[Hope you've got a minute ... this post is a little longer than most!]

Well, another week down and I've just got back to my room after breakfast at Cafe O (again ... gonna miss that place) and then some time spent reading and coffeeing at a couple of the coffee shops around SOHO ... Life isn't all that bad really, huh?

Work has been busy again this week as predicted, and things are starting to rev up again ... a little disappointing that the project has taken longer than expected and so, given I'm going home again in a couple of weeks, I'm not going to get a chance to see the thing through entirely. It's been a good experience though and these last 2 weeks are going to be pretty full on getting everything I can done before I go!!

So, given I'm heading home soon (this is the end of my second to last weekend in HK), I thought I'd better do some HK stuff!! So, at 8am yesterday (yes - I was out of bed and in Happy Valley by 8am on a weekend!!) I met Alex at the Park & Shop in HV. We tried to head to a cafe called Browns for breakfast, but the place wasn't open (the sign on the door said they do brunch on a weekend ... guess 8am isn't brunch time!!?), so after looking around a bit and realising we were way too early for lunch on Sat in the Valley we ended up with an Egg McMuffin and a hash brown for breakfast. Not quite the cooked English breakfast we'd been looking forward to, but hey?

After washing down our plastic breafast with reconstituted orange juice, we grabbed a cab and set off up the hill a bit to explore some of HK Island's myriad walking trails. Specifically, we were heading off to do the "Dragon's Back", a walk from near Tie Tam reservoir to Shek-O on the southern coast of the Island. The Dragon's Back itself is only about an hour's walk though, so we lengthened it a little by starting from Happy Valley and walking through (making it about a 4 hour walk). The weather forecast was for showers all day, and it was spitting as we travelled up in the cab, but we decided that if we were going to do it, we may as well give it a go!

It's amazing that such a densely populated island has such large areas of bush/scrubland so close to the city. I'd been told about it before, but I don't think it had quite sunk in just how such a great nature space could coexist with Hong Kong's bustling city. There's two main sets of walking trails on HK Island, the Hong Kong trail, and the Wilson trail (which runs up into the New Territories as well). I think I was told the other day that HK (including the island and the mainland portion) is about 75% national park! We spent 5 minutes in the cab getting up to the park and then within 2 monutes walk we were literally in a national park, looking at a map of where to go, with paths leading in 4 directions and a creek running down the side, next to us ... amazing!


We headed off up the side of the creek, came to a junction, turned left and after about 30 minutes walking ended up back at the first map again!!? After that, we paid a little more attention to where we were going, consulted the map we were carrying and turned right at the junction ... heading off in the right direction!

The pic to the left here shows what we could see from the first lookout kind of area ... as you can tell, it was pretty cold. As Alex and I were saying when we were walking ... on days like these you can almost convince yourself the pollution isn't too bad, because you can blame the visibility on something else ... like I said ... almost?!

From here we kept walking up and along the path, winding our way through to somewhere near the middle of HK island. We then walked along the road a little to join up with the Shek-O national park (I think that's what it was called) and walked along a little to the next map. At this point there was a choice to follow the Dragon's Back proper, which meant following a well maintained path that ran along the western side of the mountain we were standing on and then up onto the ridge for the second half of the walk, OR take a left onto an unmaintained path that basically went straight up the mountain and then followed the ridge for almost the entire length. Obviously we chose the second one, because we thought the views would be better ... and at times they were, but for a lot of the time we were walking along in seven foot high bamboo, which was a little disorienting, and not very conducive to the views we felt we'd earnt!?

The pic to the right is the view of Big Wave Bay from the top of the hill. And below is a pic of one of the walkways through the bamboo.

Once we got to the end of the unmaintained trail, and rejoined the Dragon's Back proper, we turned around to see the sign below ... quite funny actually, as there was no corresponding sign at the other end of the trail, and to be honest, apart from the fairly steep ascent, which was hard due to my lack of cardio fitness but I wouldn't desribe as dangerous, the path was actually quite straightforward!!?

Not sure what we would have done if there had been a sign at the start of the trail actually?? Guess we'll never know!?

The maintained part of the trail was actually quite a nice stroll! We wandered along the top of the hill, with views over to Stanley on our right, and down to Big Wave Bay and the very, very exclusive Shek-O golf course down to the left. (About 200 members aparently, which is unheard of for golf in HK!! We came past it on the bus on the way back actually, and there was hardly anybody on the course ... very nice, I'm sure!)

The pics below are some of the views we had ... (hang your mouse over each image for a description, and click on it for a bigger version.)

And (if this works) this is a stitched view from the top of one of the lookouts ... basically looking out to the right (West ... we were walking South) with Stanley in the distance on the left of the picture, those European looking houses in the middle and a very nice looking bay on the right (which had some nice looking boats in it!)

From here, we followed the path as it wandered down the right hand side of the hill and on to Shek-O road. We considered walking to Shek-O, but walking along the roads in the hills is kind of like taking your life in your hands, with the buses doing 60 - 80 kmph around the corners, so we decided it was marginally safer to actually be on the bus rather than walking next to it and grabbed a bus from the stop at the end of the path.

We wandered in to town and went to the Black Sheep for lunch ... which had been recommended by some of the guys at work. If you go there, pizza's were great, and the other food was pretty good (we shared a pizza and then I had mussels and Alex had the steak), although you need to take your credit card! Not cheap, compared to the other options in Shek-O ... but good!

We then got a bus and a taxi back to civilisation and I went for a fitting for my new suits (might as well, while I'm in HK, huh!?). All in all a very productive day!!