Ark Eden is about a 45-minute walk from the Mui Wo ferry pier. You'll pass village houses, vegetable plots, babbling streams, hanging vines and lianas, huge black spiders sitting on silver webs, frogs croaking under enormous leaves and village dogs ambling along happily with their tails in the air. It's so far removed from most of Hong Kong life that you might feel you've stepped into another country.
What a place for schoolchildren - or anyone, really - to interact with nature. And that's exactly the point.
The story of Ark Eden began with the government's 2004 Lantau Concept Plan, which residents of the island criticised as being 'big on concrete, small on conservation'.
The residents felt the plans for Lantau would ruin its status as a garden island, rich in biodiversity. They had a different vision for Lantau; they wanted to preserve and showcase the island, so Hongkongers, especially schoolchildren, could interact with the flora and fauna around them and learn about concepts of sustainability. They called their idea Ark Eden.
So Jenny Quinton, who became Ark Eden's director, the late architect Neil McLaughlin and other residents hatched a plan to create base for environmental learning. In 2005, Quinton quit her job as a primary school teacher and Ark Eden was born.
'I wanted to look after everything that's beautiful. That's really what Ark Eden is about,' she says.