Tag Archive for ‘Lantau Island’ at China Droll

Tag Archive for 'Lantau Island'

Save a Cow Today Day

Published

on May 27, 2010

in Beauty, Charity, Environment, Government, Hong Kong and Injustice

. 3 Comments

People - watch out! When you’ve reached a certain age, time starts rushing by so quickly. Today I was invited to HK International Arts Festival without even knowing that was what it was before I was standing in the convention centre looking at art. (I knew it was art because two of the guys there wore suits with short trousers - and bow ties.) I could have sworn it had only been a few months since the last arts festival, like last October, and then it turned out to be a whole year. I give up.

So that meant it’s also been a whole year since the last Count A Cow-day on Lantau, I figured, and sure enough, on Sunday we’ll be turning out in herds to count the bovine population of this beautiful island; every water buffalo, weird neck-cow and weird hanging chin-cow will be counted and registered in Lantau Buffalo Association’s annals.

We need people, so please come to Pui O School this Sunday at 8.30, wearing sunscreen and carrying the normal paraphernalia. You’ll be given an area through which to roam and a form to fill in, the association needs to know the state of the cows, the number of calves they have and how they behave. (That I can tell you right now: They stand around, eating. Then they chew the cud. Then they lie down for a bit. And in the case of water buffalo: They roll around in mud, then nip around a nearby river to swim.)

But aren’t they wild - feral? You ask. Why count them? Can’t they just be allowed to roam freely as before, uncounted?
You’ll be interested and maybe shocked to know that these peaceful and magnificent animals have many enemies, primarily in the shape of villagers (the cows are big and scary! They poo! And they slow down the traffic by several seconds each time they cross the road!) and by the Agriculture and Fisheries Department (we can’t have animals walking around. This is Asia’s World City! Where else do you see cows walking around? Among peasants, that’s where.)

Was it two years ago (probably five according to my warped sense of time) that the Ag and Fish decided to “move” 17 water buffalos from Pui O - by sedating them stacking them on top of each other in a truck? 16 died. So, according to my friend Tania, we must carry out the counting because “we need to do & do it right to get numbers accurately, then we know who or what gets nabbed, culled, BBQ-ed , in trouble etc and which buff who lives where & with what herd. ”

So make this Sunday your Save A Cow Day. Roll up, roll up. You were going hiking anyway, so why not combine it with something supremely useful?

Mooooooo!

Return of China Drool - Now With Cars!

Published

cecilie

on December 17, 2009

in Beauty, Dudes, Environment, Eyesore and Hong Kong

. 0 Comments

Following innumerable requests - from me - China Drool is back! Actually I don’t know if this guy would qualify as a drool if he hadn’t happened to be asleep at the time, but what beautiful colours, eh? I’m thinking: Vermeer!

Talking of cars, sleepy backwater Pui O is getting quite unbearable these days because of these metal menaces. I spend more time walking off the pavement to get around them than on the actual pavement. And I’ve been thinking this is strange, because the government has decreed (amazingly I have to say - this rule can’t have been set down during the time of the present administration) that on Lantau, only one car is allowed per household. Then the other day my friend told me the reason for this rural idyll looking more and more like Detroit.

When he and his wife bought their house a few years ago, they were advised by the property agent without any prompting from him, to split the house into two separate deeds just so they could have two cars. Being a lawyer he opted out of this, shall we say circumventing the law, and stuck to civic-mindedness instead.

Too bloody right! But he’s one of a tiny minority, the rest being people who don’t have cars at all. And when I say “cars,” I mean “vehicles that can accommodate a rugby team standing up, doing some light exercise.” Yep, two of these, or more, per household, is the norm. Nuke’em I say. A good Australian gave me a lift this morning though. Thanks geezer! But I’d still prefer to walk if it meant no more private cars in formerly beautiful Pui O.

Wintertime and the Living is Easy

Published

cecilie

on November 23, 2009

in Beauty, Environment, Home, Hong Kong and food

. 3 Comments

Cow. Dog. Poo.

Yesterday was another spectacular day in sleepy backwater Pui O. The villagers were celebrating the opening of the new village hall

and I felt myself transported back to Tibet what with the blue sky, flapping banners etc. Bloack and white bulimic Piles also wanted to take part in the festivities -there were two whole roasted pigs there.

Such a happy day in Pui O. So why would I spend it going to … Sha Tin??? More about that later.

What’s In a KUK?

Published

cecilie

on September 10, 2009

in Environment, Eyesore, Government, Hong Kong and corruption

. 0 Comments

Saw in yesterday’s paper that Heung Ye Kuk (Hong Kong’s countryside leaders, who control the 15% of the government not owned by property developers) will try to legalise dumping on private farmland. Not construction waste of course, only soil from the various infrastructure projects the government incessantly set in motion.

That’s strange - I thought dumping of construction waste was already legal? Here in Pui O there are not many square centimeters of land not covered in building debris.

“Kuk” means “cock” in Norwegian by the way, and not as in “proud member of the poultry class.”

I don’t believe that’s a coincidence.

City Living

Published

cecilie

on August 21, 2009

in Beauty and Hong Kong

. 1 Comment

Perhaps you think the best thing of the morning is sitting in your car on your way to work, bumper to bumper, seething quietly into your paper coffee cup whose coffee is lukewarm because some idiot sued McDonald’s years ago when she put the coffee cup in her lap and scalded her thighs, naturally blaming McDonald’s for making the coffee too hot.

Or maybe you’re already at your desk going through 140 emails, mostly spam, thinking you could be out of there by 9 this evening if you play your cards right and don’t go out for lunch.

Or you could prefer fighting your way down the escalator to get to The Centre, where you’ll have to queue up with 600 other office workers to get to the 42nd floor where you have to change lifts, queuing again, before you can finally reach the 67th floor and the relative peace of the office.

Me, I prefer this kind of morning:

Birdsong. Hopping water buffalo and insects. Picking up dog poo.

Ah, what a great life we have in the sleepy backwater!

And from tomorrow on, my mornings will look like this:

Yes! I’m going to Kashgar by train!!!! It’s so exciting, I envy myself!

A Drop In The Ocean

Published

cecilie

on June 9, 2009

in Uncategorized

. 0 Comments

Sunday was world ocean day and we swung around Soi Hau Beach on Lantau to do our bit for the old environment.

The beach was crawling with people armed with gloves and bin liners, and if they had come looking for rubbish, let’s just say there was no shortage. Not one local person was in sight, and I couldn’t help idly musing: Wonder if for example 50 Kenyans (or the equivalent) would have taken their kids and bags to go and clean up a beach in for example Norway?

It was a lovely day and as the thorns from plants dug into the skin on my hands and feet and my old gangrenous sores started playing up, I felt really nice and righteous. Especially seeing it was my birthday. As I pulled long reams of plastic (plastic really does disintegrate, contrary to common belief; it just keeps on existing in smaller and smaller pieces) off the many bushes and mangroves growing in the water, I wondered if the plants, strung and trussed up with plastic bags and fishing lines and -nets as they were, didn’t heave a sigh of relief as they were liberated. If they weren’t in fact, thinking in their little plant minds: Thanks for setting me free, oh civic-minded human without whose self-sacrificing help I would still be wrapped in crap!

Then again we humans were the ones who had put the rubbish there in the first place.

It’s a little like CLP Power (Hong Kong’s biggest electricity provider, the weirdly named China Light and Power Power) being the biggest polluter in Hong Kong for decades, then spending hundreds of thousands on full page ads saying: We care about the environment!

I Love Lantau I love Pui O

Published

cecilie

on February 25, 2009

in Beauty, China, Home and Hong Kong

. 3 Comments

It’s February in Pui O … and also July? Scary. But on a day like this, sun burning burning, sky sparkling sparkling, even birds squeaking squeaking it’s easy to forget all worries. And on a day like this, to live in Pui O and not having to get on that ferry and go into Central until the late afternoon - talk about privileged lifestyle!

On a day like this it’s easy to forget that we probably have less than ten years left of life as we know it only with hotter and hotter, longer and longer summers. Yep, global warming (followed by scorching and drenching) is really, really happening and there’s nothing we can do now. Irritating to know that all my efforts to save the future generations have been in vain, but at least I got to feel self-righteous and smug. Yee ha.

Keystone Knobs

Published

cecilie

on February 5, 2009

in Hong Kong

. 0 Comments

If you thought that Hong Kong’s Lantau Island, and especially Pui O, where I happen to live, was a sleepy backwater, you would be absolutely right. Apart from the fact that someone near my house gets burgled every night, little of interest happens here. But sometimes even we have exciting drama and trauma. This morning for example I was taking the dogs out for the daily 12 kilometer shuffle around the environment, when I came upon the above scene.

Two coppers, for some inexplicable, and I mean really inexplicable reason, had decided to drive their police van off the road and deep into the swampy sand. (For a fag? A snog? Who knows.)
An Australian couple were helping them push and I trotted off to find some planks of wood. One Norwegian who has pushed millions of cars out of snowdrifts and two Aussies who have driven millions of Holdens through the swell on W.A’s Eighty Mile Beach - we knew a thing or two about car rescue.

But the coppers didn’t. And they didn’t know how to drive. One didn’t have a licence, the other one must have got one last week - after having been tested on a go-cart driving around Happy Valley racetrack. We pushed, we pulled, we dug and we put planks and boards under wheels - every time the guy had pulled out of the quagmire he either stalled the engine or drove straight back into the hole, digging himself further and further in every time. The Australian guy begged them to let him drive, but all they let him do was dig while they stood around saying “take care.”

Not satisfied with how things were going, the couple’s dog finally decided to lend a hand:

But even with this expert digging the driver did everything to get more and more stuck, and succeeded. We left them after an hour, when they finally realised they had to call for face-losing backup and couldn’t rely on us discreet civilians. “Don’t put it on YouTube!” one of the cops whispered in panic as I snapped the last photos.

Is Lantau the graveyard of capable people (police)? 20 years of having a lot to do with them, one way or another, have convinced me that it is so.
Or … do police on for example HK island laugh their heads off at victims of burglary? Do they routinely not take the fingerprints of same, after having blackened down the whole house in fingerprint taking … juice? Do they make victims of burglaries drive 40 minutes to a police station to have their prints taken? Do they, when victims of a burglary who come home to see the burglar inside their house and manage to wrestle his rucksack off him with his water bottle inside (fingerprints and DNA), refuse to lift the finger prints off the bottle? When they go to the house of a victim of a violent robbery, do they turn up without a camera? And specifically, when they’ve caught their annual burglar, do they take him around to the victim’s house in handcuffs at one o’clock in the morning, waking her up and introducing the burglar to her?

I’m not sure what police procedure on Hong Kong island is but I think (hope) it’s safe to say: NO THEY DO NOT!!!! But on Lantau they do, and more. As I said to my friends this morning after the first 30 minutes of pushing van with fumes belching and sand spurting into our eyes: There’s a reason why they work here. Let me rephrase that: There’s a reason why they’ve been dumped on us.