We spat in the eye of the gloomy weather forecast today and made a little trip on a crowded bus to 大噢  Tai O , a fishing village town on the north coast of Lantau Island, just along the way from the airport. Roads on Lantau being what they are because of the topography of the island, where tiny outposts cling on for grim death to the slivers of land between steep green hills and the sea, we took a weird circuitous route through the green countryside and it took the best part of an hour to get there.

Tai O appears to be a centre for dried fish and most of the shops on its main streets seem dedicated to the display of various sorts of desiccated seafood. We ate boiled cuttlefish which doesn’t taste of much and is more or less pure protein, and a confection called mango motcha, in which a large slice of succulent mango is encased in a cloud of unctuous sticky rice flour paste, which makes the mango a lot less slippery and easier to eat than it would normally be, and catches the drips. Also on offer were Tai O doughnuts, not doughnuts at all but rather nuggets of batter deep fried and coated with sugar.

We wandered around the little town to see the vernacular stilt houses made of some sort of galvanised metal sheet. It was all quite atmospheric, if a little run down. As the afternoon wore on it did become almost as crowded as Venice if not as hot. Returning by ferry to Tung Chung, we passed under the new Hong Kong – Macau – Zhuhai bridge, which appears to have become a spot for fishing and ‘plane spotting.