IF you still don't know where to go or can't grab a ticket for the coming May holiday, consider Hong Kong's Cheung Chau Island. With its famous annual Bun Festival May 5 through May 11, you can spend the whole Golden Week there, enjoying the locally made buns, fishing and tanning.

Only a 35 to 55-minute ferry ride from Hong Kong's Central District, the picturesque island is still a quaint fishing village. Only half a square kilometer in size, with about 25,000 people and no cars, the island is small enough to cover in a day.

During the week, Cheung Chau is a quiet residential island, but weekends are a different story. When ferries, packed with sightseers and holidaymakers, arrive at the island, the population doubles.

Bun Festival

Bun Snatching Contest in 2005

In the 18th Century, Cheung Chau was devastated by a plague and infiltrated by pirates until local fishermen brought an image of the Taoist god Pak Tai to the island. Paraded through the village lanes, the deity drove away the evil spirits. Every year on the eighth day of the fourth month of the lunar calendar, the islanders organize a weeklong thanksgiving, the Bun Festival. The center of the festival is the giant bamboo towers filled with edible buns in the courtyard of Pak Tai Temple, while the climax of the bun snatching every midnight through the weeklong festival. When midnight came hundreds young men hurried up to the three bun towers, torn off all the buns, put them in bag or spread them over the crowd. The participants are so quick that thousands of buns are plucked from the bamboo frames in a manner of minutes. The buns are then sold or distributed to those who did not join in the competition. This ritual was abandoned in 1978 for safety reasons, but was resumed last year.

Another exotic feature of the festival is the "floating colors." Colorfully clad children are hoisted up on stilts and paraded through the crowds. Other events, including Chinese opera, lion dances and religious services, attract both locals and visitors.

Besides, other attractions on tiny Cheung Chau are the beaches, temples and quaint back alleys. Ferry passengers arriving on Cheung Chau are often fascinated by the sight of fishing families maintaining traditional lifestyles aboard authentic wooden junks equipped with radar and computer systems.

Praya Street and Pak Tai Temple

"Praya" is Portuguese for "square." If you turn left at the square and walk a few short blocks from the pier, you come to a little playground, behind which is Pak Tai Temple. It was built in 1783 and is dedicated to the "Supreme Emperor of the Dark Heaven." From Pak Tai Temple, walk along Pak She Street and San Hing Street.

Pak She Street and San Hing Street

Pak She Street and San Hing Street form Cheung Chau's old main street. The scene is typical of island communities: three-story balconied shop-houses flank a narrow pedestrian lane that follows the contour of the original coastline before it was reclaimed.

Stroll along these streets past old buildings with modern shops where islanders practice traditional trades, baking lotus-seed cakes, dispensing herbal medicine or manufacturing and selling Cheung Chau's famed, pungent, purplish-brown shrimp paste. In clan and community associations, memorial plaques and photographs line the walls.

Tung Wan Beach

Cheung Chau's "town" crowds the narrow sandbar linking the two hilly ends of the island. On the eastern side, only a few minutes' walk across the island from the ferry pier is Tung Wan, a popular public beach. In the waters off to the right, beyond the Warwick Hotel Cheung Chau, Hong Kong's first Olympic gold medallist, Lee Lai-shan, used to practice windsurfing as a schoolgirl. The local Windsurfing Center teaches the sport.

Cheung Po Tsai Cave

At the far western tip of the island is Cheung Po Tsai Cave. It's named after Cheung Chau's most infamous pirate, who used the cave as a hideout in the early part of the 19th century. Legend aside, the cave is nothing special. Visitors enter from the top, climbing down inside. Once inside, the paths are dark and narrow, with only a ray of light beaming from the top.

Seafood restaurants

The tiny shops and celebrated seafood restaurants highlight the commercial attributes of the island.

Getting there:

Take the ferry from Outlying Islands Ferry Pier No. 5 in Central. Ferry schedules are available online from the First Ferry's Web site (www.nwff.com.hk). Click "English," then "ferry schedule" then "local service." Ferries run from 6 a.m. to 1 a.m. daily; HK$11.30 for slow boat (55 minutes) or HK$22.20 for fast boat (35 minutes) Monday through Saturday; HK$16.70 to HK$32 Sunday and public holidays.

Editor: Wing