Here was the plan, on my day off: Catch a ferry from Central and go to Lamma Island,  which I visited back in October, and hike over the island and maybe have lunch at the fishing village.

Here was the reality: Heading toward the ferries, deciding that the No. 5 wharf was the one I wanted,  looking at my watch and realizing it was 12:25 — and that the ferry to Lamma left at 12:30 — and beginning to jog toward the No. 5 wharf. Getting there just in time to get on board, feeling vaguely triumphant …

And getting on the wrong ferry.

Instead of Lamma Island, I was heading for Cheung Chau Island. Though it would be another half hour before I knew it.

Hence the expression “that ship has sailed.” Meaning, you’re going where it’s taking you. You can’t change it. You also can’t catch up to it — or leave it. It is frustrating, but you have to accept it.

My daughter was with me. She has come over from California to visit this week, which is nice. I realized, after we were aboard, and heading west into the South China Sea, that I wasn’t quite sure, 100 percent sure, we were on the right ferry. She asked the Chinese woman sitting next to us. Who spoke some English. She said, uh, no, we’re going to Cheung Chau.

I was still not sure this was a problem, because the main city at Lamma Island has its own name, and I thought perhaps we were going there. Or that even the ferry would stop at Lamma Island before or after going to this Cheung Chau place.

But, no. We got out a little primitive map, and the woman pointed at a tiny island … just west of Lamma Island. And that was our one and only destination.

Ack. So we would have to turn around, when we got there, come back to Hong Kong Island, and then catch the right ferry and do our hike. If we wanted to stick with the Lamma Island plan.

But when we got there, we realized it would be a half-hour before we could even begin heading back (which would take an hour to get to where we started), so we decided to look around a little.

And it all worked out. In several ways.

First, we walked up the busy and kitschy waterfront strip, with lots of souvenir shops and scads of seafood restaurants and thousands of Chinese from Hong Kong, presumably, celebrating the final day of the Lunar New Year. Family groups. Going out on the water and visiting a little island and having a meal …

So, we’re just walking around, killing time, and then we found a map of the island, and it looked more interesting than we thought, with “places of interest” marked on a path that seemed to circle the perimeter of the island … and it looked like it might represent a little exercise, a little outing, so off we went.

First came the beach, on the other side of the narrow strip of land that lies between the north and south ends of the island.  A real beach with fine sand. I walked over it and stuck my finger in a wave that rolled in. The water was a little colder than I expected. In the distance I could see Lamma Island, where we were supposed to be … and beyond that the west side of Hong Kong Island. It was fairly scenic, actually.

We kept going. There was the temple, and the “mini Great Wall,” which was just a fairly ornate masonry railing to keep us from tumbling off the path … then “human head rock” and on up to a high vantage point, and it was just fine. The sun broke through the haze we have had here for most of a week, and it was warm and nice.

We were climbing up and down, with the water and beach below us,  and thick vegetation around us.

We rounded the south end and were up in the hills, when we noted that there was a big, empty, abandoned house almost hidden by vegetation that had grown up around it. We maneuvered up to the front door and looked inside. It was vacant and crumbling but it had been an enormous house, by Chinese standards. But no one could be bothered to take care of it.

It was a little creepy. My daughter suggested it was haunted.  I didn’t argue.

We got back out on the narrow track. A Chinese man, a realtor by the looks of it,  was leading a British woman through the area, looking at property. My daughter asked him why that big house, with views of the sea, was empty. He speculated that some Brits had lived in it and abandoned it when they left for England. Or perhaps some Chinese people had owned it and left it to their children — who were fighting over it. It seemed rather fanciful, his theories.

He said it wasn’t the only empty house. And it wasn’t. We went along another few hundred yards, and several really nice houses also were empty. Or, they once were really nice houses. The windows were gone, as were the doors, and you wondered if homeless people flopped there at night. Not that HK has homeless people, really …

In one, we saw a Chinese man poking around. Or was it a man?

Here is where it gets a little weird. After we finished our two hours on the island, and took the one-hour ferry back to the Central wharfs, we began looking for Cheung Chau information on the internet.

And it turns out the cheerful-looking village and lush island, once known as the smallest populated island in the area … has a dark side.

It is perhaps best known locally as The Suicide Island. A reputation burnished when a local official suggested that a spate of suicides on the island might be something the island could turn to its benefit by opening a ghoulish theme park based on its recent history as a place where people came to visit — and kill themselves.

According to a report from Hong Kong University on Suicide Prevention on Cheung Chau Island, there were 63 suicides and 56 attempted suicides on Cheung Chau Island between 1988 and 2004. Many of them in the little apartments for tourists, 44 of them by charcoal-burning (and subsequent asphyxiation, which could be accidents, too) and nine cases of suicide pacts resulting in 19 fatalities.

And we were thinking, Hmm. Wow.

Anyway, it seemed a perfectly charming little island. Touristy, sure, like Lamma Island and Catalina Island in SoCal, for that matter.

But those two are laggards when it comes to this dark side.

The curious part about it was the leap my daughter made to “haunted” from the moment she saw that empty and abandoned house nearly obscured by bamboo and scrub pines.  It turns out that most of the suicides were in the commercial motel-like structures in the main part of town, but still …

So, a perfectly interesting and restful day on a little island in the Hong Kong littoral … also turned out to be a visit to the area’s best-known haunted place. One also known for a history of murderous pirates and a “bun” festival meant to ward off ghosts — and discovering, in our browsing, that suicides are believed, locally, to leave behind unhappy spirits in the place where they happened.

So, wrong ferry, right island. Good story. Memorable. Funny how it worked out.