Junk Trip

Since last Thursday, our friends Ajeet and Rahkee from Denver have been visiting. We have had such a great time going out with them. Probably the best part of the stay was yesterday's junk boat trip. Drew and I have wanted to go on a junk trip since we got here, and since we weren't getting invited to one any time soon, we decided to plan one ourselves, with Rahkee and AJ being the perfect excuse.

So, just before Drew and I left to go to the US, we hired a junk boat and a caterer. After that, we just had to recruit enough people to fill the boat; that's where friends of friends come in. It really wasn't that difficult of an event to plan. I'd say a child's birthday party is harder even.

On the big day, we had 28 people, and the boat max was 30. The boat picks everyone up at a pier right in downtown Hong Kong. As we had catered the food, everyone else just needed to bring their own drinks for the day. It was quite funny; there were perhaps 9 junks all trying to pick up passengers from the same pier, all about the same time. (Apparently the junk companies don't communicate with each other). So, a junk would pull up for 5 minutes, and if all of the passengers weren't there, the junk would pull away from the pier and circle back, letting another junk pull up for a few minutes to collect it's passengers. Well, we didn't know that, so I was on the boat, Drew was on land corralling people, when suddenly our boat pulls away leaving a lot of people on the pier. "Ah, excuse me? Excuse me, boat driver, sir? We need to go back.... We are leaving people behind..." Of course he doesn't speak English, so luckily there was a Cantonese speaker on the boat who conversed with him and got it straightened out. By the end, everyone got on the boat.

We then boated for an hour and a half out of the main city and around the island to a nice little beach called Clearwater Bay. We actually never went all the way in to the beach. We simply swam around at the back of the boat, floating on noodles, and using a surf boat as a cup holder. We had lunch out on the boat, then once it was late afternoon, we turned around and drove back to the city. Overall, it was a very relaxing and fun day out on the water.

We got REALLY lucky, and it never rained once. That was the most stressful part of planning this whole experience. If the weather is bad enough, the junk company makes you reschedule the trip (understandable) but then you have an non-refundable catered lunch to eat alone. Or, if it's only pouring and the junk company won't cancel, then you have to hope your passengers still show up. We made them pay ahead of time to hopefully deter this behavior. It poured on Friday, was on and off on Sat., but by Sun (junk day) we didn't get a drop. How lovely!

There was one other miscommunication with the boat driver that made for an eventful afternoon. For some reason, our boat kept drifting towards other boats; apparently our anchor wasn't doing that great of a job. So, at one point the driver makes us all get back in the boat, turns the engine on, and drives further out in the bay to get away from the other boats. Well, we didn't realize that; we thought he was actually making us leave the bay altogether, which would have been a bad time for two of our passengers that had swum to the beach for fun. Luckily, we again had the Canto speaker converse with the driver to understand his intentions, and the two people weren't stranded. But, they did have a much longer swim back to the boat.

 

Overall, though, great day.