Hong Kong Off the Beaten Path Tips by leffe3

With the building of the Nina Tower (tallest building in Hong Kong when completed) and the opening of L'Hotel within the complex, Tseun Wan will not be off the beaten path for long. But for now, the end station of the Tseun Wan line is visited mainly for the Sam Tung Uk Museum.

The town is the ultimate in HK living - the slums of the old villages cleared fo the building of modern apartment block living, schools and sanitation provided. Sadly, the buildings built to replace the slums are now slums themselves. But its interesting in its own right if you want to check out normal living in HK.

Sam Tung Uk Museum is what is left of the old walled village of Sam Tung Uk and then renovated to within a quarter of an inch of its life. Surrounded on all sides by high-rise, the Museum (free entry) is there to provide a perspective on 'how it was'. But the whitewashed, perfectly aligned walls, the open doored rooms leading to various displays is way too clinical to be anywhere near authentic. Displays are mainly photographs and salvaged home use goods. Incredibly disappointing, especially if you have schlepped all the way from Kowloon just to see it.

The Museum is 2 minutes walk from the Tsuen Wan MTR station.

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The walled villages of Kam Tin can be easily accessed from Tseun Wan (worth combining with the Sam Tung Uk Museum). Take the #51 bus (from the Nina Tower bus station NOT the bus station next to the Ferry terminal/KCR station) whihch runs every 20-30 minutes. HK$7.60 will take you all the way to Kam Tin (40 minutes) via the Route Twisk and HK's highest peak, Tai Mo Shan (957 metres). It's quite a surprise to climb the twisting lower slopes and then appear over the top, revealing a long, wide valley on the other side and few signs of HK's high rise apartments. The bus rattles on through the military town of Shek Kong and into Kam Tin. The road between the two places seems to be HK's used car centre - hubcap to hubcap of car yards with 2nd hand cars and wreckers yards line the road on both sides.

The walled village of Kat Hing Wai is the most 'complete' of them all - a couple of hundred metres beyond the bus stop. The main entrance is at the far end of the moated walls. The moat is somewhat rubbish strewn and there is a sad neglect to the place, even though people still live within the confines of the walls. Main point, however, is that many of the buildings inside have been built in the last 20-30 years . Nevetheless it's still an interesting place to wander down the incredibly narrow alleys, checking out the corner guardhouses.

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Kat Hing Wai may be the only complete walled city in Kam Tin, but hit the back streets and you still come across remnants of the old villages - the occasional meeting hall, homes with ornate exterior corniches. You have to work at finding them - even more so as when I was there in July, a whole site had been cleared ready for development - only the geometric foundations were in evidence along with the gateway feature. Sad, but that's Hong Kong development.

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