Discovery Bay – Home Away From Home

I have never come closer to cancelling a trip than last November. When I booked our tickets to Hong Kong, the protests hadn’t started yet. But in the two weeks before we left, the protests resulted in a death and two shootings. Visiting Hong Kong didn’t seem safe. Ultimately, we decided to go because we knew we had a safe base in Discovery Bay.

Geography

First, a geography lesson. Hong Kong is an island. The governmental entity called Hong Kong comprises that island, plus a bit of land sticking out from mainland China called the New Territories, a peninsula on the tip of that land called Kowloon, and 262 other islands. Most of these islands are small and many are uninhabited. But some are more densely populated than Hong Kong and one, Lantau, is larger than Hong Kong.  

Lantau Island

With much more land than Hong Kong, Lantau has many fewer people. It houses the international airport, Disneyland, the Po Lin monastery with its giant bronze Buddha, lots of mountains with natural forest and hiking trails, a few villages, and a couple urbanized areas, notably Tung Chung and Discovery Bay.  

Discovery Bay

Discovery Bay is exactly the sort of place I usually try to avoid. A privately-owned residential development posing as a community, the town is closed to all vehicles except public buses, a chartered taxi company, and golf carts. It is essentially a gated community. There are two commercial plazas and a ferry terminal connecting it to Hong Kong proper. There is only one Chinese restaurant. The population of 20,000 residents represents 30 different countries and includes a lot of airline employees. It’s essentially an island within an island. This is the stuff of my Truman Show nightmares.

But with such a large short-term and foreign population, Discovery Bay has been completely unaffected by the protests that rock the rest of the city-state. The expatriate enclave was also where my daughters’ teacher lived when she studied in Hong Kong and would be the location of their training while we were there. It was not my usual style, but it was a perfect base for this particular trip.

Strangely Pleasant

Because of its proximity to numerous hiking trails, Discovery Bay is as attractive to pet owners as it is to foreign residents. So there are almost as many dogs as people in Discovery Bay. You would expect a place like Discovery Bay (DB to the locals) to be filled with elaborately groomed, pedigreed, rare breed dogs. But there is a very active animal rescue group on Lantau, and the dogs at the end of their well-heeled owners’ leashes in DB were as motley as any group of mutts you’ve seen. I saw more limping geriatrics and tripod dogs in a week in DB than I would see in a month of shelter visits at home. It went a long way towards endearing DB to me, even as I couldn’t help but repeatedly reference the old TV show, The Prisoner. “I’ll be seeing you.

The Plaza (and its smaller neighbor to the north, helpfully named North Plaza) also contributed to the strangely pleasant feeling. During my years in the green building movement, everyone was struggling with how to recreate the town square where people would choose to park their cars and walk around instead of driving between errands. Despite the myriad golf carts, people mostly walked around in DB, and even on a Monday night (it may have helped that we arrived the day after happy election results) the Plaza was filled with families. Adults drank on pubs’ outdoor patios, children rode tricycles around, and people of all ages wandered in and out of the various shops and restaurants. It was a lovely place to relax in the evening and I can see how it might be exactly what a lot of people need after the overwhelm of a day in downtown Hong Kong.

The Greens

There is one big hotel in DB, and a couple more over by Disneyland, but everyone in our group rented Air BnBs in the neighborhood. Many of us ended up in the Greens – a series of identical skyscrapers with names like Greendale, Greenland, Greenvale, etc.

Finding lodging in Hong Kong, or almost anywhere, actually, with room for 4 people – especially if it’s for more than a week and you really want two separate, proper bedrooms – is really hard. But we found a perfect 2-bedroom apartment in The Greens at a really good price. Then, weeks after booking and months before our trip, our host cancelled the reservation without explanation, and we had to start the search over.

This time, there were only 7 search results for the parameters I set, and two of them used the same pictures. We finally settled on an apartment that was technically more than we needed – and nearly half again as expensive as our original choice. But it turned out to be perfect for us.

Our Home Away From Home

Our apartment was a rare three-bedroom. The master bedroom, second bedroom, and the living room had views of the Bay, Hong Kong island, and Disneyland (which didn’t look like much during the day, but when the nightly fireworks shows are running, you can see them from our apartment). We even had a view down into the park where the girls practiced kung fu every day. We were too high up to see what they were doing, but we could tell when they took breaks and finished practice.

There were bunk beds in each of the secondary bedrooms. Our girls chose to share the room with the view. That left a spare room for storing suitcases, which helped us keep the living/dining room cleaner. My husband was frustrated trying to cook in the tiny kitchen, but for anyone accustomed to Asian apartments, it was actually spacious and well equipped.

Even though we got super lucky with the timing of our trip, and we were able to go into Hong Kong several times, we spent a lot of time relaxing in that apartment. With the glass doors to the balcony open, it was cooler in the apartment than it was walking around outside, and the girls needed lots of downtime after their training.

Travel Home

Maybe other people don’t do this, but wherever I travel, I imagine what it would be like to live there. When you stay in an apartment instead of hotel rooms, it’s so much easier to pretend you live there. I know it’s not the same thing as having a job and a commute and budgeting on local wages. But using the washing machine, navigating public transportation, and shopping at the grocery store give you some feeling of life in a place. I love the monuments and museums, too, but to me getting a sense of what a place feels like to people who live there is one of the best parts of being there. There’s no place like home, but home can be anywhere in the world.