The great escape: some easy Hong Kong hikes

Day 1 - High Junk Peak

Since December J has been back Stateside to spend Christmas and New Year with his family, and get settled in to his new lab/ grad programme, so I've been flying solo since then while waiting (and waiting, and waiting, and waitingggg) for my spouse visa. (Which, frankly, leaves me in a pickle: how do I clean my ceiling fan and change the kitchen light bulb that's on the fritz? I really am not keen on falling off a chair.)

So to get away from it all, I took a quick jaunt to Hong Kong two weeks ago with Holly for some cooler temperatures, gorgeous hikes, and good eating.

Hong Kong is an intense city; everything is taken to extremes. The urban part of Hong Kong is way built-up - from the AirBnB hostel we stayed in, we had a lovely view of...neighbouring blocks' air-con compressors and neon street signs. I was just glad to have a window. On the other hand, because of the city's steep, hilly geography, all the urban area is concentrated in a few spots, with some suburbs perched on hillsides and on the outlying islands, and the trail part of Hong Kong is...well, it's beautiful.

At 23 weeks pregnant I wasn't going to do anything ridiculous, and both of us were lugging along work and deadlines anyway, so we ended up doing probably three of HK's easiest hikes, half a day each or less including travel time. All of these are suitable for a reasonably in-shape beginner walker and I did them in regular old running shoes, with one of those stupid uncomfortable string nylon backpacks - I forgot I'd shipped my usual daypack. If you are a newbie hiker, take it slow and steady with photo/ drink breaks.

Day 1: High Junk Peak, Kowloon

Our flight got in about 6am, and we started the day off with breakfast (not pictured) and a bit of an adventure getting (in)to our hostel*, followed by conking out for a nap.

*:
- Get to security-code-enabled front door at 8am. Ring the number provided. No one picks up. (Repeat 7-8x.)
- Message AirBnB host, who turns out to manage/ own a number of different hostels, each with an on-site property manager. Host is tremendously responsive online, but we still can't get in because the property manager isn't picking up.
- Wait an hour. This preggo lady needs to peeeeeeeee. Look longingly at trash bin in stairwell. (What? I'm a runner. I pee in the woods. Someone who isn't opening the front door despite multiple phone calls arguably may or may not deserve to have their trash bin peed in.)
- A couple of tourists emerges from front door, whereupon we walk in
- And make ourselves at home in one of the empty rooms - they are empty after all, and we have paid. - Wake up from nap and ring property manager again.
- A very drowsy property manager arrives to officially check us in and give us keys and security code.

By now, we were starving. What better to fuel up with than a hearty lunch of roast goose and rice?

And some pretty views, although at the end of the above spit you can just about make out the fancy-pants golf club.

Day 2: Dragon's Back, Hong Kong Island 

Dragon's Back is perhaps one of the most famous hikes in all of Hong Kong, and with good reason - it's lovely! The trail goes up up up for a good half hour, but then is almost flat along a long spiny ridge that goes south-east. 

Above: Looking north-ish towards the city bits of the island. 

Goofing around on the trail. (Not pictured: Holly yoga selfie - newly minted yoga instructor, had to take yoga selfie. I did not follow suit for fear of overbalancing and falling off the hillside.)

The trail ahead

With a chaser of dim sum. This was a mere fraction of the spread we had: fried dumplings, steamed dumplings, steamed rice cake, lotus seed paste and custard buns, baked char siew rolls, congee, and pan-fried rice rolls with sweet sauce and sesame-peanut sauce... 

After running some shopping errands for my mom I had some work to do to make a deadline, so I fairly rolled back to the hostel in a food coma while Holly trundled off to the museum, and we got dinner after she got back. 

Day 3: Sha Tin Pass to Kowloon Reservoir 

The first portion of this was up all the way for a good half hour, but it's lots of stairs, nothing crazy. We saw plenty of little old ladies and tourists doing it. Views: definitely more urban skyline than bucolic countryside. The link above says it's 'difficult' and takes 5 hours; I found it relatively smooth sailing and we took about 3.5, I think. (There is a slightly tougher option to actually ascend Lion Rock, but we skipped that to climb Beacon Hill and see the 'lion' from afar on the way down.) There are longish flat sections, and the ascents and descents mostly involve paved steps like these:

City view at a wee pavilion en route, looking south towards the bulk of urban/ residential Kowloon. 

A view of Lion Rock - the tallest peak is the top of its head, and it's looking towards the right, sphinx-like. 

After all these stunning views it was of course time for lunch; we decided to go hunt for Vietnamese food and found some in a basement food court right near the hostel. Pho and pomelo soda! 

In the evening we went down to the Kowloon waterfront, where the Avenue of Stars is (if you are a HK movie/ pop buff, that's where the stars' handprints are, just like Hollywood's Walk of Fame - Tsui Hark, Bruce Lee, Gong Li etc. One day many millennia in the future, aliens will land and wonder if that's where we buried our dead celebrities) but it was kind of hazy and thus really funny to see tourists try to take photos with the blurred neon skyline. 

Later, I went for hot pot with some friends who live in Hong Kong. Good times and lots of laughs. (In the pot: vegetables, pork bones, fish maw, corn, fish paste, sliced shabu-shabu beef, mushrooms, glass noodles, etc etc etc etc, all simmering away to make this rich umami stew-ness.) 

That was the last night of vacation; we flew out at 7.30am the next morning. Feel free to ask me where else/ what else I ate!

And yes, work has been kind of crazy with interviews and deadlines, which is why it's taken me two weeks to post these photos.

What's running like at 23-25 weeks? I am SO SLOW these days, and my runs are peppered with walk breaks. (Sometimes my walks are peppered with run breaks?) It's kind of like an inverse training plan: you get heavier and heavier and slower and slower as things progress. In other words: still not very exciting, sorry guys. The highlight of last week was running a whopping 6km without stopping to walk.

This is me at 23 weeks; there is definitely a bump going on. Said bump has since expanded. 

And I'm trying to cram as much time in as possible with this little squish before I leave for the US (still don't know when, but at least I have a visa interview date). <3 #favouriteniece 

New Zealand: A Much-Expected Journey - Part 1

And a much-overdue blog post. We in the Chua-Bramante ('Team Chuamante') family like to do certain things in supremely scrambled order, somewhat late. I got back from NZ at the end of May, and promptly 1) hosted friends 2) had a nightmare week at work 3) had another nightmare week at work that ate my life. Indeed, I joke that we'll finally have a combined bachelor/ette paintball party (stag vs doe, of course) after the birth our firstborn. (No save the dates for THAT yet - sorry parents.)

So of course we finally went on honeymoon in May, after squirrelling away a few dollars each month for this trip and using my parents' frequent flyer points which we got as a wedding gift. Why yes, it's been 1.5 years since we got married...

Ah, New Zealand. The land of hobbits and wacky animals. All of them are so marvellously tame (except for the orcs). There are no seriously wild creatures in New Zealand. At least none that can kill you.

This here is a weka, about the size of a large chicken. They are technically a vulnerable species, but on the Heaphy Track they are a menace. One ran away with a fellow hiker's Ipod Shuffle. Guidebooks tell you not to chase them as they'll only run farther away - just watch where they stash your stuff and go and retrieve it later. On the track, we saw a good 25 of them, just hanging out. 

Don't fall off or into any mountains though, that's a different story.

Week 1: The Active Week

In May, New Zealand is not quite in the depths of winter, but it's getting there. It was rather chilly when we landed in Christchurch, a city that crumbled under the force of a major earthquake two years ago. Christchurch is still being rebuilt, and there's plenty of work for builders and architects - including a couple of friends who moved there from Singapore. We stayed with one of them to relax for a couple of days.

The upside to a major earthquake is that you get to rebuild your city from scratch. There are some interesting things going on, including the Re:START container mall and Gap Filler, as well as some rather stupid-sounding planning decisions.

We spent some quality time there, then in one very long blitz, travelled from Christchurch to Nelson to Collingwood to the start of the Heaphy Track on a series of smaller and smaller buses until finally we were going down a dirt track in a van with a trailer. Side note: Every small town in New Zealand has its very good cafe with very good coffee and what are perhaps the best chocolate caramel slices in the world.

The roughly 80km Heaphy Track is a Great Walk, meaning it's designed to provide tourists a pleasant introduction to New Zealand's wild places. And how pleasant. There were some seriously luxurious huts (four walls, gas stoves, running water, and even LED sensor lighting in one of them!!). We'd planned meticulously for a four-day trek. Dehydrated meals, snacks, hut bunks, bus pickup at the end. Only trouble was, the weather forecast on day 2 of our trek was for heavy rain. And it was supposed to be our long day (24km)...

We got to the trailhead at 7pm and stayed the night at Brown Hut. The first morning was bone-dry and lovely. We were supposed to walk 17km to the next hut, but ended up walking 30km to the one after that to eat 13km into Day 2's walk. With full packs (about 1/3 my body weight). Ouch.

"We're doing this! We're doing this FOR REAL!"

now imagine like this, but wet

But that was nothing compared to Day 2.

We woke up to a massive storm outside. There didn't seem to be any lightning, so we (wo)manned up, raincoated up, backpack-covered-up, and marched on. (Mind you, at this time of year it was about 7 degrees Celsius when we started in the morning.) If I kept my raincoat hood up, my glasses fogged up. If I kept it down, water streamed down the back of my neck. I had my arms across my chest for warmth, and when I dropped them to my sides again, icy water streamed out of my sleeves. It rained sideways, from all directions, at the same time. By the end of our 11+km walk - across squishily exposed territory - there was nothing that was dry. Thank goodness for Ziploc bags.

At Saxon Hut, we changed out of our soggy clothes and tried to warm up. Puddles everywhere.

All of a sudden, there was a knock on the door. And then another. And then another, till a quartet of friendly, woolly-hat-clad, bearded...mountain bikers barrelled into the room. This year was the third and final year of a pilot trial - mountain bikers were allowed to bike the Heaphy in winter, during its less crowded season, so they were out in droves.

biker (L) and the husband (R) trying to start a...coal-fired stove. 

They were just stopping over for a few hours, so after they left, we sat by the fire trying to dry our things. The general rule of hiking is that you have just two sets of clothes: one to walk in and one to sleep in. Maybe some spare underwear and socks, and another shirt if you are very dainty and want a clean shirt after the whole hike is done. So the next morning, there were more than a few yelps as we struggled into our less-soggy, but still-cold gear. I could swear that my boots had frozen overnight...

The next two days (20km and 16.2km) were much drier and less eventful. On the last day we went down South Island's north-western coastline, facing the wild Tasman Sea, and were treated to some spectacular scenery.

Okay, fine, here is a picture of my gourmet trail lunch.

And some nikau palm forest.

Now you're jealous, right? 

Finally we ended up back in Nelson, at a cute hostel called Tasman Bay Backpackers.

And that's all we did for the first week - walk a lot.

Mind you, we did walk 80km in four days over interesting terrain and all kinds of weather, so we could use some sleep.

At this point I could use some sleep too so I'll stop here. I might split the NZ blog posts into three to make more money attract more hits. What's that you say? Oh, too soon.

Double points if you got all the Hobbit references. 

where the wild things are

A lot of Singaporeans go to Hong Kong to shop and eat. 

We went to Hong Kong for five days to HIKE and eat. It's called luxury hiking: you go out for a nice walk every day, somewhere you can get to by some combination of subway and taxi, and then come back every night to eat a lot and have a hot shower and sleep in a real bed. Why didn't I think of this before? 

The temperature was 15 to 20 degrees C. Perfect weather! Pity about the fog.

<--  a lot of my vacation looked like this.

Day 1: Wednesday 

Quarry Bay to ? Park View

Take the MTR (subway) to Tai Koo MTR station.
Turn left; walk all the way up Greig Road to the start of the Mt Parker trail.
Don't ask me for any more directions. We promptly got spun around A LOT, crisscrossed Mount Parker Road, got as far as Mt Butler, went up and down Sir Cecil's Ride, and finally were spat out onto Mount Parker Road again.
This took about an hour. By then it was 5pm and starting to rain and get dark...

before it got dark.

we also met up with friends for dinner and ice cream.
that's leanne in the foreground, levi in the middle.  

Day 2: Thursday. It rained the entire time.

We left the hostel three times: 

- for a breakfast of scrambled eggs, toast, milk tea, and that curious Hong Kong delicacy, macaroni soup with ham, at Capital Cafe 

- for lunch with Jeanette, my former colleague who now works at South China Morning Post

- for dinner at Mak's Noodles with Lee, a kid from the UK we met at our hostel. 

Clearly a very productive day. 

yum. 

    Day 3 was even more productive. 

    How to hike Lantau Island: 

    1. Take the MTR out to Tung Chung, at the end of the orange (Tung Chung) line. 

2. Take a rollercoaster bus ride to Mui Wo, at Lantau's eastern tip. This is where the Lantau Trail begins. 

3. Walk a lot. 

4. Climb every mountain.

And I mean all of them. 

You're in luck; there are stairs. 

There are more stairs about twice as steep as this, much higher up, atop Sunset Peak and Lantau Peak which are fairly exposed. 

And then stairs all the way down. 

After this you will not want to look at a staircase again for some time. 

5. I don't know how you feel about the Buddha. I was quite happy to see him, or at least the giant statue of him at Ngong Ping. It meant I was definitely still alive. 

6. Sorry about the mist/ fog/ smog. As you can see, the views were few and far between. Sometimes this was a good thing - especially when I'm afraid of heights. 

7. When you get to Ngong Ping, which is a big tourist destination, TAKE THE FANCY CABLE CAR BACK TO TUNG CHUNG. By no means take the rollercoaster bus, if, like me, you have a very motion-sensitive stomach and have not eaten a full meal all day, only snacks. The cable car would've been worth the extra, oh, ten bucks. 

At the end of all that we had an enormous dinner of crab, razor clams, clams, whitebait, oyster porridge, salted-egg prawns, etc. at Qiao Tei with friends. (I think we earned it.) 

"You Singaporeans," laughed the lady at the hostel reception desk when we announced where we were going for dinner. "You come prepared with a whole list of places to eat!"

Day 4 was more sedate. 

Still sore from the 13km/ 5-hour walk of the day before, we took the Peak Tram up Victoria Peak and did the 3.5km Peak Circle Walk. Fortunately the sky was clearer - we even had some sun...

As my husband put it: "Yesterday was lots of effort for no views. Today - no effort, lots of views."

wok-seared rice rolls (chee cheong fun) with sesame and sweet sauces

And then it was off to Happy Valley for some dim sum at Yu Man Fang on Sing Woo Road. 

(I am a very bad Asian and keep forgetting to take pictures of my food. My husband has all the food photos on his phone.) 

After all that food we went back to the hostel, vegged out a bit - and headed out for more food: 

- fish congee and pig innard congee at Congee King at Heard Street,

- and traditional 'tong shui' desserts at Tsui Yuen across the road.  

What about Day 5? 

I woke up bright and early and took myself for a solo run up the Wan Chai Green Trail (ok, trudge - this part of the trail goes pretty much straight up and feels like a 30-degree gradient, but there were a lot of very fit little old ladies power-walking it, to whom I said a lot of 'zou sun'/ good mornings), and to the end of Bowen Road and back - about 7km. 

It was probably one of the best runs I've had in a long time. 

managed to take a photo of myself on the run.
still not sure how I did it. 

After that it was showertime and time to head for the airport - 

but not before stopping for MORE dim sum at the Tim Ho Wan branch that is very conveniently located inside Hong Kong Station - right where the Airport Express train is. 

At the end of this great adventure when we touched down back home I managed to be hungry again. I really must have done something to anger my metabolism.

I'm a little sad we didn't manage to make it out to Sai Kung or Lion Rock or any part of the Maclehose Trail... we can save that for next time though. 

Workouts this week: 

- None

- My entire holiday (is it really a workout if my brain is so relaxed?)

- Monday night: easy shake-out-the-legs 10km at the canal, half of which was run with my friend Lin. Took my new Oiselle shorts for a run on a very soggy evening, and at the end they were bone-dry. Either my behind does not sweat or...holy wicking magical powers. Perth Marathon training starts TODAY. 

As I write this it's Boston Marathon Monday and I'm virtually following it online! 

I do wish they would start an hour earlier though. It's 11.45pm and the lead women still have a good 7km to go - not to mention the friends I'm tracking online who started in Wave 3. I'm propping my eyelids open. Husband has long since gone to bed. Time zones...uff da.

Update:
It seems pretty clear this morning that Marathon Monday was not a good Monday. 
I'm particularly mad about this because what have runners (or their families, or spectators, or race volunteers) ever done to hurt anyone?
But that's the way terror works. right? 
Fortunately there is still goodness in people: people finishing the race and giving blood, helping each other up, offering a place to stay for the night. That's what a community is for.