International Workers’ Day on May 1st is a public holiday in Hong Kong though we have only one day off, not four like the Mainland Chinese. We’d heard that Sai Kung was an interesting place to visit. Two buses and three MTR trains, about an hour and a half later, we arrived almost as far away from Discovery Bay as it’s possible to get within Hong Kong.

Sai Kung is known for its seafood restaurants, and there they were in a string along the seafront, all displaying fish and seafood ready to be chosen for cooking by customers in a way I find disconcerting. There is so much live fish held in plastic buckets and tanks here, and I can’t help wondering how long they are all kept like this, the crabs with their pincers tied together with raffia. Some of the crabs and lobsters waiting to be be sold are huge enough to feed a big family, and there were lots of big families out together yesterday lunchtime.

The harbour and bays nearby are also home to lots of little pleasure and fishing boats and we caught a gang of fisherman hard at work removing their catch of urchins from their spines and selling them fresh from the quayside.

Sai Kung seemed a bit boho, hippy shabby chic to me, with a longstanding international community. It’s a long way from shiny downtown Hong Kong and feels like a seaside resort, with surf shops and cafes dominating. If anything, there are more dogs here than even in Discovery Bay, perhaps because you can park your car here and so pet-unfriendly public transport is not the only way to travel here. I have never seen such a concentration of pet shops in one place and I even caught a “pet-friendly” laundrette, though that prompted horrifying thoughts of people putting their dogs in one of the larger washers for a bath. I bet someone’s actually done that.