Sai Kung

Today it was my friend Colin's 40th birthday, so we surprised him with a party on the beach at Sai Kung. This took all day to orchestrate, dragging a tent and a sleeping bag and a mound of booze from one end of Hong Kong to the other.

It's not difficult to get to Sai Kung: it's just a train and a train and a bus. To get out to the beach is another bus and a boat and then an hour's hike over the top of a hill and down to the beach, which would be easy apart from having to carry a winecooler and several bottles of champagne over.

Champagne, incidentally, is one of the best drinks to take camping, as you don't need any tools to open it. Or if you have brought a Cossack's sabre, that's all to the good as you can then fight off wild pigs, angry AFCD officials, etc etc.

As we hiked up the hill, we heard a loud animal grumbling. After a few minutes' pause, a stream of cattle staggered past us. Some of them were quite large, and as the cooler was bright red, we were just a little bit worried about being gored. Thankfully, none of the buffalo/cows/iguanas/whatever these animals are got angry with us.

Some of the people on the trail got angry though. It's amazing that even out in the countryside, far from crowds and the pressure of the city, Hong Kongers still won't give an inch to people walking in the other direction, even if they're struggling under the weight of three bottles of champagne and a plastic box full of wine and steaks. Dammit.

The beach is lovely; the first time I've camped on a beach since I was 18 and driving around Britain in a Citreon Dyane with my old friend Dan. That time we'd ended up on a million different campsites, all strewn with rabbit shit, before happening on a deserted beach in Galloway, led there by the advice of a drunken Geordie and a promise of 'a makeshift barbecue'. That's for another time. The beach tonight is a wide expanse of soft, cool sand, with a toilet block, and twelve of us roasting sausages over an open fire while the surf rolls in on the beach.

The only unfortunate thing, after eating my own body weight in cake, home-made marshmallows and wine, is that I'm boozed out of my mind and can't write, so this will have to be a short entry tonight. Perhaps when more hungover tomorrow, I'll continue to wax lyrical on the joys of camping in Sai Kung, or else I'll bemoan the heat, the lack of broadband internet, and my need for an xbox. Let's see...