Wearing flip-flops to work is nothing unusual for Pang Yiu-kai, 42, a sales engineer for a telecommunications company. Unlike office-bound colleagues, he asked to work from his home, situated in natural surroundings on the north coast of Lantau Island.
Little wonder, then, that he is peeved by other Tai O residents who hope the Government will some day build a road connecting the village with Tung Chung New Town.
'I chose a simple lifestyle; I just want to see it preserved,' he says. 'We have a natural environment here and it has already been destroyed by 10-storey high-rises. The SAR government should look towards China for development needs . . . the places that are less biologically important, less biodiverse places, where they won't do great damage to the ecosystem.' The Tai O quandary represents a familiar struggle among competing elements on Lantau, and one that is set to spread to Mui Wo with the news this week that plans are afoot to link the town to the new North Lantau Expressway.
Those elements are: residents who want to conserve their traditional lifestyle; neighbours who yearn for better links with the outside world; environmentalists who wish to preserve the island's diverse ecosystem; and the Government, which faces constant pressure to provide more housing and other forms of development.
Ophelia Wong Yuen-sheung - sub-regional chief town planner for Hong Kong who is involved with the development of Lantau - can only give assurances that planners will abide by the interim Territorial Development Strategy Review (TDSR) outlined in 1993.
'We envisage major growth around the new town [of Tung Chung], but we see other areas on Lantau are mainly for conservation,' she says. 'For the southern part [of the island], we will take an area-by-area approach, with some limited growth.' But when the review process wraps up with public consultation later this year, the planning strategy laid out at sub-regional level - and based on the 1993 report - will itself be subject to review.
