People said, when you did something for the first time, there will always be the second one. So, as I had my first hiking in Hong Kong, of course I will have the second hike😉Again, the hike I joined was organized by HKBU's International Office. I intentionally only join the hiking activities which are organized by school. The first reason is because I realized that my stamina is poor, thus I walk slower compared to the others. The second reason is because once in while I love to stop to take pictures! By joining school's hike, I know there will always be student ambassadors that will accompany me to walk slowly and wait for me to take some pictures 😂 (Thank you for all student ambassadors that accompanied me!)
This time, the destination is Tai O which is located in the Western coast of Lantau Island. When I went to the International Office to register for the monthly outing, the PIC, Juventius, told me that it's gonna be a difficult hike compared to the previous hike that I joined. However, with the motivation to see that other side of Hong Kong, I registered for the hike and found myself making my way to Tung Chung MTR station on that fourth Sunday morning of October.
The hike is called as 'Tung O Ancient Trail' because we will walk along the trail from Tung Chung to Tai O. On the way from from Tung Chung station to the starting point of the trail, we passed by some locals' residents area. It was quite interesting because I could see the locals' activities during Sunday morning. Rather than seeing people rushing to the nearest station to catch the train, I saw them in their PJ doing the laundry.
After 2 hours of walking, all started to feel tired. Luckily, there was a small shop selling food, drinks and snacks. We stopped there for 15 minutes break and some of us grabbed the cold drinks to release the thirst. Of course, as there was no other store nearby, this little shop charged higher price for the goods, e.g. a can of coke was about $10. If you could survive a little bit longer, in the next 30 minutes we found another resting area and I saw more people in that place. Perhaps they serve better food or charge better price compared to the first store.
It was indeed a more difficult hike compared to my previous hike. We need to walk up and down, with several steep slopes. Yet, if you ask me which hike that I prefer, I'd choose this Tung O hike. Despite of the difficult terrain, the hiking trail was surrounded with trees that protect us from the direct sunlight. We also had more fresh oxygen to breathe. I could enjoy my walk without the need to sweat a lot due to the heat :)
Once we got to the top, the view was undoubtedly beautiful. Blue sky, green lands, blue-green water. We also saw the construction of Hong Kong–Zhuhai–Macau Bridge. This bridge will connect east Hong Kong to west Macau, so people have more choice aside from taking Turbojet or Cotaijet when they want to go to Macau from Hong Kong and vice versa. It is said that the bridge will be the longest bridge cum tunnel sea-crossing in the world and will be a direct land transportation link between the east and west coast of the Pearl River Delta. Hope I can go back to Hong Kong and try the bridge once it is completed.
At 13:30, we finally reached Tai O after 4 hours of walking! So happy! Tai O is a fishing village famous for its traditional stilt houses, fresh and dried seafoods, and also the fact that it is called as Venice of Hong Kong. With the unique geographical area and the 'architecture' of houses there, for me Tai O is one of the places that does not reflect Hong Kong as a big metropolitan city with the mainstream skyscrapers.
The stilt houses were built close or even connected to each other. Even though the houses are small, people line their homes with potted plants and grow vegetables on their doorsteps. It was nice and felt like home. We could also easily find fishes hung in front of the house. It is not surprising as the villagers there lived upon fishing.
Aside from the dried food and egg yolk, there were also stalls selling the street food and souvenirs. There was a fugu fish keychain and it was uber cuteee! I really wanted to buy one, but it was very fragile. I was afraid that I will break it even before I reach home haha. Tai O also famous for the beancurd dessert and it surprisingly cheap ($10). We managed to get one after our lunch was processed in our tummy :p The taste of the beancurd was plain, so you can add sugar and the ginger soup according to your own preference.
I'm so happy that the weather on that day was quite nice. The fact that we had typhoon on the previous Friday might be the reason behind the not-so-hot weather. We had the sun shining bright, but the cloud was there too. Perfect combination to accompany the hike. However, the grey cloud was not very good to be captured.
Throughout the journey, I saw quite numbers of things. We crossed the Tung Chung river, one of the few remaining major streams in Hong Kong. I also saw the cable car from Tung Chung to Ngong Ping village, which reminded me about my visit to Big Buddha with my mom and bro. Then when we started to get into more forest-y area, there were some houses with old design, just like the typical houses that you could see in scary Chinese movies. With the greyish bricks wall and some red papers pasted on the door, the houses had kind of mysterious atmosphere. I guess the houses are abandoned houses.
Once we got to the top, the view was undoubtedly beautiful. Blue sky, green lands, blue-green water. We also saw the construction of Hong Kong–Zhuhai–Macau Bridge. This bridge will connect east Hong Kong to west Macau, so people have more choice aside from taking Turbojet or Cotaijet when they want to go to Macau from Hong Kong and vice versa. It is said that the bridge will be the longest bridge cum tunnel sea-crossing in the world and will be a direct land transportation link between the east and west coast of the Pearl River Delta. Hope I can go back to Hong Kong and try the bridge once it is completed.
The stilt houses were built close or even connected to each other. Even though the houses are small, people line their homes with potted plants and grow vegetables on their doorsteps. It was nice and felt like home. We could also easily find fishes hung in front of the house. It is not surprising as the villagers there lived upon fishing.
As everyone was sooo starving for lunch, we split into 3 small groups and found our own choice of restaurant to eat our lunch. Aside from the restaurants, there were also food stalls offering snacks such as egg tart, cookies, doughnut and EGG WAFFLE! The egg waffle was really crowded with people queueing. They said that it was the real egg waffle because the uncle still use charcoal to cook the batter. I really wanted to try all the sweet snacks butttt I was too full due to the lunch to eat more carbo... So I skipped it😭
Done with lunch, we walked along the street. There were many shops selling dried products (fish, fish maw, etc.) and salted egg yolk. What surprised was when I saw the shops selling dried seahorse and dried starfish. It reminded me of Patrick Star in Spongebob😥
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| A super big squid! (My hand was trembling carrying the squid) |
That's all for this post and I hope you enjoy reading it! See you on my next post! xx
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