Hikes of Doom

Hiking, a very common activity in Hong Kong, you know, with all the mountains literally everywhere, is the reason I am taking precious time away from the real world and writing for this blog.

Let’s start with the night hike to Sunset Peak. This hike started at 1 am, and the plan was to see the sunrise from the top of the mountain. This seems like an amazing idea, until; 1) you go up the wrong mountain 2) it’s so windy that you might actually fly off the mountain and 3) there’s so many clouds/smog that you wouldn’t be able to see the sunset, let alone the person walking in front of you.

Yes, we went up the wrong god damn mountain! We went up Lantau Peak instead of Sunset Peak. This was actually very funny to me at the time, because yeah, hiking up a mountain for 1 hour just to realize you need to go back down and restart from a new mountain is just hilarious! Really!

So yes, we had to go back down, and started again. By that time it was around 2:30 am. I’m not even exaggerating when I say the weather conditions were so bad that we felt like we could fly off the mountain. It was also freezing and the wind was insane, so we had to stop and sit down, literally on the edge of staircases on Sunset Peak to wait out the weather because it was too dangerous. Luckily everyone loves each other so we were like 50 people cuddling on a mountain.

On the way back to campus, at around 7am I was with my Spanish friend Gemma and American friend Justin and we looked like we had just been on hard drugs. Our hair was all over the place, we were absolutely exhausted, we might have also been going a little insane because I remember us looking at ourselves in the reflection of the MTR windows just laughing the entire MTR ride back.

What a goddamn shitshow. Worth it? Yes. Would I do it again? Probably not.

HIKE #2.

This hike, unlike the previous one I just discussed, only happened 2 days ago, so I am still recovering not only physically, but mentally. After a hike like this, any simple staircase will make you cry, even if you are just going down.

Just kidding. But seriously, I take elevators at all costs lol. My legs are so incredibly sore I almost fell on the floor trying to get out of bed this morning.

So, this one was called Pat Sin Leng. Oh, Pat Sin Leng…

We started hiking, everything was great, it was an average difficulty, a great work out, and we were taking breaks so it was wonderful, and then we reached the top. We reached the dizzying point of the mountain, where you had to be careful not to actually fall off the mountain by taking too many steps back. It was a little scary actually. We were about 600m above ground but it was beautiful! I can’t even describe.

Anyway so since we reached the top, I figured, alright, we just need to go back down now, easy peasy!! I drank almost more than half of my water and had my snacks, thinking it’s almost over, no big deal! I had no idea how wrong I was. We weren’t going back down at all, but continuing to hike 8 peaks.

8 peaks. WTF? Yeah, my exact reaction. It was actually a gigantic mountain with 8 peaks, and we had only done 1. We weren’t even a quarter way done the hike.

I have pictures from the top of the mountain, and you can see a long chain of mountains behind me, and we literally hiked the entire damn thing. I will post some pictures here as well and if the entire chain of mountains you can see, we did the entire thing.

It took about 6 hours. 11km. We were actually laughing out of mere insanity at times. As soon as we could reach a peak, the top would be about 4 square meters large, and we would have to walk back down right away and it was mostly very steep. And then as soon as we reached the bottom, we had only moments before climbing up again to the same heights we were just before. 8 times doing this. Very mentally challenging. But incredible views.

Unfortunately it was hard to really appreciate the views while hiking because if you didn’t look at where you were stepping, you would probably fall and hurt yourself or worse. There were a couple times where we all slipped a bit because of loose small rocks covering the trail.

So at each peak we took time to appreciate our surroundings, especially at the last peak where we knew it was actually only downhill from there! Finally! Also there was a waterfall at the end of the hike: “Bride’s pool” which was stunning but took us another hour if not more to reach. I have no idea how we found the motivation to continue on for one hour after that. I guess I really wanted to see the waterfall, which I must say I am very happy I did!

Although those hikes were pretty challenging, I am so happy to have done them and experience them with the people I was with. It was a good mix of hilarious and miserable!

Post-hike, I feel like I never want to hike again, but I know I will, and I am excited to hike again once I am ready to take-on another mountain. After doing Pat Sin Leng and Sunset peak in the worst conditions possible, I feel like any other hike will be a piece of cake!

#travel #world #Hiking #HongKong #Outdoors #Asia