Quiet streams and secret waterfalls

With the constant work from home these days, there's a bit more time in the mornings.  Without having to make the journey into work, it seems that you effectively get an extra 30-45 minutes in your morning if you are able to manage the timing.  This doesn't seem like much, but if you are able to wake up a bit earlier, it means you really can fit in some extra activities that would normally be much harder to accomplish.

So the last few weeks, I made it a habit to catch up with my friend Candy.  She lived not too far from Quarry Bay and had been doing short morning hikes in the hills in the area.  The hikes up didn't take long, only about half an hour, but what was special was a little turn off that we would take to a secret little waterfall in the area.  It was a serene and idyllic location. The water formed into a small pool before flowing further down and it was nice to be able to sit and dip your feet in whilst relaxing.

On this weekend, I thought it would nice to bring Veronica up to see where I had been hiking.

On some of the walks up and down, we would also find ourselves meeting some of the neighbours.  There were several families of wild pigs in the area.  Completely fearless, they would sometimes be fast asleep on the ground, snoring and farting after having eaten their fill.

Every now and again, you would see the skyline of the city through the canopy of the forests. 

It was a reminder that even in these natural surroundings, we were still in the city.

Stilted village

Living in Hong Kong, everyone always talks about Tai O as a place to visit.  It's meant to be incredible, beautiful, unique... choose an adjective.

It had been on my list of places to visit since I had first arrived, and yet somehow I had managed to miss it.  It was now more than five years since I had arrived in Hong Kong and I had still never visited.

That was finally to change.

There wasn't that much else to do with the travel restrictions in place, so this now seemed to be a perfect opportunity to explore this local tourist spots which so many had spoken of.

Early one morning, Ron and I started our trip out to visit.  First we went to the MTR station in Hong Kong.  We sat on the MTR for about 40 minutes until we got to Tung Chung in Lantau Island.  From there we walked to the bus station and waited in the long lines (there were many others who had the same idea as us) for the bus across the middle of the island to Tai O.  That bus trip took another 40 minutes.  It was certainly not a quick trip to get to Tai O, particularly given how close everything else in Hong Kong normally is.

When we finally arrived, we found something unique for Hong Kong.

Not only was still a town full of canals, it was a stilted village, with homes and shops protruding out into the water.

We walked around as much as we could.  We didn't feel at all like we were in Hong Kong anymore.  There was a strange feeling that this was much more like a developing world location.  There was a level of disrepair to everything which seemed to be part of the culture of this place.

After doing a couple of loops along the paths that we could find.  We jumped on one of the tourist boats that took visitors on a loop of the area.

Each bend we turned, we were brought into ever more intricately interlocked buildings.  There didn't seem to be any pattern or standard approach to how anything was built, but it all still seemed to match up and fade together like some bizarre patchwork.

After the boat, we did some more walking.  It became clear to me that many of these buildings were only being occupied on a limited basis.  This seemed to be more like a place that people would come on a weekend or when they had time off.  More than likely, the owners of the places had long ago moved to the city areas and only returned when they wanted some more space to relax.

Tai O isn't too easy to get to.  From a Hong Kong point of view, it's probably one of the more annoying places to get to when you take into account the number of transport changes needed and the long commute time in some uncomfortable buses on winding roads.  However, when you compare it to some of the treks I've done in the past in other places, it's really not that bad at all.  It all just goes to show how lazy you can become in Hong Kong.