pei. It was at her Kowloon Tong apartment that Bruce died after she gave him a headache tablet.

A scene with Danny Lee, who played Bruce, shows the pair strolling along South Lantau Road above the Shek Pik Dam, apparently chosen because of its spectacular setting. It’s a scene almost impossible to create today; the road carries far too much traffic to be closed down for several hours for a shoot.

We also see the couple hand-in-hand on Lantau’s favourite stretch of sand, Cheung Sha beach. Where else for a romantic stroll?

It’s not much. But it is Bruce Lee.

Cable car climax

Nightfall 大追捕

The 2012 thriller Nightfall isn’t related to Lantau at all except for a spectacular fight scene in the Ngong Ping 360 cable car.

The thriller stars Simon Yam in a battle of wits with ex-con Nick Cheung over a series of murders. As it nears its climax, they slug it out 20 metres above the hills of west Lantau. Spoiler: they don’t make it to the vegetarian special at Po Lin.

You can catch it in this trailer at the 1:40 mark.

Logging on

Project A 1983 A計劃

Lantau plays a brief but entertaining part in this much-loved Jackie Chan effort from 1983.

Set in the early 1900s, Jackie plays a marine police officer trying to take down a powerful pirate. Among other adventures he gets caught in a scheme by Sammo Hung to sell rifles to the pirate gang. Sammo hides the guns inside a floating log but Jackie discovers he’s been played and pulls a ruse of his own.

The log scenes (beloow) were shot at still-recogniseable Sunny Bay on Lantau’s north coast. The logs have gone but some of the uprights are still there (though possibly not for long).

These days of course Sunny Bay is best-known as the jumping off point for Disneyland, Lantau’s lasting connection to the fantasy worlds of Hollywood and Hong Kong government finance.

The rifles-in-the-log scene may not be a box office draw, but Chan’s 60-foot jump from a clock tower and the slapstick bicycle chase in Project A have become Hong Kong classics.

Andy and Maggie

Oh What a Hero 嘩！英雄

Here’s a whole movie starring Andy Lau and Maggie Cheung as young lovers from Lantau.

But the island takes a back seat to the plot in which a youthful Andy is a policeman and a successful taekwondo artist up against a rival policeman-taekwondo artist. Eventually they settle things in a taekwondo tournament.

Despite the presence of the megastars the 1992 movie didn’t register strongly with audiences or critics.

There isn’t a great deal of Lantau, either, apart from a running gag about Andy being from Mui Wo. Maggie’s house looks to be at Chung Hau, and Cheung Sha Beach racks up another credit.

For the emotional high of the Maggie-Andy kiss scene (above) the film’s producers snubbed Mui Wo’s grand ferry terminal in favour of the Tung Chung pier.

You can relive it in full here (Cantonese only).

Two Van Dammes

Double Impact

A police boat chase, exploding Mercedes, a climactic factory fight scene, and not one but two Jean Claude Van Dammes: the 1991 action movie Double Impact has all of those and a Lantau hideout, but still managed to earn a critics’ score of just 14% on Rotten Tomatoes.

JCVD plays twin brothers born in Hong Kong but separated as babies after triads murdered their parents. One has grown up a cigar-chomping bad boy, the other a businessmen with a penchant for plum-coloured shirts. Yet they both have the same Belgian accent and martial arts moves.

When things get a little hot the Van Dammes head to a safe house in Mung Tung Wan (above).  A quarter century on, it still works as a movie hideaway. It’s as remote as ever and it hasn’t changed; the shots of the jetty, bay and houses could have been taken today.

Unrelated, but a highlight anyway, is the marine police boat chase (it may even be off Chi Ma Wan). The Van Dammes evade capture by forcing Chinese gangsters and two Mercedes overboard. The discarded vehicles explode in the water, exploiting the well-known inability of a police boat to manoeuvre around a burning car.

If that’s not enough Lantau for you, the final death battle scene appears to have taken place in Tsing Yi.

Bonus fact: merely playing the part of a martial artist from Hong Kong wasn’t enough for Van Damme. He had to be one, and has lived here since 2006.

You can watch the whole Van Damme thing here.  The Chi Ma Wan scene kicks in at 32:20.

The Lantau of the mind

As Tears Go By   旺角卡門

The Oscar for best Lantau-themed movie goes to this 1988 romance-drama, the first by Wong Kar-wai who later became famous for Chungking Mansions and In the Mood for Love.

It’s another Andy-Maggie love story and another in which Maggie plays a Lantau ingénue – though there the resemblance with the Mui Wo slapstick four years later ends. The two meet when she goes to stay with Andy, a distant relative, in Mongkok where he and his brother (Jackie Cheung) are minor gangsters.

It’s mostly set in gritty Kowloon but Lantau has a small but critical part. We follow Andy as he heads to Pui O to find Maggie at her family restaurant. He decides to return home, and we see the ferry leaving Mui Wo, but he changes his mind again. Maggie runs to meet him and once again there’s a stirring ferry pier kiss.

They spend a couple of days together in Pui O before Andy hurries back to Mongkok to clean up his brother’s latest mess, the start of a downward spiral. At one point he offers to take his brother away with him to Lantau – but too late.

The brief shot of the ferry aside, there are no identifiable Lantau locations, yet it creates a mental view of Lantau as a distant other or refuge – not a million miles from the Lantau of popular imagination today.

You can relive it here.

Silvermine Beach river crossing to be upgraded to twin bridges

The Wang Tong River bridge on Silvermine Beach is to be replaced by separate pedestrian and cyclist bridges under a Highways Department plan.

The existing 1.5-metre wide bridge will become a 35-metre long crossing comprising a 3.5-metre wide bikeway and two-metre wide pedestrian path.

In a submission to the Islands District Council traffic and transport committee the department said the current bridge is frequently congested “when both the local residents and tourists use [it] simultaneously.”

“The lack of segregation also raises road safety concerns as pedestrians, cyclists and village vehicles may come into conflict with each other during peak periods .”

Source: Highways Dept

The department does not put a price tag on the twin-bridge project, but warns it will mean temporary closure of the existing bridge during different phases of construction.

It also does not specify how long construction will take but the environmental assessment report filed by the Environment Protection Department in 2013 said it would be approximately two years.

The project is the latest in the Mui Wo Facelift programme that has been underway for the past decade.

WEEKEND NEWS: Another MTR fault; Shirley Kwan; Raking it in

Local MTR service was hit with yet another failure near Tung Chung station on Saturday morning.

A signalling breakdown at 8:25 am meant that passengers had to wait 15 minutes for trains from Hong Kong to Tung Chung and five minutes from Tung Chung. Services returned to normal at 8:50.

The line ground to a halt for an hour in early April because an equipment failure caused a train to stop, blocking the line.

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Singer Shirley Kwan attended Lantau North Police Station on Friday afternoon, Apple Daily reported.

While she and her male companion declined to give details, the singer was arrested in March following an incident at the Auberge Discovery Bay Hotel in which an hotel staff member was assaulted.  Police say a 50-year-old woman will appear in West Kowloon Magistrates Court on May 24 on charges of criminal intimidation and assault.

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One property investor is already profit-taking from the Hong Kong-Macao Bridge – by selling parking spaces, Ming Pao reports. Since late last year Hung Lungtsuen has been buying parking lots in Tung Chung, anticipating a rise in demand after the bridge opens next year. He sold one parking lot, acquired for more than HK$90 million, for HK$110 million early this year.

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Unpopular Education Secretary Eddie Ng has drawn a lot of press this weekend for his appearance dancing with students at the Buddhist Fat Ho Memorial College in Tai O on Friday.

Local media have contrasted this with his repeated failures to appear at hearings on the controversial local school assessment system, TSA. While on Lantau Ng also paid a visit to Po Lin Monastery.

 

Photo: Wiki Commons

 

Mother’s Day specials

Lantau businesses and restaurants are lining up with special deals for mothers and families this this weekend.

Cavalli Wine is offering Il Calepino Brut or Il Calepino Rose at HK$160 per bottle. GF 9 Lo Wai Tsuen. Contact: 9205 5223  info@yolla.com.hk

Garden Plus in Pui O is holding a Mother’s Day sale. Discounts include soil 20% off, tools 10% off, pots 10% off, herbs and plants 5% off. Contact: 2980 2233 or Facebook

For Mother’s Day meals, Garden Cafe O is laying on a free carnation and a free dessert or drink of choice (supply of carnations is limited). Contact: 2984 2233 or Facebook

Café Isara is offering mums a complimentary glass of Prosecco with their first food order.  Contact: 2470 1966 or Facebook

At The Water Buffalo, mums get a free glass of Sangria at lunch or dinner. The menu will be a traditional Sunday roast plus full menu, along with Lighter Fare Gluten Free specials. Contact: 2109 3331 Facebook or thewaterbuffalo.com.hk

Regal Airport Hotel is promising a range of lunch and dinner specials, including an international dinner buffet with  King crab legs and Rose flower Bird Nest Mousse Cake at Cafe Aficionado, and a Mother’s Day set menu at China Coast Grill. Contact: 2286 6238 or 2286 6898

Novotel Citigate is offering special prices on its lunch, diner and afternoon tea buffets. Contact: 3602 8802

 

 

 

 

Dodging bullets on a Lantau trail

A surprise encounter with a cache of bullets sent police rushing up Nga Ying Shan this week.

Local resident Venus Khongphet and friend Mark Tee came across the hoard of around 800 bullets while hiking down a remote path on Tsim Fung Shan near Tai O on Tuesday.

Venus posted photos of the find to a local Facebook page. Forum members quickly told her they were likely blanks or expended cartridges used in British military training exercises 30 or so years ago. One Facebook friend called the police.

So Venus and Mark had another unexpected encounter when they exited the hike at Shek Pik – seven or eight members of South Lantau’s finest.

“We knew the bullets would be tricky to find, even when we pointed out their approximate location to the police on a map,”  Venus later posted on her own Facebook page.  So she headed home for a cold beer and left it to her friend to guide the police to the spot. As she explains:

Mark returned to Tai O and he, a uniformed police sergeant, and two ordnance experts climbed up to Nga Ying Shan, and managed to find the pile of bullets again. After the experts assessed they were safe to move the pile was collected into four or five heavy bags, carried safely down off the mountain, and taken away for further processing.

They eventually thanked Mark for his cooperation and sent him home buzzed with the excitement of having ascended an extra peak in the failing light on an empty stomach, and blessed with the opportunity to contribute to law and order on Lantau.

I was very impressed with the Lantau Police and their quick response. I was very scared to see these bullets, and I think the two guys who do this kind of cleanup are very brave. Even my friend Mark put in a big effort to help find the bullets again. It’s great to be part of the caring Lantau community.

She reminds that bullets are dangerous. “If you see them on the trail please look but don’t touch them. Report them to the police immediately.”

RTHK reported that police found the bullet stockpile “not suspicious.”

After Golden Week failure, LCSD vows ‘action’ against illegal campers

After its embarrassing failure over illegal beach camping during last week’s holiday, the Leisure and Cultural Services Department (LCSD) says it has referred the issue to other departments for “action.”

But in an email reply to Lantau News,  the department did not explain why no action was taken during Golden Week, when campers at Pui O and elsewhere spilled over onto the beach.

Incidents at Pui O, Mui Wo and Cheung Chau’s Tung Wan captured wide media attention, with some noting that mainland tourists were using the popular Pui O campsite as a cheap hotel and others pointing to the failure of authorities to act.  At Silvermine Bay, a local stallholder, Mr Chan, complained to Apple Daily about tourists littering and using the sea as a toilet.

In response, LCSD director Michelle Li Mei-sheung called on people to “comply with the law” – but did not elaborate on how her department would enforce the law.

However, department has vowed to increase patrols of Islands district beaches “as necessary.”

Spot the breach

In contrast to its passivity over breaches of camping regulations, which threaten public hygiene and beach ecology, the government has been energetic in laying down the law against live music. The Hidden Agenda venue has been raided by the Lands, Immigration, Food and Environmental Hygiene and Fire Services Departments.

The LCSD says setting up a tent or any structure on one of the city’s 41 gazetted beaches is an offence incurring a penalty of up to 14 days’ prison and HK$2000 fine.

“No camping is allowed outside the camping areas as designated by the management for safety reasons. Camping on any of the bathing beaches, including Pui O Beach, is a violation of the Bathing Beaches Regulation.

No-camping notices have been posted up at all nine bathing beaches in the Islands District, and patrols will be stepped up as necessary.

It says it has set aside 54 camping bays in Pui O for advanced booking by local residents. The other sites are available on a first-come first-serve basis.

The Pui O camping ground has become a regular site of controversy during mainland holiday periods. It is featured on mainland travel forums as a low-cost alternative to hotels and some tour companies lead tours there.  Four years ago police were forced to intervene after a small riot broke out as campers quarreled over limited spaces and food.

Hannah’s journey to no-wasteland

Hannah Chung won’t leave home without her stainless steel lunch box.

It’s the indispensable tool in her quest to live a life that creates no consumer waste.

But is that even possible in a city where strawberries come individually wrapped?

“I’m not there yet,” she admits, eight months into her zero-waste challenge. Speaking at the Lantau Health & Wellness Expo on the weekend she says it’s been “pretty difficult.”

It began with an epiphany in a supermarket late one evening. Everything was wrapped in plastic. She went home and looked in her bathroom cabinet, full of product in plastic containers.

“Outside there were styrofoam boxes everywhere. All of this just added up, I felt I needed to make a change. Once you have it in your mind you can’t unsee it.”

She found some inspiration from advice from online resources, including Zero Waste Home by Californian-based Bea Johnson and Trash is for Tossers by New Yorker Lauren Singer.

“I wanted to see if it could be done in Hong Kong, where convenience is prized.”

It’s certainly taken her out of her comfort zone. She’s worked with groups like the Zero Waste Alliance of Restaurants, which works on cutting restaurant waste, and charity Impact HK, which makes sleeping mats for homeless Hong Kongers out of plastic bags.

She has met with a lot of Hong Kong’s recycling community and has learnt to deal with the different types of plastic.

PET bottles can’t be cleaned properly and shouldn’t be reused but can be recycled, she explains. Takeaway food tubs can be recycled but only if they’re clean. “If they’re contaminated with food and oil they may end up in landfill.”  Polystyrene – also known by its trade name styrofoam – can’t be recycled at all.

At home, she’s donated and swapped a lot of clothes, made stock from food scraps and soaked citrus peel in vinegar to create a cleaning agent. She’s made her own toothpaste from coconut and baking soda and bought locally-made toothbrushes. For feminine hygiene she’s discovered the lunette cup.

The hardest thing is the preparation.  It takes a lot of time. But the stainless steel box is a great aid – it means she can buy food even from McDonald’s and not generate waste.

It’s been a steep learning curve. “At the end of the year I will review it, and see what I will keep.”

Time to Uberize Lantau’s transport network

Golden Week holiday period has come and gone and once again Lantau’s traffic network was hopelessly choked.

Visitors waited two hours or more in the Tung Chung taxi queue for a ride to South Lantau, the Apple Daily reports.

Rather than idle under the hot sun, some took one of the half-dozen seven-seater people carriers charging $400-$500 per vehicle to Po Lin Temple.

This is the kind of entrepreneurialism for which Hong Kong, prior to the food truck fiasco, was renowned.  It is illegal, however, and the Transport Dept, instead of expressing concern about the tourists’ discomfort – not to mention the failure of its policies – has vowed to work with the police to hunt these criminals down.

The problem is the city’s taxi industry is dominated by the owners, who have paid up to HK$7 million for a red plate. David Webb estimates this fleet of creaky old Crown Comforts is worth HK$118 billion, and it is the government’s role to protect the financial well-being of this powerful interest group.

Hence the resistance to change. In ‘Asia’s world city,’ drivers are unable to receive payment in any form but cash and are untroubled by competition from ride sharing services.

Lantau’s problems are exacerbated by the limited road network and government’s determination to squeeze as many people as possible onto the island for leisure-making.

The choice is either limit the demand for transport or increase the supply.

We’re not going to cap the number of visitors, so let’s look at lifting transport capacity. In the medium term we might upgrade the Tung Chung-Tai O ferry service and add extra and bigger buses, but the obvious immediate fix would be to track down the owners of those seven-seaters and issue them holiday period permits.

For local residents, it’s not just Golden Week. The taxi and bus services are maxed out over most weekends, especially in the hotter months.  If you’re a South Lantau resident needing to catch a weekend flight you’re better off begging a lift from your neighbour.

We wouldn’t be in this fix if the government hadn’t banned Uber and Didi services. Smart technologies are designed to provide the kind of flexibility to solve precisely these kinds of problems. When Golden Week rolls around again in October, you can bet the only change will be the Transport Dept inspectors trying to catch those providing a desperately-needed service.