Sustainable Hong Kong tourism: visit the Unesco Global Geopark on a DIY trip through beautiful Double Haven to Lai Chi Wo
Take a ferry through the sheltered waters of Double Haven, past Plover Cove Reservoir and Port Island, taking in the oldest and youngest rock formations in Hong Kong to a Hakka walled village and its revived rice paddies
As the ferry to Lai Chi Wo leaves Ma Liu Shui, you can see you are within a geological feature. Tolo Harbour was formed by the sea inundating a valley carved through one of Hong Kong’s main fault lines, the 60-kilometre-long, 750-metre wide Tolo Channel Fault, extending northeast of there, and through Sha Tin Valley to near Lai Chi Kok in West Kowloon.
The Hong Kong Unesco Global Geopark has a grand title, yet is something of a curate’s egg: good in places. It comprises seven areas in eastern Hong Kong, and while the “star” rocks are the spectacular, columnar jointed volcanic tuffs of the Sai Kung Peninsula and islands, there are other sites that few but a geologist might appreciate, like Ma Shi Chau (literally Horse Poo Island) which is easily missed against the backdrop of the Pat Sin Leng range.
Last weekend the geopark was featured in the Hong Kong International Tourism Exhibition for the first time, in a bid to highlight the city on a global level, as a model for sustainable geotourism.
While this sounds impressive, sustainable tourism can be hard to pin down. One definition, offered by Unesco, is that sustainable tourism “respects both local people and the traveller, cultural heritage and the environment”.
If you delight in acquiring information like this, you might enjoy one of the recommended R2G geopark tours, such as a boat trip through Tolo Harbour to Double Haven. I’ve been on one, and found it akin to a school outing for grown-ups, with guides who talked almost non-stop and, when we did land occasionally, shepherded us around using flags and megaphones. Otherwise, you might prefer a more leisurely DIY tour, hiking, or taking the ferry to Lai Chi Wo.
After Ma Shi Chau, you pass two dams of the Plover Cove Reservoir, which already seems far from the city. It is the second largest reservoir in Hong Kong, and you might wonder about the merits of a suggestion for building housing here, as included in a government survey on land supply.