Trip to Grass Island

It was a beautiful Sunday. After the thunderstorm on Saturday, the temperature on Sunday was not too high and I thought it was a nice day for a trip with my family. It was 8:30am in the morning after reaching consensus with my wife on the destination of the trip. We packed our stuff and rushed to the minibus stop and began our fantastic trip to Grass Island. It is a remote island located in the northeast of Hoi Ha Wan in Sai Kung. The local villagers are fishermen and you will expect to see and experience the fishermen's life, now a vanishing heritage that can only be seen in Hong Kong History Museum. It took us one and half hours on bus ride and another thirty minutes boat ride before getting there. Upon getting off the boat at the pier, we followed the trail to the Tin Hau Temple (Goddess worshipped by fishermen). We finnaly reached the top of the island after a fifteen minutes walk along the path leading from the temple. There is a large piece of grassland seldom seen in Hong Kong. You can have a bird's eye view of the rocky shore that is smashed hard by strong wave propelled by the prevailing easterly wind in autumn and winter. I flew kite with my daughter. She was excited to see how the stong wind failed the kite. The kite kept spinning without any tendency to fly aloft. I played hide and seek with my daughter. She enjoyed it very much and kept chasing me on the grassland. While I am chasing my daughter, my wife proposed that we both took off our shoes and let her run barefoot. Why did she have this suggestion? Immediately, I figured it out. A few months ago, we read an article from a local newsaper about a survey on the 'natural experiences of local kids'. The findings showed that quite a large population of kids in Hong Kong never step on grass barefoot. Only a few spend their holiday in the country parks. My wife's suggestion of letting our child run barefoot on the grassland was great. My daughter really enjoyed it and I thought it was a wonderful learning experience to a kid. After spending two hours on Grass Island, we went back to the pier and headed for a return trip.