Peng Chau- another island hike



Actually, less of a hike and more of a walkabout. While SB was in Thailand watching one of his largest teammates get schooled by a small, Thai boxer, I sojourned to Peng Chau with Cousin Shirley. We met at Central Pier 6 at 9:20 am and boarded for a ferry ride to the tiny island.


It is a really, really small island and without the breathtaking views offered by some of the other places we have visited, but there is a lovely local community to mingle with. Peng Chau is a sleepy island village, where the locals take to the trails and spend lunch in the village center's restaurants and market, or sit in chairs under trees in the late afternoon. Almost every house and shop had a row of chairs along the facade, which was very welcoming and inviting. I admit that I spent a few minutes daydreaming about living in a place where the whole community moves to the porches in the waning part of the day. Certain parts of Ithaca, New York are like that but not every house on every block as in Peng Chau.


We descended from the hills close to lunch time and perused through the market until we came upon a small restaurant (shop 26). Shoils asked if I was hungry but I wasn't due to the suspiciously bad tasting char sui bo lao bao (pineapple bread with bbq pork stuffing) that I consumed at the ferry pier. I bit into it and noticed a particularly bad taste. I would have asked for a refund but I got the stink eye from the shopkeeper because I was seen frantically spitting out the food into the trash right in front of the shop. Not good for business. But selling spoilt food can't be too good for business either.

Anyway, we went a few more steps and Shoils made another polite comment before I realized that she was subtly telling me that she was ravenously hungry. We hightailed it back to the restaurant and she inquired if it was dim sum (yum cha), which it was. The place served dim sum old school style with carts or carried steamer trays laden with delicious treats. As far as I could count, there were six layers of steamer trays serving very large portions.


It was some of the best dim sum that I have had! We are fans of the Lee Theatre dim sum with its delicate and beautiful dishes, but this was entirely different. Shoils used the term, "robust," for the sizes. I know that it is hypocritical of me to disdain large wontons and rave about large dim sum, but the taste was exquisite. We had dumplings with meat and quail eggs on top that were phenomenal, along with ribs, char sui bao, and some strange wrap of noodle, bean curd skin, meat, and chicken that was very tasty and hung off the bowl. We were going to get the siu mai but we were stuffed to the gills. The ladies next to us ordered it and they were enormous, with crab roe spilling out over the top. Yum!


Our timing was perfect because a few minutes past noon, the placed filled up. There were customers ordering dishes to eat while standing in the street, and more than a few locals ran off with plates to their porch chairs.

After the meal we combed over the various beaches and I collected sea glass. The beaches had a lot of coral as well, that I want to collect but am not sure of the legality or other implications. Is collecting dead coral fragments allowed?


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