On Saturday Hannah wanted to go to the beach. So we took a taxi round to Sai Kung….
and then a kaido across Port Shelter to Sharp Island and Hap Mun (Half-moon Bay) beach.
This is Sai Kung town from the Kaido. In the background is Ma On Shan and to the left the ridge that Daddy hiked along last month.
Hap Mun is an small attractive beach in a nice cove.
Once again we thanked our good-fortune for being able to live in Hong Kong.
The beach was ripe for improving and H went to work rearranging the sand with gusto. And the water was very pleasant for swimming.
Hannah and I swam out to the platform together. Unfortunately H got a small cut on her foot, but the lifeguards were charming and efficient in patching her up.
Hannah and Daddy on the raft.
We caught the last Kaido home at 6pm and had dinner in Sai Kung Town. Daddy chose 'A######'s Ranch', encouraged by fond memories of 'Texas', our favorite Tex-Mex-Jap steak-house at Opera City in Tokyo.
AR is "dedicated to delivering top quality real Texan smoke-house foods" and "serves arguably the best American grub this side of the USA". I'm sure it is a fine example of its type, and the staff were lovely, but it just showed us how Asian our tastes have become.
The ambience was authentically US right down to the high proportion of super-sized customers. The next table had a group of 6 ladies who clearly didn't get to Hong Kong in economy-class seats. I don't just mean very overweight, but rather morbidly obese to the degree that you rarely see in Asia, and which my med school friends referred to as 'land whales'. Frankly, I was surprised not to see plankton on the menu.
And from the menu it was easy to how they had ended-up that way. With the exception of boiled broccoli (super sized!) everything on the menu was deep-fried, smothered in cheese, and/or dripping in fat. Even the salads were high-calorie with the lettuce merely a delivery-platform for lashings of cheese and rich dressing.
We tried the mixed starters - onion rings, deep-fried wings and cheese 'poppers', fried potato with cheese, ribs and nacho chips - but could barely eat a quarter. Even Hannah found it too 'junky'. Rika's steak was very good but it knocked her out for the rest of the meal. I went for the light option of chicken fajitas which I liked but couldn't finish. Nostalgia then drove me to ignore the clogging feeling in my arteries and order apple-pie with ice-cream . The pie was nice but remained unfinished, as did Hannah's sundae, when we waddled-out with our bowels wondering quite what had hit them. We all slept-in on Sunday and I had to fast for the day to recover.
