peak viewing

“Let’s go up the Peak,” suggested Paula recently.

Victoria Peak, the highest summit on Hong Kong Island, is the only major mountain in Hong Kong that I don’t know the Chinese name of. However, it’s always been simply ‘the Peak’, hence the wording of Paula’s suggestion. How to get there is the first problem. We can get a train from Fanling to Admiralty station on the island side (this line used to terminate at Hung Hom, on Kowloon side, but was extended by the MTR a few years ago), followed by a short walk to Central. From here, if you’re a tourist, you will probably take the Peak Tram (actually a funicular railway), but we always take the bus, mainly because the views are far superior—on the tram, you’re tilted backwards at an obscene angle, so you can’t see much, although if you’ve never tried it, then you should. Just once though.

The bus terminates next to the upper terminus of the tram, so there’s no effect on what you might want to do next. It is possible to continue uphill on foot, although the actual summit of the Peak is inaccessible because it houses a radio station. We always start by walking along Harlech Road, which contours the southern side of the Peak. There are occasional views to the south, but nothing particularly impressive. And despite the crowds around the tram terminus, it’s relatively quiet on this road, with few people and almost no traffic:

I never notice at what point we find ourselves on Lugard Road, which crosses the northern slopes of the Peak with no major gradients, ending eventually at our starting point. However, according to the government map Harlech Road continues straight on where Lugard Road branches off to the right somewhere around the col that separates the Peak from nondescript higher ground to the west. The last time we visited the Peak, we encountered a couple of young wild pigs around the col, and I shot quite an intimate video:

The individual that accounted for the bulk of the time in this video was probably expecting to be fed. Incidentally, I hadn’t realized that there are wild pigs on the island side, although I’ve seen many of these creatures in the New Territories.

I’d carelessly neglected to charge my phone before this excursion, and we spent some time in Hong Kong Park, where I took more than 60 photos, before catching the bus to the Peak, so I shouldn’t have been surprised when my phone decided to switch itself off to conserve power as we walked along Harlech Road. Consequently, I asked Paula to take some photos whenever a gap appeared through the trees as we walked along Lugard Road. What follows is a selection of her photos, with occasional explanatory comments from me.

The first two photos are views of what might be called the ‘western approaches’ to the harbour:

Almost all the high-rise blocks that you can see in the foreground of these photos are residential buildings. The buildings in the distance in the second photo are part of the town of Tsuen Wan, the northern terminus of the MTR’s Tsuen Wan Line to Central, one of the first lines to be constructed in what is now a very extensive network.

And this was our first view of the harbour, with a glimpse of the building that dominates the view towards Kowloon:

I don’t know the name of the building, which is located on land reclaimed from the sea since the handover to Chinese rule in 1997. The entire reclaimed area is known collectively as ‘West Kowloon’.

The next photo provides a fairly comprehensive view of Kowloon:

You will notice that there aren’t many super-high buildings. The reason for this situation is that when Hong Kong’s airport was located at Kai Tak, in eastern Kowloon, a height restriction (18 storeys) was in force. Notice too the line of mountains in the distance. ‘Kowloon’ means ‘Nine Dragons’ in Chinese, referring to these mountains. I can’t positively identify any of these summits apart from the one on the far right, which is Fei Ngo Shan (‘Flying Goose Mountain’), better known simply as ‘Kowloon Peak’.

The next two photos are essentially the same view from different angles:

Notice that there are now quite a few commercial buildings in the foreground. This is because the area below is the central business district, better known simply as ‘Central’.

These are views looking east along the harbour (shots taken from different locations):

The final four photos are general views from different positions, which I present without further commentary:

One final comment: it would seem from many observations over the years that a majority of people who follow this walk do so in the opposite direction. This might seem like the logical direction to follow—spectacular views almost straight away—but if you follow Lugard Road first, Harlech Road is going to seem like an anticlimax. We will always circumnavigate the Peak in a clockwise direction!