Neon Nights and Pink Dolphins - Hong Kong’s shades
Despite our guide’s admonitions, we waste a bit of time. This is Hong Kong harbour after all, where ubiquitous styrofoam cups are interspersed with shoes, plastic bottles and, oddly, the occasional garden implement bobbing about the waves. Our launch is 10 minutes slow steam from Hong Kong’s busy international airport and Boeings boom overhead carrying business suits and serious shoppers to and from the city. Hydrofoil ferries race past on their way to Macau and beyond. It doesn’t feel like prime wildlife habitat. A stones throw away across the harbour are the high rise apartments and skyscrapers that most of Hong Kong’s 6.97 million people call home, making it one of the most densely populated parts of the world. Nearby, dredges work on a massive reclamation for a new Disney theme park. And somewhere, sight unseen, Hong Kong’s sewage flows relatively unchecked into the harbour waters. But surprisingly soon someone clocks a pink dorsal fin and the cry goes up – dolphin at one o’clock. The front railing of the launch is jammed with elbows as cameras click, recording the distant speck that is our first Chinese white dolphin of the day, Sousa chinensis. Which is pretty exciting. Probably more so because of the location. Who would think that here, in the harbour of a bustling hustling city renowned for its shopping and business and neon lit nights, we are treated to one of the world’s rarest sights, a pink dolphin. But hang on. Isn’t it the Chinese white dolphin? What’s with the pink? Actually, it’s both. And when it’s born it is dark grey, turning coat as it matures. Just to confuse things even more, if you see the same species swimming off the coast of South Africa or western Australia, it will be grey, and you’ll call it, more mundanely, the Indo-Pacific hump-backed dolphin. Only in Hong Kong and China’s coastal waters are they pink and called white. There is still some debate about why the dolphins are pig pink. Most educated money is on the blushing theory. With swimming such hot work, this suggests the dolphins flush blood to the surface as a cooling device. About 1000 animals live in the brackish, silty water where the freshwater Pearl River flows out of China to meet the sea near Hong Kong, and round here they are a bit of a star, the official mascot of the ceremony when China resumed sovereignty over Hong Kong waters. Surprising then, when our guide Ho Tak-Ching tells us many locals still don’t know they have dolphins living in their harbour. The Hong Kong Dolphinwatch tours attract mostly foreigners - Japanese, ex-pats, Britains, north Americans, Aussies and Kiwis. Tak-Ching is excited about meeting a pod so close to Lantau Island. About 400 dolphins used to breed and feed along a 10 kilometre stretch of its coastline, until reclamation work for the new airport turned nine square kilometres of sea bed into runway and transit lounges. Now about 85 animals live here, and the launch usually has to steam to a marine reserve for sightings. As the dolphins stooge around the boat, Tak-Ching reels off a list of threats they face, from boat collisions, toxins and pollution, to habitat loss and reclamations, to overfishing and tangling nets. “Hong Kong people like to eat fish,” she says. So do dolphins. Part of the problem is the way people like to fish. An official notice board on one jetty warns fishers off prohibited ‘dangerous’ fishing practices – “No toxins, no explosives, no dredging, no electricity, no suction.” Off the water and back in the human crush of down town Kowloon we pass a sartorial policeman preening his plate-glass reflection, smoothing creases and getting his truncheon on straight. We’re heading for the underground. The blast of air-conditioning is both shock and relief after the sticky sauna of Hong Kong in high summer. Hong Kong’s transport infrastructure is an unexpected bonus for we two newcomers, making getting around both simple and fast. Torrents of buses, big and small, pour along the tarmac. Snakes of red taxis wind their way up Victoria Peak. Below the surface the slick rail runs, rumour has it, within 15 seconds of the printed timetable. Our destination is Sai Kung peninsula on the east side of Hong Kong, famous for its pretty harbours and seafood restaurants where you can choose your own fish from the aquarium before tickling its bones with your chopsticks. Most people don’t get past the restaurants, and it seems many locals don’t know about its two country parks laced with walking trails, beaches and a marine reserve. As the guidebook says, “The country parks are Hong Kong’s best kept secret, and not only among visitors. One can easily find local residents who have never set foot in (them) beyond a roadside barbecue site. Their loss is your gain.” We test this out on our hotel receptionist. She knows Sai Kung well. Every week with her family she goes there for a slap-up feast of fish and shrimp. No, she doesn’t know there are walks there. And she remains under-whelmed, though news of picnic and barbecue sites gets a bite. Without a doubt the area is quiet. No cars and very few people. Crickets chirrup, frogs croak, butterflies flit and spiders spin. The day shift animals. Night-time brings out the larger porcupine, pangolin, civets, wild boar and python, but we’re back in our hotel pool by then. Sai Kung peninsula lives up to its hype – it does offer some of the best scenery and isolated spots in Hong Kong. From the high trail are views of blue water bays, islands and fishing villages, whose fish farms help fill the restaurant tanks. Workers scoop shovelfuls of small fry from a punt into the fish pen, which erupts into a boiling roiling mass as the feeding frenzy unfolds. Watched patiently by two reef herons, alert to the occasional mis-directed sprat. But it pays not to look away from the trail for too long as you walk. The penalty is a face-full of sticky web. Spiders from the Apocalypse set mantraps across the tracks for latecomers like us who stop to take photos and take in the view and end up rushing to make the bus before darkness and mosquitoes descend. One, Shelob, created a partial eclipse of the sun as she moved across her web. Sai Kung and Hong Kong’s other country parks may be a ‘best kept secret’, but it’s one that’s now being shouted from the rooftops. The Hong Kong Tourism Board is keen to promote the territory’s hilly interior, coastline and natural ecology. Hong Kong has one of the highest population densities in the world with six million people living in 10,000 square kilometres, but that has left large amounts of space with no people at all. Seventy per cent of Hong Kong is rural land, and 40 per cent of this is under protection, which allows it to boast one of the globe’s highest ratios of conserved parkland. And make no mistake, it is boasting. Hong Kong is proud of its proportions. It wants to show its other, green face to the world. It wants people to take a break from shopping and check out its 23 country parks, three marine parks and marine reserve. The country parks network took root in the mid-1970s, with 21 in place after just three years. Progress then slowed, says Dr Wong Fook-yee of the Agriculture, Fisheries and Conservation Department. People cottoned on to what they meant for development and opposition increased. It is a huge challenge to manage natural areas in the midst of so much humanity – in Hong Kong terms the numbers using parks may be small, but small is a relative term. Last season nearly 11 million people visited the parks, leaving behind 3400 tonnes of rubbish. Dr Wong’s department recently ran a conference on how to balance development pressures with the need to protect ecology. The balance is important, he says. Urban people need open space to get in touch with nature. One of Hong Kong’s special sites is the bird sanctuary at Mai Po Marshes, a bird nerd’s heaven just short of the boundary with mainland China. Originally mudflat, the area around the Mai Po Reserve has commercially grown brackish water rice, shrimp in ponds and fish in farms. Now its 405 hectares of reed-beds, mudflats, mangrove forests and shrimp ponds are nature reserve and sanctuary for 350 species of birds. Some are resident but most stop over on their way to and from summer and winter grounds as far flung as Siberia and Australia. We’re talking serious distances here, up to 13,000 kilometres for some migrations. And we’re talking serious numbers – 68,000 birds stay over winter, and spring brings 20,000 more migrants. While Mai Po was designated an area of special scientific interest in 1976, it doesn’t feel like prime wildlife habitat. On one side commercial fish farms still supply the city’s restaurants, on the other the dubious waters of the Pearl River flow into the South China Sea, and planes roar overhead to and from its new international airport. Yet here you can find the endangered black faced spoonbill. Only 800 are left in the world and they winter over in Hong Kong, migrating in summer to breed along the west coast of Korea. We visit Mai Po at the wrong time of year – its August and high summer, hot and humid, and our skin is leaking as we sit hopefully in the baking tin hides. But we wipe the sweat from our eyes long enough to spy a solo black faced spoonbill that missed the annual migration. It may be the wrong time of year, but still the ponds are busy with feeding, preening waders - grey herons, whimbrels, godwits, egrets, sandpipers, redshanks and stilts, not to mention drifts of dragonflies. The marshes are managed by WWF on behalf of the Hong Kong government. A big part of its role is education. Each year 400 school groups visit, and in 2004 a new wetland education centre will be opened. We watch one cluster of children cavort with insect nets and tweezers, learning about the marshes’ 400 insect species, its fish, otter, snakes and crabs. I’m temporarily distracted from Mother Earth by one young lad’s footwear; the soles emit blue flashing lights and sound. Somehow, here in Mai Po, these shoes epitomise Hong Kong’s double life – consumer paradise meets nature haven. Reserve manager, Lew Young, says part of WWF’s money to run the education programmes and manage the marsh habitat comes from selling shrimp farmed in the ponds. Not only does this bring in money, maintaining the ponds helps keep the mangrove forests alive, which is good for the fish, which is good for the birds. A virtuous circle. Mai Po’s mangroves make up half of all Hong Kong’s remaining mangrove habitat and are the sixth largest stand of productive mangroves in rural China. The shrimp farming techniques used at Mai Po are age-old and sustainable, and the product is famous in Hong Kong restaurants. Shrimp larvae are flushed into the ponds on incoming tides, from the open water of Deep Bay. There they fatten up on mangrove leaf litter. Harvest happens at night, when the shrimp are most active. Ponds are drained and as the water flows out a sluice gate the shrimps are trapped in a net hung across the gap. Small ones are put back to grow some more; large ones head for market. In recent years harvests have decreased, Dr Young says, because pollution in Deep Bay makes the water less productive. Pollution is only one of the issues facing the small but important reserve. Other threats are siltation from land reclamations, and disturbance of the mudflats care of Chinese fishermen who come to catch mudskipper fish by day, and birds by night. The latter are being dealt with, says Dr Young. As we walk around Mai Po reserve’s high perimeter fence on dusk, birds fly over its gnarly barbed wire barricade to their favourite roost sites among the shrimp ponds. The fence was built in 1986 to deter illegal immigrants crossing the border from China. The armed police patrol we meet suggests this threat is still taken seriously, and at least one of the tall watchtowers has eyes scanning the mangroves. Mainland China’s proximity and the issues that raises come up often enough when we talk with Hong Kong’s residents. Post –1997 and the territory’s return to Chinese sovereignty, the “one country, two systems” approach seems to work for politics and business, but people are wary of their big neighbour’s impact on the environment. Overfishing, toxic waste, pollution, bird disturbance - the blame is laid at China’s feet. The fear seems real - the Pearl River drains one-eighth of China’s catchment, and puts it on Hong Kong’s doorstep. What China does, Hong Kong has to live with. Some consequences are already washing up. We are told Chinese factories can no longer dump waste into waterways, but young Chinese white dolphins are dying, apparently victims of toxins already in the marine ecosystem. Autopsies reveal high concentrations of toxic materials like mercury and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) in their blood. Going green is a challenge for Hong Kong, says Stephen Wong, public relations manager of its Tourism Board, but it’s a challenge taken seriously. “With a population close to seven million you need this awareness.” He says efforts to clean up the air include converting taxis to lpg and electricity, providing reliable public transport, putting buses on to “green diesel” to minimise fumes and getting them to shut down their engines while waiting for passengers. We encounter some of Hong Kong’s huge population on Sunday in downtown Central, its main business district. Thousands of women have overrun nooks and crannies, sitting on rugs and mats, talking, laughing, strumming guitars or in prayer circles. The masses and the noise are raucously reminiscent of a bird colony – perhaps Mai Po Marshes in high season. They are Hong Kong’s Filipino domestics, 40,000 – 50,000 of them. Local law gives them a day’s rest a week, and they choose to share it en masse. I wonder if they’ve been to the country parks. Travel Fact File How to get there: We flew to Hong Kong care of Cathay Pacific which offers daily flights out of Auckland. Public transport from the International Airport on Lantau Island to the city is fast, efficient and simple to use. When to go: Hong Kong can be hot and humid from April to September, with temperatures up to 38 degrees Celcius. It’s also the rainy season, and typhoons are possible between July and September. Guide books suggest the temperate climates of autumn and spring (20 – 25 degrees Celcius) makes them a good time to visit – October to December, and April to July. If you want to experience the Chinese New Year festival, be there in January and February. What to do: The Hong Kong Tourist Association website, www.hkta.org provides all the information you could want about the territory, seasonal promotions and festivals, or e-mail hkta@iconz.co.nz © Marieke Hilhorst/ORIGIN NATURAL HISTORY MEDIA |