Friday, October 19, 2007

Uuuy, photo essay daw...

It was a three day holiday in HK this weekend and so naturally, I returned to my Western European roots and went for a hike.

Naturally.

The hike we went on is called Stage 8 of the Hong Kong Trail, the route from To Di Wan to Tai Long Wan. To know more about the Hong Kong Trail, a series of 8 walks in (you guessed it) Hong Kong Island, click here.

So we started off at Shek O National Park and after briefly losing our way (we weren't actually lost, we just weren't sure where the trail began, that's all) we found this:



Now Shek O Peak doesn's sound sexy. And if someone said, "Hey Jona, let's go hike to Shek O Peak." I would have probably said, "Parang no." But thanks to the geniuses who run Hong Kong's park system, I agreed to hike up the "Dragon's Back". Has a much sexier ring to it.


The first hour you're walking through a mountain with no view. This was the part of the walk I enjoyed the most. When there was overgrowth -- it was cool and you had to jump over streams, watch out for the rocks and make sure you didn't twist your ankle. Here's a picture of A. who I conned into walking with me.



You climb for about an hour and when you get to a decent elevation, you see this:


Climb a little bit higher and you see this:



The walk is called Dragon's Back because once you reach a certain elevation, the trails follows the ups and downs of a set of hills. It looks like this:




You keep on going...



And then you get to the top:



And then we walked down to the town of Shek O:



We walk around a bit and checked out the local temple:



We had lunch. Sorry, no pictures of the salt and peper tofu, but here's a pic of my lemon soda.


[Aside: I am now silly crazy about soda water. On weekdays (libre kasi yung soda water so opisina) I drink about 3-4 cans a day. Yes, it makes me burp excessively; but I read somewhere it's good for digestion.]

And sat on the beach for the rest of the afternoon. Well, I actually slept for the most part.









While waiting for the bus back to Central, A. spotted a mural on a nearby house:



If you look closely, the parrot is sitting on the water pipe.

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