Nan Lian Garden tea house

I do love a good cuppa, but even though I live in a nation of tea lovers, we just don't put as much love in brewing our tea as they do in the far east. When I opted to have tea in the Nan Lian Garden tea house in Hong Kong, I learned that the Chinese take their tea drinking very serious.

 I was greeted by a young woman who ushered me towards the shoe cabinet with an abrupt: Shoes off! After swapping my pink flipflops for the tea house bath slippers, I was shown to my table. It was a lovely secluded table overlooking the pond. The waitress handed me a menu with lots of tea flavours I had never ever heard of and told me to press the bell when I'd made my choice. I chose one that sounded very exotic, but unfortunately also very hard to remember.

The waitress returned with my order and placed, with a lot of precision, a tea cup, a teapot, a tea pourer and a saucer with tea leafs on the table. She then opened a small panel in the table and out came a kettle. She showed me how to boil the tea, how to warm the tea pot, the tea pourer and the tea cup with boiling hot water and finally how to brew and how to pour the tea. Nothing of that dunking a tea bag in a cup a couple of times and winding it around a tea spoon. This was serious tea making. I did enjoy that tea. How could someone not enjoy it after all the effort put into making it? However the cup of builder's tea I hurriedly made myself this morning tasted pretty damn nice as well.

Chi Lin Nunnery and Nan Lian Garden

To fist time visitors Hong Kong might seem like an urban forest of skyscrapers intertwined with busy roads, but if you look a bit closer, you’ll find some worthwhile treasures hidden away in this hectic metropolis.

Only a 20-minute metro ride away from Hong Kong Island, tugged away between a giant shopping mall and a busy cluster of highway overpasses, lies Chi Lin Nunnery. It’s not a terribly historic place of interest as it was only established in 1934 and rebuilt in 1990 in a Tang Dynasty style, but the utter tranquillity compared to the city noise outside its walls, makes it worth a nosy around.

It’s quite a large temple complex with wooden structures set around a wide open courtyard dotted with lily ponds and bonsai trees. The temples within the complex house several gold, clay and wooden statues of deities and impressive looking Bodhisattvas. Buddhist chanting and the scent of incense linger in the air. It felt mesmerising to walk around and watch local Hong Kongnese go about their prayer rituals.

Chi Lin Nunnery is connected to Nan Lian Garden by a street bridge, so I walked across and continued my visit in this large and meticulously kept garden. Every path, rock and hill you see are placed precisely where they are according to strict gardening rules. Grass is carefully planted patch by patch and plants are cut and shaped following specific methods. The cleanly swept walkways meander along several wooden structures also built in the Tang Dynasty style and along ponds filled with koi carp and colourful water lilies.

I popped into several of these timber pavilions and found that they housed riveting exhibitions on rocks, plants and Chinese architecture. Even though you can see the high-rises towering over the garden in the background, the setting is so calm that you’d almost forget you’re in Hong Kong. I sat in one of the water pavilions for a while listening to the Chinese pling-pling music that was playing throughout the garden, until my zen-like state was loudly interrupted by the grumbling noise that seemed to be coming from my stomach.

 Luckily the garden offers a solution for that. I found a veggie restaurant hidden away behind a waterfall, but I opted for a tea session at the tea house overlooking one of the bigger ponds. Which I will talk about in my next blog post. Stay tuned.

Tin Hau Temple at Stanley Beach, Hongkong

When I was in Hong Kong a few weeks ago, I decided to leave the craziness behind and hopped on a bus to the other side of Hong Kong Island. If Kowloon and Hong Kong Island is all you've ever seen of this bustling metropolis, then Stanley is a bit of an unexpected surprise. As it was for me.

The ride there was already quite spectacular. Soon after entering the Hong Kongese burbs, the road to Stanley meanders through lush scenery treating you to lovely views of the beaches and bays that line the coast. The ride only takes about 20 minutes and the bus stop is right across the street from Stanley Market.

The market has a lot of tacky and a few not so tacky shops. It's a shoppers Valhalla and good place to stock up on souvenirs, if that's your sort of thing. I'm not a big shopper and a bit of a miser when it comes to souvenirs, so I walked on to the beachfront promenade dotted with restaurants ranging from local to western.

I walked on along the boulevard and there next to Starbucks I noticed a temple, called Tin Hau and decided to pop in. The facade looked a bit plain and I later learned that it is not the original facade. I also learned that it is the oldest temple in Hong Kong and it was and still is dedicated to the Goddess of the Sea. But the inside is everything but plain. Inside it was like god worshipping on steroids.

It's small, but there were statues of gods lined up, side to side on a bench along the outer wall. A statue of Tin Hau herself was set in the middle. The deities were surrounded by colourful offerings ranging from soya oil, cups of tea and candles to apples, tangerines and pomelos. It was an explosion of hues that didn't leave an inch uncovered, but it made for a pleasing sight to see.

Another remarkable item on display that caught my eye was a tiger skin hanging on the wall. Apparently this particular tiger skin belonged to a tiger that appeared in Stanley in the 1940s and it supposedly wards off evil spirits.

It's probably the most quirky temple I'd ever visited and certainly more interesting than the tacky shops on Stanley Market.

Hiking on Lamma Island

Photo by Alen Ovuka

Stepping out in Hong Kong for the very first time can be very daunting. The smells, the sounds, the heat. That’s why I was so chuffed when my friends took me hiking on Lamma Island when I was on a trip to Hong Kong.

We took a ferry from Central that dropped us at the bohemian village of Yung Shue Wan. It doesn't exactly have a very Asian vibe, with its arty shops and trendy western style restaurants, but it’s a laid-back village that deserves a wander about. It’s a popular place for ex-pats to live who then commute into HKG. After we treated ourselves to a coffee and a veggie lunch at the Bookworm Café, we set off for our cross island walk.

Photo by dannydv off Flickr

It’s a 4 km trail, also known as the Family Trail as it’s super easy to walk. It crosses the island and takes in some iconic Lamma sites. There’s the kamikaze cave that was used by the Japanese to launch speed boat suicide missions during WW2.  There’s the halfway pavilion, which is a pagoda that sits on top of a hill treating you to distant views of the sea. You pass Hung Shing Yeh Beach, which we had all to ourselves when we were there, but I hear it can be crowded during hot summer days.

We walked across hills and valleys, until we ended up at the harbour of Sok Kwu Wan

Which is dotted with sea food restaurants. We had a couple of hours to kill before our ferry left so sat down for a delicious meal looking out over the water. The ferry took us back to Central where the hustle and bustle of this metropolis was all the more noticeable after our tranquil hike on Lamma island.

Photo by Alen Ovuka