We chose to nominate this Saturday as the day to celebrate
Claire’s birthday. I’ll write a separate blog post on the birthday
celebrations, but the plan was to kick off the afternoon/evening with a hike.
The route we chose I’ve already written about – the Dragon’s
Back. It makes up the final leg of the Hong Kong trail, a 50km route that
meanders from one side of HK island, which I have only dome the first half of.
I learnt midweek that a couple of our party, Rachel and
Charlie, were planning to take on the whole second half of the trail, joining
our group for the final section. Intrigued to explore this new trail, I decided
to join them. And so at 930ish or so we taxi-ed up to the halfway point of the
trail, aiming to meet the others around 1pm.
We spent a thoroughly enjoyable 4 hours or so making our
across the island. It was at first very challenging, climbing up two fairly
sizeable peaks with many steps (which, if you were doing the whole trail, would
kick in around 27km in. Ouch), then benignly downhill around a beautiful
reservoir, before hitting a long, flat and fairly dull bit.
The opening peaks overlook Wong Ngai Chung Gap, which
effectively is a cleft in the hills that slices the island in two. And hence a
key strategic place, in military terms, for holding the island. And so, early
in the walk, we passed a memorial to the brave Canadian servicemen who bitterly
contested the pass against Japanese in December 1941, and were killed almost to
a man, the final members herded off a cliff at bayonet point. Sobering.
But the main attraction on the way around was the incredible
abundance of beasties and creepy crawlies. The picture above was taken looking
into one of the aquamarine-green reservoirs, that were teeming with life – koi
crap the size of my torso, turtles, big terrapins and thousands of
indeterminate fish lazily swam aimlessly near the surface in the heat. Lizards
big and small basking in the sun and flitting into the undergrowth as we
approached. Suspicious rustlings in said undergrowth whose provenance we never
discovered. Tens of species of butterfly, most huge and vividly coloured in
blues, oranges and yellows. Elsewhere, we saw the result of the heat combined
with heavy rain of the season – thousands of spiders, from the
transparent-legged orange bodied ones, to ones the size of an outstretched hand
that brooded threateningly in the middle of webs 3 metres wide. I was
disappointed not to see more mountain crabs, which Claire and I spotted the
other week (who live in freshwater streams over a thousand feet from sea
level!)…it was like living in a nature documentary!
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