Five Golden Dragons - Bob Cummings (1967) - HYF Ferries

Sadly, by the time I eventually made my first visit to HK in 1995, the vehicular ferries were already on their way out and, in fact, the previously mentioned ferry pier on Jordan Road was demolished the following year. So, I never got to experience a cross harbour trip on one. It's a bit of a shame really. Of course there is still a vehicular service from Kwun Tong Pier for dangerous goods banned from the cross-harbour tunnels, but I don't think that particular service is open to the general public.

Anyway, courtesy of Five Golden Dragons we catch a glimpse of several types of ferry. It looks - from the earlier screen shots showing the small elevated ramp allowing cars to board and alight on the upper deck of the ferry - as though double-decked ferries (cars on two levels) were already in use by the late 60's. I'm not sure when they were introduced but an earlier screen shot of Jordan Road ferry in Soldier of Fortune - filmed twelve years earlier in 1955 - shows an older version of the pier that just allowed for a single deck of vehicles. So it looks as though the modifications allowing vehicles on both decks happened sometime within that time frame, but I could just be making false assumptions.

Here is the previously used shot showing the Ferry Point Estate. Look carefully at the ferry pier and you can see the white line of the upper deck ramp (in front of the building scaffolding) as well as what appears to be a double-decked ferry at tied up at the pier.

This isn't the ferry our character uses though. The one he gets into with his taxi is a single deck version - that is...a single deck for vehicles and an upper deck for passengers. The HYF stands for Hong Kong Yam Ma Tei Ferry Company. I guess this might mean the single vehicle deck ferry was of an older vintage.

As we cross the harbour we see another type of ferry, this time only a non-vehicular type passenger ferry. I can't make out the name exactly but it looks to me as though the ferry below is the Man Tai (民泰) which was a double decked passenger ferry in operation between 1956 and 1988. I've posted this link before but it is worth repeating because of the wealth of information regarding all the HYF ferries.

We can also end this post with a couple of screen grabs taken inside the ferry itself. Maybe it will trigger some nostalgia from someone out there who can share some memories.

Emmanuelle 2 - Sylvia Kristel (1975) - Hong Kong and Yaumatei Ferry

More commonly recognised as HYF, this company provided cross harbour services for many years alongside the Star Ferry. The cross harbour tunnel(s) put paid to much of the company's business and as such it has since diversified into the usual property development sidelines, but it does still run some ferry services, notably the dangerous goods vehicle ferry (vehicles carrying potentially hazardous or explosive loads still must get a vehicular ferry service from Kwun Tong <> North Point) and what better way to reuse the now defunct general vehicular ferries than turn them into the Bauhinia Cruise boats. Okay, not a ferry service as such, but good enough.

Anyway, here we see Emmanuelle crossing the harbour in one of the old HYF double-decked double-headed passenger ferries (or 雙層雙頭渡輪). Similar in style to the famous Star Ferry.

Sadly, I can't tell which specific ferry this was. The film was shot in 1975 and at that time the company had quite a few of these boats in service. According to this rather excellent Chinese Wikipedia article there were 15 ferries, of this style, in service during 1975 (take your pick).

These days the ferry licences have been taken over by New World First Ferry (owned by Henderson Land) but even then the routes in operation are few by comparison, though that's not surprising given the number of cross-harbour and cross-island road routes there are now.