Macau Weekend

We went to Macau for the weekend - the Vegas of Aisia, Casinoville and architectural hallucinogen - its telecom tower competing with ultra-mod gambling cities, an artificial Venice, volcanoes, art deco originals and a 50 story gold shiny building that looks like the top half of a pineapple with its spikey leaves. Rampant chaos, explosive growth, the hint of an omnipresent underworld, all running at top speed in 35 degrees of South East Asian ultrahumidity. We navigated the first two of the three islands and went to the far side of the third, Coloane, where you can hide from the rest in relative seclusion and your kids can run on a beach and splash in a pool. But before I get into it I wanted to say that I was delighted to get this photo of you taken by Big George. I chopped out the rest of the pic, and built a groovy matching background - matching that is the quicksilver stripes on the Quicksilver top. Its so nice to get a pic of you, puts me in touch, and reminds me how you're rocketing - you look beautiful, fabulous, so I thought I'd post it here, where it pretty much belongs.



We did not much more than nothing, spent two days in the pool and on the beach to Fernando's, the best Portugese food in Asia, spicy, tasty, simple and volumous. Coloane has a black sand beach, (from the artificial volcano perhaps?), which I've only seen before in Indonesia, and the sea is an amazingly muddy brown - VERY different from the white-blue/green of SA. The hotel was lush, and the pool

Dai Long Wan camping extravaganza

On Saturday morning we went camping with a group of people. The trip had originally been planned for the Friday, but no one was organised by that stage, and the weather was so good the sandbank braai in the previous post seemed like the most sensible. The destination for the outing was Dai Long Wan, in Hong Kong terms a remote island beach with no cell reception. Greg and Pam have a yacht (here is Aiden on deck leaving the harbour), and the idea for the trip was to load all the camping gear and a number of people and kids onto it while others went in beachable zapcats so that the equipment and people could be taken ashore from the yacht. As you can see from the three piece photo above, Dai Long Wan is very beautiful; a mountained amphitheatre with a beautiful long, wide beach facing onto a bay with a couple of small islands in it. It took about an hour for the yacht to get there, half that to get unloaded and ashore, and we set up a camp site on the beach facing the bay. This is what it looked like by the time the sun was setting behind the mountains. Aiden and Evan had spent the afternoon running and playing in the water. The beach was almost a table-top shape in cross section; we put the tents on the escarpment of it and there was a slope down to the tidal part of the beach. Evan, surprisingly, found this feature very entertaining and put a good chunk of time into walking up it and running down, getting the giggles when reaching that stage where you are in danger of your upper body overtaking your legs.
What had been a lovely day, however, turned into a less lovely night. With all four of us in it, temperature inside the tent rapidly reached what felt like 400 degrees - bearing in mind that summer nights here range from about 25 to 30 degrees, with humidity in the 90s. At eleven pm I couldn't be bothered with the pretense any longer, so I got up, promptly got drenched in a ten minute downpour, and then spent a sandy and wet hour lying under one of the shade things that we had brought, pretending that two hundred thousand frenzied and starved mosquitoes weren't feeding on my face. I gave up this farce when the third mosquito had actually flown into my nose - not a very comfortable feeling. Then between short and intense downpours I tried unsuccessfully to take time exposure photos on the beach, until I eventually accepted that sitting and chatting to other people who were having a decidedly sub-optimal camping experience was the only real choice. Simon's brother in law, Allan, is finance head for the UN's refugee programme in Geneva, so that made for a unique conversation, from my perspective. When the dawn came it was beautiful, and people shook off a non-existant rest with brekkie and a swim and all looked like changing for the better - but not for long. Over the horizon out at sea a grey black wall of cloud had sprung out of the sea. I noticed as it grew, literally visibly, that two big fishing trawlers had taken shelter behind the island in the middle of the bay, a piece of shelter that our camp-site was decidedly lacking in my opinion. On the other side of the beach, perhaps a km from where we were camped was a dai-pai-dong, a very small beach restaurant type thing - but probably more accurately described as a fancy shebeen in South African language. I said to Ange that she should get cracking and take the kids to the dai-pai-dong because it looked like we were going to get pounded, and fortunately she did because 15 minutes later we were hanging on to the stuff that we had not managed to pack up, while a storm of unimaginable ferocity raged. An hour into this the sea had turned decidedly nasty. Simon and Greg took a load of stuff out to the yacht through the surf on one of the inflatables and found a decidely unhappy crew member who proclaimed that it's engine would not start leaving him at the mercy of the waves, and suddenly it looked like we were going to be spending another, very uncomfortable night on the beach - there being no other way to go home. Fortunately however two people who had been on the beach the day before, Rob and Emma, had to come back to Dai Long Wan to fetch an inflatable of theirs that they had left there the day before, and did so on a 28+ foot RIB. This is a big inflatable with a proper hull, and 2 big, high performance four stroke motors on the back. It's the type of boat that is used by the HK Marine Police's pursuit team, and by NSRIs around the world. You can load it (as it it takes 22 people, unbelievably), and travel in pretty much any sea - this pic comes from an Australian baot magazine, and they were raving about it too. Rob is mechanically gifted, he gets it completely, so not only did this offer a possible (super-efficient) way home, but also sorted out the yacht motor, because in half an hour he had fixed it. So then it was just the challenge of getting everyone and all the stuff off the beach in a much rougher sea than we had come to shore in. So from what was panning out as a bit of an ordeal with little children, 40 minutes later we were back in Sheung Sze Wan, having been blasted back in this ocean gobbler of a machine.

Sandbank village braai

It was just a perfect day in every respect (...drink sangria in the park, and later, when it gets dark, a movie too - Lou Reed); blue with white sky vistas, unusual for Hong Kong - booming heat, and a very lazy very warm sea. The bottom of the bay is close to flat, so although they look a long way out in this pic, both Oscar and Aiden can stand where they are and have the water come up to just above their belly buttons. But because it was spring, it turned and came in again with surprising speed and the last bits were going onto the portable braai just as the water was knocking on the door. 15 minutes later we were all carrying bits and pieces and wading back to the jetty. The problem with a sea so calm is that it lacks the energy of waves. This in turn means that you have to provide that energy if the guys want a bit of boogy board action, which they invariably do. Fortunately some of the older kids think towing is quite a blast, so there are others keen to play this role. Oscar Arro made a very significant contribution in this regard; without it the whole thing would have been a touch exhausting.

The photos below are all pretty much the same theme, nice day, fun in the sea.

I took this picture with the last of the days light in the background and Courtney holding the flash.

Below this are the colour versions of the two black and whites in the previous post. I think the one of Aiden popping out of the water is a really nice photo. I like the compositional triangles in the other one too, and the sense of cautious trepidation that it suggests. I think this second one is nicer in black and white than colour. Hope you like them, and are having a fantastic hot time of it in KZN yourself. I was thinking about the Ushaka slides and being there with you, and wondered if you'd been zooming them yourself, of late.

...and another perfect day on the 4th of July