Lamma Island

Yesterday, Jake and I took a little scenic walk on Lamma Island, about a 25 min ferry ride from our Central pier. The allure of the island is that it's populated by only two small fishing villages and is very lush with jungley vegetation. It's a good place to escape the hustle and bustle of the city. 

We took the ferry from Central to the larger of the two fishing villages called Yung Shue Wan. As soon as you get off the boat and onto the pier, you see bicycles along the entire length of the pier. This explains the "how can people still live and survive on this island" question. There are still a few fishermen by trade, and we saw a few, but the rest ride their bikes to the pier every day and then take a ferry to jobs off the island. Also, other than some four wheelers, there are no motorized vehicles on the island.

Next, we walked through the little Main Street, which was quite cute, selling all kinds of trinkets etc. This town actually had a hotel and an ATM, so you knew it was legit.

Disclaimer, and I should have come clean about this long ago. I did not take the above picture. In fact, I didn't take any of the photos in this particular post because I forgot to. But, they are completely accurate in what we saw. I apologize in advance to the takers of these pictures. If you, picture taker, want me to cite your pics, I will. 

 To get to the trailhead, you walk through the little town, then at the end there is a fork in the road. Left is the trailhead, right goes to an athletic ground and a temple. I must have really wanted to show Jake the temple, because I overlooked the turnoff completely, and after visiting the temple, continued on in that wrong direction. We weaved our way through people's homes on this sidewalk, and it was very evident the people here were living very simple lives. Eventually, the sidewalk opened to this parking lot area, which is funny with the no cars thing. To the right was what looked like a hiking path with fallen trees on it, to the left a larger road leading somewhere we couldn't tell. We go to check out the trees on the path, and, as we are in the midst of climbing over and around the trees, spot this. 

BLAHHHhHAaaaaaaaaAaAAA. Jesus! was my response to seeing this thing. As we backed out from the fallen tree, we look around and literally there were 5 more of these guys all around us that we had just never noticed. I'm honestly surprised now we didn't run into one of the webs. It was as big as it looks and in our minds must be poisonous. In reality it's a Golden silk orb weaver spider, genus Nephila, that is poisonous but not lethal to humans. Oh, that makes me feel better. The cool thing about these guys is they have been around for MILLIONS of years. Cray cray. 

Needless to say, after I got us unlost, we still noticed these guys everywhere on the island, especially dangling over our heads in the trees along the hiking trail. If I grew up on this island, I think I would leave because of these spiders alone, let alone the economically depressed villages with nothing to do. 

The hike itself, or scenic walk rather, was lovely, with views of the coast line going through dense vegetation in the "mountains." Ha! Mountains.....

After about a hour on this scenic walk, you end up at the other fishing village called Sol Kwu Wan. This one was made up of only fishing boats, houses, and restaurants, but very picturesque. We actually saw people on the beach, as it was low tide, digging for clams!

The "docks" we just boards nailed to each other haphazardly. The boats were all small with single props, but they must get the job done. We saw a dog leaping around on these docks totally at home. A salty dog. Ha! 

At this point I made my second major mistake of the day, in addition to getting us lost and almost eaten by giant spiders. The ferry to the larger village comes every half hour. The ferry to this smaller village comes ever hour and a half, and we had just missed it. Oops. We decided to spend the time drinking Jack and Coke (from a glass bottle) in a small cafe by the water, so not a bad way to kill some time. Luckily Jake was a good sport about it all. Funny thing was, all of the restaurant owners knew all of the ferry times exactly, and they would use it as a tactic to get you into their restaurant. "Ohh, next ferry not til 7:30, you eat here and wait...." Clever!

Also along the trail we saw a kamikaze tunnel where the Japanese would hide speed boats during World War Two to use for suicide attacks on Allied ships. If I didn't think there would be giant spiders ready to pounce in there, and if I had a headlamp, we might have gone exploring.

We also saw several beaches with nice bbqing areas. Both of them would be lovely to spend an afternoon on, but both are within sight of a large coal fired power plant that kinda ruins the mood. The power plant provides electricity for Hong Kong Island, but Lamma Island gets to house it. And apparently after heavy rains, the waters get polluted. Considering that it rains heavily everyday, I don't think we'll be coming here to swim any time soon. 

Overall, it was a fun adventure, made more adventuresome by my planning mistakes. Adventure's out there!