Hot out in Peng Chau

After a morning of household chores (eating a fried breakfast, playing on the Xbox and then having to empty the cat's litter tray) I headed down to Central to take the ferry out to Peng Chau.

It was roastingly hot, so rather than break myself on the harsh test that is Finger Hill, we sat down at the French bar in the town square and ate cheese for a couple of hours, waiting for friends to arrive.

Eventually they called, to say that they had arrived. In Cheung Chau. To be fair, these are both islands, one hosting a yearly festival based around climbing up a tower of buns without falling to your doom, and the other being the island my friends should have taken the ferry to.

To while away the hour it would take them to reach us, we went to a furniture shop to see about obtaining an enormous block of wood for my television to stand upon, then tried to walk to the other side of the island to see the temple and the grumpy cat we'd met last time.

We got lost (which is a fairly special thing to do, given how small Peng Chau is) and tramped through a housing estate before coming out back where we had started, just in time to meet our friends disembarking from the ferry. I began to worry that we would never get to the other side of the island; it would be a teasing mirage, to always be apprehended but never attained.

Luckily, we wasted no time. In going down the seafront to a Thai restaurant, and spending another hour eating food. On the positive side, I wasn't going to starve. On the negative, the other side of the island was no closer.

An hour later, we got up again and trudged wearily up one of the only two hills on this otherwise pancake-flat island, and walked down the other side into the blazing heat of 5pm Peng Chau. The air was stationary, the heat falling on us like a suffocating, two-hundred-percent polyester blanket. Although we reached the temple, at what cost? The grumpy cat was too tired to be grumpy, and was reduced to lying on the floor, unable to raise its head.




Still, we pressed on, walking down the beach past dead fridge after dead fridge. Peng Chau is the place white goods go to die; eerie phalanxes of deceased washing machines and fridge freezers, lined up like so many kitchen-appliance-themed tombstones. Eventually the constant heat and the dead air got to us, and we fled down a side street to find ourselves back at the Thai restaurant we'd had lunch at.

I was bamboozled. We'd spent half an hour walking to the other side of the island, yet it only took five minutes to get back. Was there some dimensional rift we'd fallen through on the way? Or was it just the constant sunshine warping my mind and sense of direction. Luckily the French bar was waiting for us.

But the French proprietor wasn't; he'd gone swimming, so we had to sit in the furnace for an hour until he turned up to feed us more bread and cheese. In short, a rather confusing day. Perhaps I was sunstruck.