vines in sai kung
stephen says...
To the barricades Stephen Vines on the fight to save the country parks and other puzzles. The battle to preserve the country parks, part 101 So the new head of the Country and Marine Parks board, Tang King-shing, has signed a charter aimed at protecting the entirety of the parks. It says something of where we are in the fight to preserve these areas that it becomes headline news when the person with responsibility for these precious areas is prepared to say he will join the fight. Call me naïve but surely it should be axiomatic that the park’s chief honcho would take his job seriously. Anyway support is far better than no support although suspicions linger that Tang, a former policeman, was put in this job to serve the interests of the government, which is quite different from serving the interests of the people. As matters stand all of the statutory government advisory bodies are stuffed with time-servers, sycophants and others who can be relied on to be government stooges. By tradition the post Tang now fills was occupied by someone with long experience of the parks alongside board members who possessed a wealth of knowledge. This kind of expertise is apparently no longer required for this and other statutory bodies. Barely a day passes without a property developer or some other useful idiot cropping up to say we really don’t need to waste all this space on country parks. And, as we have seen with the recent rezoning plans within Sai Kung Country Park, the authorities are increasingly showing a willingness to tolerate more development. If all current plans are realized we could have thousands of additional houses being built in the Sai Kung Country Park
24 | WWW.SAIKUNG.COM
The only positive thing about the increasingly high-volume debate over the park’s future is that it is encouraging formerly passive people to focus on our precious countryside and to do something to protect it.
The bureaucrats who run this department seem to think that all this conservation stuff is none of their business Meanwhile the Ag, Fish and Many Other Things Department, which has responsibility for the parks, keeps putting out figures for the number of visitors. These are deeply mysterious and almost certainly nonsense as people visiting the parks do not register and, although I am in the Sai Kung park practically every day, I have never seen anyone counting people in – not that it would be that easy as the park can be accessed in a number of ways. Time to destroy Pak Sha O? Apologies to those who are getting bored by all this banging on about conservation (actually that’s not a sincere apology, just a way of saying this topic always seems to be with us). Anyway here’s a bit more on these lines because there is no end to the relentless efforts to destroy Pak Sha O, one of Hong Kong’s best-preserved Hakka villages. The Xinhua Bookstore and the Xiang Jiang Group are pressing ahead with their plans to tear down part of the village and replace it with something
infinitely worse. It might be thought that preserving this little gem of a village was a no brainer but this is hardly the case when we have a Lands Department that seems to interpret its remit as being to build and build again. The bureaucrats who run this department seem to think all this conservation stuff is none of their business. However, as we have seen in other instances, they respond to pressure and the case for pressure here is very strong indeed. The Sai Kung Chinese restaurant puzzle Here’s a question that continues to puzzle me and, I guess, many others. Why is Sai Kung so notably lacking in decent Chinese restaurants? We have a rather impressive array of European food eateries and a number of serviceable dai pai dong Chinese fast-food outlets but when it comes to restaurants something is missing. Yes, I know the seafront fish restaurants are very popular but, my oh my, they know how to charge and their prices are excessive for such mediocre food. Then, for reasons only known to tyre experts, there is a rather middle-of-the-road Chinese restaurant with a Michelin star. These stars must be easier to get these days because the standard of food in this restaurant is far from exceptional. So what’s the problem? Maybe the answer is simple: if you can get away with serving so-so seafood at exorbitant prices, why bother to do something better? Surely there is a restaurateur out there who can see the gap in the market. Stephen Vines is a journalist, broadcaster and entrepreneur. He is the former editor of the Eastern Express and Southeast Asia correspondent for The Observer.