OnHongKongIsle 在香港岛

Twenty-seven Trampers reported for duty at Tsuen Wan MTR station. It may have been the weather, or some strange alignment of planets, but the walk leader made a rare exception to policy and extended the 10 minute waiting rule by a couple of minutes…

Future note for anyone else who wants to arrange a walk; Tsuen Wan has two Hang Seng banks. Luckily, Caroline took charge of one group while Justin picked up the other. The groups met up and headed straight out of Tsuen Wan MTR towards the hills.

Though the leader was fully equipped with maps from Centamap and Google Satellite images – and I am not making that up – we had some small difficulty in navigating our way through the Tsuen Wan streets to find the beginning of the path. Luckily, Paul was able to see the confusion in the leader’s eyes and subtly guided him to the starting point without any loss of face.

The initial hill was described as ‘stiff’ in the posting for the walk, and this proved to be a reasonably accurate description. It is quite a tough uphill concrete path, and strangely enough, the sun beating down on us did not make it any easier. The path took its casualties, with Karen and Vivian deciding that the path was a bit much in the heat. While at the same time Gale showed that she has no plans to be the permanent rear-guard for the hill climbs, and stormed up that hill - luckily the Trampers do not have stringent (all right, any) doping rules, because a sudden burst of energy in sport, whether it be the 17th day of the Tour de France or your 3rd hike with the Trampers, is always going to raise eyebrows…

Of course, the hill with the sun raining down on it was not enough to drive the energy or enthusiasm out of Balaram. He was still leaping about, pointing out subtle differences in the floral landscape, and sucking up the knowledge of the Trampers around with questions starting with “why”. One could only think that the sun and the hill had at least temporarily made the Trampers a very barren intellectual landscape for him to be trying to harvest knowledge from.

Once at the top of the hill, we rested while waiting for the team to catch up. Just enough time to meet some of the new Trampers. Ishmael who had just come over from Melbourne, Tali bought along the Shenzhen crew, Caroline brought along Wendy, Tim came with his wife Lily who is a regular Saturday hiker, Neil who is back in HK for his third Tour of Duty here, two new local Trampers (friends of Fai) and Cara. It was Cara’s first day in Hong Kong, having only arrived that very morning. Already she was joining a hike. For her following 3 days in HK – her first visit – she was kayaking, swimming with dolphins, doing a tai chi course, doing a course on how to buy pearls, buying some pearls (presumably), visiting Cheung Chau and so on. It was as if though she had asked father time for an extra couple of hours in the day than the rest of us get. I think that on the fourth day she was going to sort out democracy in Hong Kong.

Once we had regrouped, the walk progressed at a more leisurely pace. There were great views over Kowloon and all the way to HK Island. After last week’s tears at there being no beach, contrary to the advertised walk description, the leader was concerned that history would repeat it self. It would be tough to convince anyone that those grasslands we were passing were in fact a “shady path”, as advertised. Turning to the oracle again (Paul), the leader was advised that the shade would arrive; and, that it did. The shaded section of the walk was really very pleasant. We passed along streams and through remote picnic areas on our way to the path down to Sham Tseng.

No man eating spiders or other such treacherous obstacles were to be had this week. So, Tali just had to get by on her new found reputation as being the toughest Tramper, without being given the opportunity to prove it again.

The path down to Sham Sheng was also scenic, passing through a valley down to the town, to deliver us to a local restaurant.

Thirteen Trampers stayed on for an early dinner at a place that was described on arrival by the staff as “not the famous roast goose place”; he advised us that one was around the corner. We risked the non-famous place and had an enjoyable dinner.