Day Five:

Today I was getting away from all the hustle and bustle once again, this time by way of a hike in the hills of Hong Kong island. I had a slightly later start than usual, but got out of my room by 10AM, and grabbed some supplies from 7/11. On a bit of a tangent, I must note here how much I -love- the Octopus card. For those of you not in the know, an octopus card is a smart card originally used by the public transport system in Hong Kong - Whenever you need to catch a train, bus, minibus, ferry or even taxi, you just place your Octopus card on the machine for a second and it deducts the fare from an amount you have stored on the card - they have automatic recharge machines, and you don't even need to place the card right on the reader - like most people, I keep mine in my wallet and just swipe it over the machine - much better than sticking a ticket in the machine. But here's the real kicker - the octopus system has been taken up by a bunch of stores, so you can use your octopus all over the place - the 2 big convenience store chains, the 2 major supermarkets, several fast food chains all accept Octopus - You could almost live your entire life in HK just on the Octopus - it's a rather brilliant system, all up.

But back to that walk - I took the subway to the Eastern end of HK island (using my Octopus card), and then a bus (Using my Octo- you get the idea) to the start of the Dragon's Backbone walk - it's part of the 50 km Island trail, but this section only takes a couple of hours, and is a spectacular walk along a ridge of hills which are said to resemble the backbone of a dragon. Having not seen a dragon myself, I wasn't about to argue. Anyway, it's a really pleasant trail, with great views of both the ocean and the hills of HK island, plus some of Hong Kong's many outlying islands.

While walking along the ridge, I came upon several guys assembling a remote-control glider. Wanting to see this thing in action, I stuck around and waited while they got the balance right, checked the controls, changed the ballast, checked the controls again, unscrewed some stuff, checked the controls, screwed some stuff back in etc etc etc. I never knew it took so damn long to prepare a model glider for flight - seriously, I've seen real planes that are ready quicker than that thing. So after waiting around for about 20 minutes, I gave up and was walking away when I heard people getting excited behind me - I ran back just in time to see the machine being launched! anyway, the guys controlling it put on a good show, doing loop-the-loops, barrel rolls and buzzing around over our heads - amazingly, all completely unpowered, no motor, no propellor, just gliding around the place.

Once that was done, I headed back down the trail, then took a bus (Using m- alright, alright!) down to the seaside town of Shek O. In some ways, it was similar to Sai Kung, which I visited yesterday, a tangle of streets down by the sea with a lot of foreigners - but it's actually quite different - Shek O doesn't have the fishing/seafood industry of Sai Kung, but it does appear to be home to a large expat population - walking around the on the town's seaside (which has an overabundance of luxury cars and big (by HK standards) houses), I barely heard a word of Cantonese - it was either English, French, Spanish or Italian.

Just out of Shek O there's a small outcrop joined by a bridge to the town, so I walked down in that direction - turn out that Shek O is a real hub for a few things:

1) Washed up Hong Kong rubbish - the rock beach there is covered in shoes, polystyrene, plastic bottles and even a computer monitor.
2) Teenagers playing at being army men - This was wierd. I saw some young guys hanging out on the rocks at one end of the beach, and noticed they were all wearing an army uniform, and carrying fake guns (the kind that go CLACKCLACKCLACKCLACK when you pull the trigger). Later on, one of them was looking around with a pair of binoculars - I honestly don't know what the deal is here.
3)People being followed around by a gaggle of photographers - This was even wierder than the army men. So I was walking down to this beach, and I saw some random pretty girl sitting on the rocks being photographed by, like, 7 photographers. So I'm like 'Ok, photo shoot - that's no surprise' - but then there's this guy pretending to climb a rock, and he's got 3 or 4 guys around him, snapping away - then I see this lady with her child, and about 4 photographers, and later on, I saw another girl posing for photos for like 6 people at a time - I couldn't (and still can't) figure it out - these people had all different equipment, but all of it was real good stuff (Canon and Nikon SLRs with -expensive- lenses) and there were just so many of them. The closest I came to a solution was that maybe it was a photography school excursion, but on a Sunday? it was all a little wierd, tbh.

Anyway, I left Shek O and travelled back to Kowloon, and spent the late afternoon wandering the flower market (really big business leading up to the New Year), and the bird market (fascinating place, but it's a rebuilt version of the original thing, which was knocked down to make way for a train line, so it's not really what it once was).

Well, that's all from me this evening, hope everythings going well over there, and with any luck, I'll be back tomorrow to report on my day on the South side of Hong Kong island.