COUNTRY LIFE 01: THIS AIN’T NO COUNTRY CLUB

And now, the first in a three-part photojournalism series of How dEFROG Spent The Chung Yeung Festival.

First up: Kam Tin Country Club!



As mentioned previously, it’s not really a country club so much as a rural playground where you can BBQ, or play football, or play on inflatable structures under the watchful eye of some Cthulhu creature, or look at rabbits, pigs and chipmunks in jail, or ride around on battery-powered scooters, or catch goldfish in a wading pool, or have some snacks. (That picture in the center? That’s the siu mai dumplings I had to tide me over til lunch.)

The football and BBQ activities were the product of seven (7) busloads of Koreans, who were having some kind of get-together. It was funny to see all the football players take a smoke break after the game. But they seemed to be having a good time. And the BBQ smelled good.

Anyway, this is what people do to amuse themselves up in the New Territories. There’s a certain low-budget country charm to it all, though there’s a certain tiredness to it as well – not as quietly desperate as, say, similar parks I’ve seen in mainland China, but it’s in the same genre, I suppose. Still, everyone seems to have a good time, so why not?

I also like the stacked-pillbox architecture you tend to see out that way.

Okay, well, so much for Kam Tin. Up next: dried seafood in Lau Fau Shan!

Living for the city,

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COUNTRY LIFE 02: MY SEAFOOD, LET ME SHOW YOU THEM

Part 2 of a three-part photojournalism series of How dEFROG Spent The Chung Yeung Festival.

For lunch, we went to nearby Lau Fau Shan, a tiny village in Yuen Long that evidently has some kind of deal with the local tourism agencies, who bring daytrippers there for lunch. There’s quite a few seafood restaurants there, one of which I ate at the last time we took a trip up to the New Territories. We ate at a different one this time, and the food was pretty good: the usual batch of steamed fish, steamed prawns, roast chicken, sweet’n’sour pork, garlic scallops and vermicelli on the half shell, pak choi and all the rice you can eat. Good food!

To get there, we walked through a marketplace where dried seafood, snacks and similar items were the main attraction.



PRODUCTION NOTE: The restaurant in the pic above isn’t the one where we ate. That’s one of the restaurants on the main roundabout.

Next: Hunting for crocodiles!

Are you going to eat that,

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COUNTRY LIFE 03: I SAY WETLAND, YOU SAY SWAMP

Part 3 of a three-part photojournalism series of How dEFROG Spent The Chung Yeung Festival.

After lunch, we headed off to the Hong Kong Wetland Park, which has an interesting history in that it was built in part to give a home for a wayward crocodile that some trucker brought back from the mainland with the intention of eating it, only for the croc to escape into the Shan Pui River and grow large. It caused a media sensation here, not least because crocs are not native to HK.

Anyway, they eventually built the Wetland Park as a sort of nature preserve to create an environment where people could see the natural ecosystem of wetlands. Like so:



“Pui Pui’s Home” is where they keep the croc (who was named Pui Pui in a contest). We didn’t see her, though. She was off-duty, I guess.

We also checked out the museum where you can learn all about what lives and grows in the wetlands – with a special emphasis on frogs, which I approve – and walked around the actual wetland area. We saw a lot of mangrove crabs that day, I can tell you.

Anyway, it was interesting, though one can be forgiven for walking around the wetlands and thinking, “Dude, it’s a swamp.” Still, there’s a peaceful beauty to it, and it’s educational. Also, no mosquitoes. (I'm curious as to how they do that – maybe we just got lucky that day, but HK is very big on mosquito control, what with Dengue Fever and Japanese Encephalitis being two popular afflictions round these parts.)

I imagine certain parts of the Everglades offer a similar experience (only with way more crocs and mosquitoes the size of housecats). No wonder Carl Hiassen is so cranky about Florida property development. Speaking of which, we did see some old truck tires washed up in the mud by the bird-watching tower. This IS Hong Kong, after all.

And so much for the Chung Yeung Festival.

INSTRUCTIONS: By the way, you can click on the mosaics at any time to access the full set of pics.

It ain’t legal huntin’ alligator down in the swamp boy,

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