Wan Fook-ming glances at the grey sky from the porch of his stilt house in Tai O. Like many of his neighbours along the waterways of this sleepy fishing community of 3,000 on the west coast of Lantau, the 72-year-old has been keeping a close eye on the weather.
Wan doesn't want to see any more rain on the Tai O Tuen Ng Waterway Parade. Last year's event was virtually a washout - landslides on Tai O's only road link to the outside world prevented many of the port's city-based relatives from returning to celebrate their home traditions and links to the sea.
'This is an important ritual for us fishermen,' says Wan, a thin, deeply tanned retiree who first fished with his parents at the age of seven and then became a seafood buyer in Kowloon in his forties. 'This year we also hope swine flu will stay away from us.'
Tai O's Tuen Ng traditions are unique in the region, locals say. While Hong Kong's other fishing communities mainly commemorate the death of the patriotic poet Qu Yuan with dragon boat races, the 600-year-old Tai O community holds a similarly vibrant but more religious waterway parade.
The festivities begin at 8am when members of three local fishermen's associations carry statuettes of Hau Wong from Yeung Hau Temple in the northwest of town to the outlying Tin Hau, Kwai Tai and Hung Shing temples. From 10am to noon, the procession continues in sampans, which are towed by ornately carved dragon boats in the waterways of the 'Venice of the East'.
'Tai O is the only place in Hong Kong that practises the dragon boat deities parade ceremony during the Tuen Ng [dragon boat] Festival,' says Cheung Siu-woo, the associate director of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology's South China Research Centre, who taught in the port from 1984 to 1986.
