Hong Kong desert island is new tour destination, with junk trips run by couple revealing its beauty and recent past as refugee camp
Aboard their restored wooden junk, Rex Law and Sarah Yip offer trips to Tai A Chau in the Soko Islands, a thriving farming and fishing community 40 years ago, then a home for Vietnamese boatpeople, but now reclaimed by nature
Tai A Chau, the largest of the Soko Islands in the far southwest of Hong Kong waters, was home to a Hakka farming village until 1980 and, during the 1990s, a community of some 10,000 Vietnamese refugees. Now, however, it is only populated by birds, butterflies and reptiles.
In the past, few had the opportunity to experience the natural charm and tranquillity of the Sokos, walk along the deserted beaches, or search for clues to former human habitation. But an entrepreneurial couple from Cheung Chau island have recently started offering group excursions to the islands, on their lovingly restored 49-foot wooden motor junk.
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Rex Law Ka-kin was born into a traditional Cheung Chau fishing family (his father still helps out and advises on the junk). When Law and his girlfriend, Sarah Yip Chui-ha, took a year out from their careers and completed a year of travelling to 38 different countries in 2016, they found the experience had changed them profoundly.
“We didn’t want to go back to our corporate jobs in Central, but we needed to eat,” Yip says.
When the couple heard of an old junk for sale in Sai Kung, they made the bold move to invest their life savings in resurrecting an old Cheung Chau tradition and living afloat. It took four months of hard work to restore the vessel with help from a local boatyard. They renamed their freshly painted junk and home “The Floatudio” and both obtained all the necessary licences for offering trips.
Their first commercial excursion was to the Soko archipelago. “People were really excited because it’s so rare to be on a real desert island,” Yip says.
