repulse bay
A random Tuesday off seemed a good excuse to head to the city. With not much of a plan in mind, we ended up jumping on our first minibus (I am losing count of the transport forms available here!) and heading to the non-city side of Hong Kong Island. The drive was very cool, after cutting across the middle of the island we stuck to coastal roads along the south of the island. It is gorgeous around there, sweeping bays, islands dotted in the ocean and apartment blocks gripping to cliff sides. My wee guidebook said Repulse Bay was worth a look so off we jumped, drawn to the stunning looking beach. We wandered through highly manicured gardens and jungle-like trees and appeared on the sand. It's as pretty as it looks in the pictures and I was immediately regretting not having a bikini with me… until we got close to the water. Sadly we are yet to find a body of water that actually looks appealing for a swim. There were dead fish floating around and lots of bits of plastic and other rubbish to contend with so no swims today.
Instead, we spotted a colourful looking spot at the end of the beach which turned out to be probably, no definitely, the craziest temple I have seen. Lots of mosaic and bright colours with animals, buddhas and goddesses all standing side by side. And all this perched at the end of a bay, reaching down onto the beach, really quite a cool spot.
After a cold drink we’d kind of been there done that so we jumped on a bus back to the city, this time taking a different route over the island where we got to check out some pretty crazy huge houses (actual houses, not apartments… a rarity!), as well as the famous Happy Valley racecourse. Deposited in central we decided to go for another guidebook favourite, Michelin-starred dim sum. After an absolute battle to find the place (GPS is quite bad as it is in HK due to all the buildings, let alone trying to find something that is underground!) we jumped in a short queue and ordered somewhat at random. We soon found ourselves being bought steaming baskets of random Michelin level dim sum, surely our taste buds were about to be blown out of our mouths? Disappointingly not. The infamous BBQ pork bun (which usually I love and was most excited about) had this weird crunchy sugary coating on top that just didn’t work in our humble (and probably wrong) opinions. The beef short ribs were hard to get the meat off the bone and had a weird flavour to them (they probably weren’t helped by the fact that I have been having a bit of a meat-related crisis lately after watching “What the Health” (Netflix doco) and seeing some dubious looking meat in the supermarkets here). The other bits and pieces were ok but not amazing, probably the best thing was the spongy cake type thing but it certainly wasn’t Michelin star worthy. The restaurant was constantly crowded with huge queues so we were definitely questioning the sanity of our judgement at times, there are a few other locations so we might have to try again at the original one sometime.
