First day of our New Zealand vacation

Here are a few pictures from the first day of our New Zealand vacation. What, you say? That doesn't look like New Zealand? You are correct. We missed our connection in Hong Kong and spent the night there.

There was snow in Beijing the day we left and a 3.5 hour layover in Hong Kong was not sufficient to make the connection. Air China put us up in the Marriott near the airport and gave us some essentially worthless vouchers.

There is only one flight a day on Air New Zealand so we had to wait 24 hours. Anyway, we took advantage and visited Tai O on the Lantau Island.

Tai O is a fishing village. Many of the houses are built on stilts. The Hong Kong tourism board calls it the Venice of Hong Kong. I've never been to Venice in Italy but it seems to be a bit of a stretch.

Lots of seafood for sale.

It seems mostly oriented to the Mainland and Hong Kong tourist. Most of the prices and descriptions are in Chinese. But as in most of Hong Kong all the vendors, etc. spoke English.

A lot of the seafood was dried.

And some of it was EXPENSIVE! That stuff on the far left is 6,800 HKD/jin or per 500 grams. That is about $800 USD/lb !!!

I'm not really sure what these are but an internet search suggests that they are salted duck egg yolks. We saw some packaged in the market and these were set out to dry or cure or something.

Many of the houses seem have  sheet metal covering the walls. I don't think I have seen this anywhere else.










On the way to the white dolphin viewing area we walked through a huge cemetery.  Chinese graves tend to be round and face the water. I imagine that the dolphin viewing platform is not very popular with Chinese tourists given how skittish they are about graves and spirits.

Some more of the houses.

These are the only dolphins we saw after climbing to the top of the hill.

I didn't expect to see these in Hong Kong. I snapped this picture looking out the bus window.

Here are some less rural posts about an earlier visit to Hong Kong.

Hong Kong at Night
Hong Kong by Day
Bird Park and Flower Market
Seafood Dinner