1/23/18

When it turned out that everyone else on the trip was too busy to hike Pat Sin Leng today, I wasn’t sure exactly what to do. The idea of doing it all myself was a little daunting, but I had hyped it up so much that I didn’t want to back down. Also, I still really wanted to do it – I had gotten ahead on my work for the express purpose of having today to hike, and so I set out this morning determined to do it anyway. Actually, I slept in a little, having disabled my alarm in indecision, but that turned out to be a huge boon, since I was still on campus when Keileh woke up, and I was able to grab a map of the area from here. After that, it was an hour and a half on the MTR, another hour and a half buying food (I wasn’t sure what to get, so I got a little something from every store I passed) and wandering around the Tai Wo shopping mall trying to find the start of the trail (the online blog I was using had very clear instructions on how to get from the MTR station to the trailhead, but then someone decided to put a huge mall right where the entrance should have been). Eventually I found my way onto a different trail, that eventually converged with the one I wanted to be on, only to find that it wasn’t Pat Sin Leng at all – the blog I had found was to do sections 8, 9, and 10 of the Wilson trail, of which Pat Sin Leng was only a piece. IT wasn’t an unpleasant surprise, really – I ended up hiking Cloud Hill, and then down to Hok Tau Reservoir, before finally starting on the ridge I initially intended on. It didn’t disappoint – the weather was a little smoggy, so the views weren’t quite as far as they could’ve been, but it was still a gorgeous hike, and the rolling mountaintop meadows felt surreal nestled up inside the clouds. The actual 8 immortals (the 8 peaks that Pat Sin Leng is known for, named after 8 heroes of Chinese myth) went by in surprisingly quick succession – I sort of expected 8 grueling climbs and 8 jarring descents, but once I got up the first one, I went over them all in maybe an hour of gentle ups and downs. By the time I finished them, though, I had less than an hour of sunlight left, so even though my blogger guide wanted to take me across another 5 miles or so to the end of section 10, I took a side trail off the mountain (glad I had that map!), where I hopped on a bus that took me back to to the MTR. My knees are a little sore, but all in all no worse for wear, and I can’t think of a better way to spend my last full day in Hong Kong!