A-Clammin’ We Will Go

 

 

We woke up this morning and for the first time since summer started, it was not scorching hot.  I decided it was a perfect day for the beach.  We hadn’t hit the beaches here in Hong Kong at all, so this is our first beach trip of the year (not counting the beaches we’d visited while in Canada).

 

Despite Zoë trying my patience being a tad difficult over breakfast, we finally managed to head out.  I decided to go to St. Stephen’s Beach this time, instead of Big Wave Bay, Shek O, or Stanley (our usual beaches).  St. Stephen’s Beach is just a little bit further down from Stanley Beach, but is not as easily accessible, so I figured there wouldn’t be too many people.  As it turned out, we had the entire beach practically to ourselves, apart from a couple of old men taking their morning swim! 

 

 

For those of you who love to take photos that way I do, that means clean, uncluttered shots, without having to edit out arms and legs of other people in the background!

 

 

They started out digging and trying to build a sand castle, but the sand at the beach was rather coarse and it was not easy to tamp down and shape.  Eventually they gave up. 

 

For a while there, both Josh and Zoë were going around trying to dig out all the big rocks embedded in the sand.  They would then move them and put them together in a “Rock Family.”  They got some with pretty colors…

   

 

The highlight of our beach morning, however, was finding clams –lots of them!  Pretty soon, everything else was abandoned and we were walking up and down the whole beach, digging for clams.

 

And there were plenty!  We didn’t even have to dig deep…  

Josh and Zoë insisted that we bring them home… as, er, their pets (!).  We did bring them home and we transferred them into a basin to let them soak and spit.

 

We made clam soup with lots of ginger.  They tasted so yummy!  Josh wouldn’t eat one.  Zoë scarfed them down.  The clams would have been perfect for spaghetti vongole.  Our friends (and Chris and my mom, too!) were horrified to learn that we actually cooked and ate the clams.  I was a bit leery, too, at first, but I figured the water at that particular beach was clean enough (that I could see) and we boiled the clams to make soup, so hopefully the boiling would’ve negated whatever nasties there might have been in those clams.

 

Will we do it again?  Yes to St. Stephen’s Beach; yes to digging for clams… but maybe we will leave the clams at the beach next time.  I wouldn’t want to push our luck.

 

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