The New Territories On the weekend we went for a brief trip to the New Territories. The what? Yes - the New Territories. The bit of China that got handed over to the British in 1898 - 57 years after they took possession of Hong Kong. Hence the name "New Territories".

These days the New Territories are the remnants of the rural areas of Hong Kong - a conglomeration of old Hakka villages and new urban high-rises. It's quite an interesting place. The pace of life definitely feels slower than on Hong Kong Island or in Kowloon, and the residents look a little less well-off. (But there are still a lot of BMW's and Benz's zooming around.) Piles of wrecked or disused cars and shipping containers are lumped next to old temples, ancestral halls, houses and farms, all lined up along tiny winding roads. And then suddenly there'll be a sleek modern KCR railway station, conveniently located near a dozen or more towering apartment blocks. The whole place has a faintly transient quality - it's the buffer zone between Hong Kong and China, and buffer zones always feel a bit looser than other places.

I had the feeling that everyone was waiting for someone else to come along and tidy it up, but that no-one was particularly anxious for that to occur either. Unfortunately I don't really have any photos - for various reasons we ended up seeing most of what we saw from the inside of a public minibus, and when we finally did manage to get out and walk around we'd ended up at a Buddhist temple that seemed to be in a transitional state itself - moving from being a monastery to a theme park.

I guess the next thing to do is head north a few more kilometres and visit the ultimate human intertidal zone - Shenzhen.

tags: hongkong | newterritories

Labels: hongkong, kowloon, newterritories

  ¶ 5:49 PM