Sai Kung: Hong Kong's Seafood Town and Country Park Gateway

Sai Kung Town sits at the western gateway to the Sai Kung East Country Park — the largest of Hong Kong's extensive country park system — in a position that has made it the territory's most important outdoor recreation hub while maintaining the character of the fishing village it has been for centuries. The waterfront promenade lined with seafood restaurants, the working harbour filled with fishing vessels and pleasure boats, and the hills rising immediately behind the town create a scenographic setting that seems implausibly rural given Hong Kong's metropolitan density. The journey from Kowloon by bus or minibus — 30 to 45 minutes through the suburban new towns of Diamond Hill and Hang Hau — is itself part of Sai Kung's appeal, the transition from urban density to coastal village generating the sense of escape that makes the town so popular with Hong Kong residents seeking weekend decompression.

The seafood restaurants along the Sai Kung waterfront operate on a model that directly connects fishing to dining — the live seafood tanks displayed outside each restaurant contain fish, crab, shrimp, abalone, and various shellfish that customers select before watching them prepared in the kitchen. The standard preparation is Cantonese: steamed fish with ginger and spring onion, stir-fried clams in black bean sauce, wok-tossed prawns in garlic and butter — techniques that treat exceptional-quality ingredients with the respect of simplicity. The prices are considerably more reasonable than equivalent seafood restaurants in Kowloon or Hong Kong Island, partly explaining the queues that form at popular establishments on weekend evenings and Sunday lunches.

The hiking available from Sai Kung Town through the Country Park system is among the finest urban-proximate wilderness walking in the world. The MacLehose Trail begins at Pak Tam Chung north of town and traverses the entire northern New Territories in 100 kilometres of coastal and mountain walking that passes through habitats ranging from mangrove estuary to granite-peaked ridges with views across the South China Sea. The High Island Reservoir's surrounding hexagonal volcanic rock columns — a geological formation equivalent in scale and drama to the Giant's Causeway — are accessible by boat from Sai Kung's harbour for a natural history spectacle that few visitors outside Hong Kong's hiking community are aware of. The sea kayaking routes through Sai Kung's island-studded coastline provide an alternative perspective on a landscape that is, by any standard, one of the most beautiful coastal environments in Asia.