Wai Lingding Island

Last weekend we took a boat trip to Wai Lingding Island with Paul’s colleague, Mi, and Mi’s four-year old son, Eric.  The boat from Zhuhai’s Xiangzhou Harbor was packed with extended families – parents, children, grandparents – as well as a number of young couples and groups of workers taking a weekend holiday.  Lots of people brought snacks of dried seaweed, little sausages, juice boxes, and other treats.  The boat attendants handed out little bags for the trash from the snacks.  There was lots of excitement and laughter when the boat lurched over some big waves.  About half an hour later, there wasn’t as much laughter – many people were running to the attendants to get the bags and use them for a different purpose.  The rough water (from the far edges of Typhoon Haiyan) left crying little kids, embarrassed young lovers, worried grandparents, and a mess that the pretty young attendants were left to clean up after we docked.  Fortunately the four of us weathered the seventy-minute trip well.

Wai Lingding Island is one of several islands that are part of the city of Zhuhai, even though the island is much closer to Hong Kong than to Zhuhai city.  The island, as are many around the world, was focused entirely on fishing, and now its business is split between fishing and tourism.

We saw two larger tours led by a person with a flag, but otherwise visitors were mostly family groups.  We appeared to be the only non-Asians on the island (we’ve seen five other Westerners in Zhuhai in three+ weeks.)  Our accommodation was modest but up on a hillside, with very nice views of the harbor and the sea.  The island itself has some interesting rocks as well as several good beaches.

That afternoon we walked from one side of the island to the other on the No. 2 Greenway (slightly misnamed, as it’s a concrete path.)  Paul got his feet wet in the South China Sea.  We also stopped at a fish market with some very interesting sea creatures.

Saturday night we walked around the village, and then watched (on TV) a soccer match between a team from Guangzhou, China and a team from Korea.  The final score was a 1-1 tie, but the Chinese team erupted in celebration.  We didn’t find out until talking to Mi the next morning that this was because the match win went to the Guangzhou team because Korea had the home field advantage.

Rain and wind from the typhoon made for difficult sleep that night.  We got up fairly early, had breakfast, and walked up the mountain in the center of the island, fighting wind and intermittent rain.  Near the top we explored a “stone park” – a series of walkways and cut paths through a boulder field on the edge of the mountain.  It was quite windy up there, making walking on the rocks a little scary, but the views from the top were worth the trek.

We decided to skip lunch after the previous day’s boat trip.  Loading was delayed as the boat was rocking in the harbor and the gangplank was swinging back and forth.  The boat staff literally grabbed each passenger and threw them over the gangplank into the boat.  We were worried we’d have a repeat performance of the previous day, but the ride was actually much smoother (long swells instead of high waves) and no one we saw got ill.

It was fun traveling with Mi and Eric, especially because partway through the trip, Eric got more at ease with the two tall curly-haired white-face people, and he would even play a bit with us.  Once again we found that making connections with people is part of making a connection with a place.