Pui O

Nobody warned me about the buffalo. I’d read that Pui O was a decent beach on Lantau’s south coast, popular with campers and a fairly relaxed crowd, and none of that prepared me for walking down the access road and finding a herd of feral water buffalo grazing calmly in the wetlands just behind the dunes, entirely unbothered by the beachgoers a hundred meters away. These are descendants of animals once used for farming on Lantau, left to their own devices decades ago when the rice paddies stopped being worked, and they’ve since settled into a kind of quiet coexistence with the beach crowd that nobody seems to find as strange as I did the first time.

The beach itself is a solid, unpretentious stretch of sand, lifeguarded in season, with a scattering of simple restaurants and a campsite that’s popular enough on weekends that you’ll want to book ahead if a tent is part of the plan. Lia and I camped there once, in a rented tent from a shop near the bus stop that does a brisk trade in exactly this kind of last-minute arrangement, and fell asleep to a soundtrack of waves and, at one point, something that was unmistakably a buffalo moving through grass close enough to make us sit up. Nothing came of it. It went back to grazing. We went back to sleep.

Pui O has become something of a hub for Lantau’s small community of campers, surfers, and long-term expats who’ve settled into the island’s slower rhythm, and there’s a scruffy, unpolished charm to the string of guesthouses and cafes along the road into the village that Hong Kong Island doesn’t really offer anymore. The mountains behind the beach — Lantau Peak visible in the distance on a clear day — give the whole scene a scale that make the buffalo, oddly, feel like the least surprising thing about the view.

When to go: March through November for camping and beach weather, though the buffalo are there year-round if that’s the specific draw. Book a campsite spot ahead for weekends; weekday visits are far more relaxed and the beach empties out considerably.