Old battery
Today was another public holiday - the Chung Yeung (aka Double Ninth) festival: one of the grave-sweeping festivals and also a day for climbing mountains and wearing chrysanthemums. It's often thought of as the start of the hiking season.
We'd decided to do some walking on the trails around the Peak anyway, so we headed up there by bus in the late-morning. It's a lot less humid now, but today was still hazy and quite hot in the sun. There was some breeze though, so a nice day for walking. From the (very crowded) Peak we headed up Mount Austin Road - a very steep hill leading to some apartment complexes- to meet the Governor's Walk. There were quite a lot of people around there, most of them attempting to fly kites in slightly awkward places (one almost hit a large middle-aged man in shorts, who commented sarcastically in a strong German accent, "nice place to try to fly a kite...not!"). A lot of people were carrying brightly coloured pin-wheels, which perhaps substitute for the chrysanthemums traditionally worn?
From there we managed to find a small, very quiet, stone path which led downwards and eventually met up with the Peak circular path which we walked on back in August. Then we followed another trail to Pinewood Battery.
It's the remains of an old gun-emplacement, which featured quite significantly in WWII, but was actually built quite a long time before to see off feared invasions from Russia or China. It's quite well-preserved with lots of info boards to read, and good views to the south. There were quite a lot of people around there, most of them also of the kite-flying kind.
We'd originally planned to walk down to a bus stop near the university, but felt like doing more so followed the longer route back down to a small reservoir. On the way we had to cross a fearsome looking column of ants:
The great thing about Hong Kong is that after all this walking in what seems like quite wild-countryside, you can suddenly emerge to find a busy road and a wait of only about 3 or 4 minutes for a bus straight back home.
We'd decided to do some walking on the trails around the Peak anyway, so we headed up there by bus in the late-morning. It's a lot less humid now, but today was still hazy and quite hot in the sun. There was some breeze though, so a nice day for walking. From the (very crowded) Peak we headed up Mount Austin Road - a very steep hill leading to some apartment complexes- to meet the Governor's Walk. There were quite a lot of people around there, most of them attempting to fly kites in slightly awkward places (one almost hit a large middle-aged man in shorts, who commented sarcastically in a strong German accent, "nice place to try to fly a kite...not!"). A lot of people were carrying brightly coloured pin-wheels, which perhaps substitute for the chrysanthemums traditionally worn?
From there we managed to find a small, very quiet, stone path which led downwards and eventually met up with the Peak circular path which we walked on back in August. Then we followed another trail to Pinewood Battery.
It's the remains of an old gun-emplacement, which featured quite significantly in WWII, but was actually built quite a long time before to see off feared invasions from Russia or China. It's quite well-preserved with lots of info boards to read, and good views to the south. There were quite a lot of people around there, most of them also of the kite-flying kind.We'd originally planned to walk down to a bus stop near the university, but felt like doing more so followed the longer route back down to a small reservoir. On the way we had to cross a fearsome looking column of ants:
The great thing about Hong Kong is that after all this walking in what seems like quite wild-countryside, you can suddenly emerge to find a busy road and a wait of only about 3 or 4 minutes for a bus straight back home.
posted by Phil T at
7:04 pm
1 Comments:
Thanks for this - sounds great. Wonder where the ants were going?
$
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