Hong Kong / Japan / Singapore... Hongpan! - March and April 2025 - Page 3

I was already excited because it was a hiking day, now I am really excited.

The first part of the hike was up a semi abandoned road past a recycling depot. I was worried at first that it might be a private road and I was about to hit a gate, once I saw this I knew I was on the right path.

A low down view, and still kind of sunny. It would get cloudier as the day went on.

After wandering through the jungle for a while, I arrived at an abandoned village, very interesting.

The village has been consumed by forest.

I will now head towards that series of small mountains, and climb over them all from left to right.

The path along here is quite tropical.

Getting closer to the mountains.

Deep in the forest. There were a lot of loud insects.

This is the Hok Tau reservoir. The path I was taking joins the Wilson trail here.

The dam. A small dam.

After the dam I left the jungle, and joined some steps. But the trail would soon become awesome.

So awesome that a silly sign has been put up. Completely ridiculous. I had a bottle of water and a muesli bar.

That mountain in the middle is where I was on the rainy day a on Monday.

Looking back towards Tai wo / Tai Po.

The views started to get great.

Some of the path ahead. I will go up to the left first.

I will go along all of those ridges.

This is the style of path along the ridges, it was excellent.

It is me. I look sweaty here, but it was not a particularly strenuous hike.

No steps! A rarity in Hong Kong.

I will end my hike today by that causeway.

The white statue is Buddha or Buddha related.

That is some of the path I had come along, and behind it, Shenzhen from yesterday. You can see Ping An tower.

Excellent trail the whole way.

More view, running out of things to say.

I will continue down those smaller peaks. All of those little islands are kind of joined together and part of Hong Kong. All of them have hiking trails.

Those buildings in the distance are a different city in China, Yantian.

Time to head down, but you cannot go straight down, you have to spiral around the back of the last small mountain.

Many more hikes to go on... but hard to get to.

The final descent was again staircases.

Almost down.

There were no picnic spots on the trail, this is the first sitting area I came across, and it is right at the end. Again I think this would be a rare thing in Hong Kong where generally every hiking trail has seats every 10 metres.

My bus stop, with the small mountains traversed in the background.
3rd hike over, this one gets the 'featured' tag.

A giant monolith of a building, I am not not sure what it is.

Wanna buy a slave? Who gets uncomfortable when I say that? That's the idea.

The purple scam grapes are everywhere now that I know to look for them.

I do not think this is actually a typo as I do not see the Chinese nan character for south anywhere, but I bet most western tourists think it is a typo. As it turns out it has an entire lengthy wikipedia page, which reveals 'It was named in 1934 after Sir Wilfrid Thomas Southorn, the Colonial Secretary from 1925 to 1936'.
So both his first and last names suffered from bad spelling.

The Southorn playground provides a nice plateau to see the buildings behind it.

It was time for a healthy dinner, poke bowl, vegetarian version. It was expensive as the place was very hipstery and probably exists for female white office workers, but I enjoyed it anyway. If you see the QR code on the receipt, at many places when you sit down to eat in Hong Kong they give you one of these, and you scan it to order. You still pay at the register though.

Here is the fluffy area just one street over from what used to be the red light district of Hong Kong.

Wan Chai market. No matter the market there are always bras for sale, it is the one constant at every Hong Kong market.

Now for 2 almost identical photos taken from the same place. This first one is handheld 1/25 of a second at f/4 ISO 1600.

Where as for this one I rested my camera on the overpass and took a 3 second exposure at f/8 ISO 100. I actually think the above handheld one looks better.
Now to figure out what to do tomorrow, probably not much!

A rainy Nathan road greeted me as I exited my hotel room bright and early.

After coming up to the street near Central, it was apparent I was on the expat side of Hong Kong. There is no Marks and Spencer on the Kowloon side of Hong Kong.

As mentioned above, getting to the path up to the Peak can be a logistical challenge. They want you to pay for the tram.

Low cloud. Despite appearances, it never really rained that much, my key indicator of wet is my socks, and they stayed dry all day.

Here is the path up to the peak, steep in sections, I had it to myself.

That is uphill, but appears to be downhill. Also, it was very dark.

A bit of view, mainly of cloud.

Here is a tram station at the mid point of the way up. They recently replaced the trams with boring looking new ones. Technically I think it is a funicular railway.

Soon after I entered the proper fog.

Once arriving at the peak, I entered the peak observatory, which has very expensive coffee. I decided to get an iced coffee from the 7-eleven instead.

There is the peak observatory. It has been remodelled since I was last here. Actually last time I was here the fog was even thicker!

Behind the peak observatory is the galleria mall, which has also been completely renewal'd since I was last here.

I will now continue down the pack of the peak, in the fog and mist.

The path down was not too foggy, and much like the path on the way up the front of the peak, only longer.

The lower part of the descent even had a creek to follow for a while.

And then a wonderful foggy drain.

Soon I arrived at the graveyard, it was huge.

There were people burning stuff somewhere, adding to the fog with smoke, aka smog.

The streets of Aberdeen were very dark and moody.

Behold, boats sheltering from the typhoon. Well there is no typhoon, but there is a little museum explaining that sheltering from a typhoon was the original purpose of this area.

South Horizons on the left, Aberdeen on the right. I was standing on a bridge, in the rain.

The peak is up behind those buildings.

Strangely, you cannot walk all the way around the waterfront, you eventually get to a lift / staircase (I took the stairs) to take you up to street level.

And then the street overpass leads you straight into a mall. The central attraction is a cherry picker. Is that the only name these things are called universally around the world? I cannot think of anything else to call them.

I decided to have some lunch, the cheapest option was this, dry noodle with wontons from a Hong Kong style plastic tray McDonalds type place that only sells various combos of noodles, fish balls, wontons and duck necks. It was bland but hot.

And finally, before boarding the train, I walked down to the ocean to check out the view, I guess I can see the South horizon, but mainly I see a small island.

There is an entire street full of toy gun shops. They possibly shoot plastic pellets or foam darts or something, so that nerdy guys with glasses can pretend they are rambo into their retirement age.

Here is one of the possibly thousands of markets, this one is mainly fruit and vegetables and bras.

This is right near the flower market, this multi level store is a flower shop selling flowers and flower related accessories (ribbons, pieces of shiny paper, twigs).

You can buy a bonsai tree off the back of a truck, possibly stolen and re-potted earlier that day.

For my dinner, excellent Taiwan style beef noodle soup, with extra spicy option. It was fantastic. I am very full of noodles now after 2 x noodle meals today.

Not all markets are night markets, but this already closed market makes for photo of the night.

And here is a busy street corner, with multiple hole in the wall places having lines of people.
Tomorrow is a shorter hike, with probable sunshine, I will believe it when I see it.

Here is the official bus station, at Shau Kei Wan. I did not catch a bus from here.

Instead I took the number 9 mini bus, as directed. I waited for ages for the woman to stop bending over, but she just stayed like that forever, so her ass is in my photo.

There is no bell to ring on the bus, but the driver calls out the stops, there are not many, and it is almost guaranteed someone who yells Cantonese will also be getting off at the Dragons Back stop.

There are toilets, and plenty of signs, but no shop or vending machine of any kind.

A nice start to the trail, take a lot of pictures at the start.

The mini bus had followed a road kind of along that bay.

Today has many seating and picnic areas to experience.

Some islands, and a golf course.

More islands, and more golf course. Not very clear skies today.

Maybe the best pic of the day, looking back along the dragons back.

A summit marker. Weird coloured dirt.

You can see the city in the distance.

The path then is like this, for basically the rest of the hike.

Before long you will get to a junction, most people, me included choose to go to Big Wave Bay.

You can go down that way to Chai Wan instead if you want.

The next decision point is when you get to here, there are 2 paths to Big Wave Bay.

I chose to follow the metal pole path.

Before too long, you start the descent down to Big Wave Bay, freshly coated with grippy paint.

Big Wave Bay is interesting, there are no waves, there are a lot of surfing lesson shacks, and there are signs saying 'no surfing'. This is kind of Hong Kong in a nutshell.

The beach was not too bad really, it would look nice with clear blue sky, if that ever happens.

And finally, some of the surf 'shops' for the no surfing beach.
Nearby the same mini bus I caught to the trail starting point was now waiting here, it winds it's way all the way around the coast poaching tourists from the official bus route. I decided it was best just to get on, it was unclear when another one would come. The bus race back to the station was even more alarming than the journey to get to the start of the hike.
So a baby hike to finish my 4 hikes in Hong Kong.

Kowloon park is filled with variations of black cats. At least 50. They should probably cull a few.

View from the park. It really is a very nice park, my photos in the late grey afternoon are not doing it justice.

There is the McDonalds in the park. Note that it sells only ice creams.

The flamingos are not particularly pink.

You can exit the park via an overpass directly into the ferry to China building. I did not.

Instead I took a turn around the geyser, which was spreading Legionella as far as the eye can see.

Just a random street. Note that nearly all taxis are still these old Toyota's.

Highly authetic.

This is the hotel I should have stayed at. Actually my hotel has been great, and is better located than this one.

My bibimbap. Pretty average. Flavourless.

This is Xiqu centre, where you can watch Chinese opera.

And for my final shot this evening, of course it is a street market. This one is a food market and it is literally 2 streets over from my hotel and I had no idea it was there until now.
Time to pack my bags.