For the foragers of Hong Kong, countryside is a veritable banquet
An eco-tour guide, a chef, and an outdoor-equipment-store owner - Mary Hui meets some of the small band of adventurers who go beyond Hong Kong's urban jungle to harvest some of its rich bounty of edible plants and roots
In his late teens and early 20s, Stony Ng Leung-kwai went on many "wild camps": multi-day trips into the Hong Kong wilderness with a focus on survival. For food, his friends hunted wild boar, wild cattle, birds and fish, but Ng "was afraid of killing the living, so I foraged for plants instead".
"I always tried to look for the tastiest ones," he says.
Foraging may seem an unlikely undertaking in Hong Kong - the city is seen more as a concrete jungle than a tropical one, and has one of the highest per capita concentrations of restaurants and cafés in the world - but for Ng, it is a way to appreciate the wild and the beauty of the local flora.
"It feels very close to nature, to eat it. To forage means to have a very in-depth knowledge of plants," he says.
For Wong San, 66, an avid hiker, foraging offers a return to a simpler, more ancestral way of doing things.
"It's not to say that eating Japanese cuisine or ramen isn't good, but we do have to protect traditions and old ways," he says.
