The hike
So Muse and I went on a hike today with some folks from my office. They had chartered a bus for us which was nice and we only got lost once on the way to the starting point. The hike was in an area of Hong Kong called Clearwater Bay on a trail called the High Junk Peak Country Trail which I have to admit didn’t have much junk on it at all. Supposedly the hike is only rated a 2 out of 5 for difficulty and a distance of 6.6km and should have taken around 2.5 hours, so says the brochure. I have since renamed this route “The (new) Trail of Tears” and it took us a bit over 3 hours. Mostly because the rest of the group kept waiting for me to catch up.
The first half the trip was rather pleasant with mild hills and no death easily visible. That was nice. However the second half of the journey, once we passed High Junk Peak (which I now rename “Devil’s Horn”), should have been rated at about a level 4 or so in my opinion. The rest of the trip had beautiful vistas overlooking sandy beaches and clean clear water (which I had no idea existed in Hong Kong). It also had constant tromping up and down the sides of mountains.
Now luckily for us, some poor bastard(s) must have had the unfortunate job of hauling large stones up and down the sides of these peaks and cementing those rocks into place to make stone-age steps. I assume they must have made convicts do this, because I can’t believe anyone would have signed up for this voluntarily. If they did then maybe they were from the asylum.
After a while my legs can only take so much and it’s the exceedingly steep downhill portions that really tore me up. Add to this the fact that in most places we are on a one to two foot wide path with death off the edge of the sheer cliff that makes up the border of said path. And that’s on the straight bits. One mis-step on the downhill portions and my broken corpse would have made good time in catching up to the rest of the group. I actually considered that route at one point.
Eventually the torture ended though and we stopped in a very tiny village and had a seafood lunch on the water. I’ve had a lot better food in Hong Kong, but it was sure nice to sit down for a while. On the way back on that same chartered bus, Muse and I compared sunburns and dozed for the rest of the trip. Then we got ice cream. We’d earned it.
