The Saikung Peninsula in the New Territories is a popular playground for everybody living downtown Hong Kong to come and play in on the weekends. The area we wanted to go to was inaccessible by public car so we had to drive to a parking lot in the area, and then get a taxi to take us close to the coast. Then we hiked for about an hour, which got us to this nice, secluded beach. It was too cold to go swimming, but it's probably fantastic in the summer.
I went with my buddy Andrew. I told him to try and look cool for this picture, but...
His wife just had their second baby, so she's back in the States for a bit with her family. This allowed me to crash at his place for about a week, without intruding too much.
While I was in Hong Kong I took a ferry to Cheung Chau, one of the smaller islands in the area, for a couple of hours. As it's a popular day trip for everybody living downtown, and I went on a Saturday, it was quite busy.
There are no cars allowed on the island, so it was quite a nice place to look around. Above you can see one of the dragon boats that HK is famous for, with many bikes and bike-carriages in the background.
I think other than tourism, that the main industry is fishing, so here you can see a couple of fisherman in their tiny little fishing boats.
The coast was really nice, but unfortunately the weather was really dark and hazy, so none of the pictures turned out very well.
I had a fantastic time in Hong Kong. Although the weather wasn't great (cloudy with highs around 15 degrees most of the time), it's a very interesting city.
We ended up going downtown on New Year's Eve to watch the fireworks. They had 7 or 8 of the big buildings in Central (the main downtown area) rigged up with fireworks, so they were shooting them off the sides and tops of the buildings. It was pretty neat to see, but very brief. I think it was only about 10 minutes long.
I wasn't looking forward to coming back to Korea because I knew it would be freezing, but I got home yesterday morning at about 8:30. It was very cold and cloudy but dry. Within half an hour however, it started snowing like crazy, and within 6 or 7 hours we had about 25cm of snow. The roads were terrible and so my first two classes were cancelled, but it was business as usual for my last 4 classes.
The Saikung Peninsula in the New Territories is a popular playground for everybody living downtown Hong Kong to come and play in on the weekends. The area we wanted to go to was inaccessible by public car so we had to drive to a parking lot in the area, and then get a taxi to take us close to the coast. Then we hiked for about an hour, which got us to this nice, secluded beach. It was too cold to go swimming, but it's probably fantastic in the summer.
I went with my buddy Andrew. I told him to try and look cool for this picture, but...
