The Peak (nee Victoria Peak) and Protests

I hopped on the ferry to Hong Kong Island at around 2 PM today with the intention of climbing Victoria Peak. There's been a "Typhoon Flag 3 Hoisted" since I arrived, so I packed my raincoat and headlamp. At Typoon Level 5 the schools close, Level 8 public transport stops, and at Level 10 you meet your maker. My guidebook naturally didn't have a map depicting the walking route up to Victoria Peak so I borrowed a Lonely Planet from another boarder and attempted to memorize the route.

I got off the 2 HKD Star Ferry from Kowloon and made my way through the skyscrapers of Hong Kong, then through the Zoo and Botanic Gardens, and finally beneath tall pink residential towers before finding a sign clearly labelled "The Peak Walking Path." Apparently "The Peak" is preferred to "Victoria Peak" in the Chinese-controlled political climate. The walk was extremely interesting: it follows a meticulously maintained paved trail with extensive concrete drainage systems to prevent land slides and settling. I was rapidly at eye level with the pink residential towers a few hundred meters distant. The trek went perfectly until I took a wrong turn (another group behind me made the same mistake) and found myself at a green metal bar fence that displayed "Hong Kong Freshwater Treatment." I retraced my steps and found the correct path-road to the peak. I arrived at the "summit" approximately 1.5 hours after leaving the ferry at sea level. The elevation is variosly attributed to be 396 meters in Let's Go or 590 meters in Lonely Planet. The "summit" was actually the depression of a saddle between two true summits approximately 20-30 feet higher than the saddle. Both of these true summits are surrounded by fences enclosing radio towers. I took another path up to the fence where there was a door identifying the radio tower as property of the Hong Kong Police. On top of the welded steel fence was razor wire so closely spaced it may as well have been a cylinder with glinting protusions. I backtracked from this area and found a pleasant park bench to watch the clouds fly around the peak and the mists obscure the container ships. The bench was at the end of a trail that was delineated by another wall of the concrete variety but with only the relativey pedestrian variety of barb wire atop that settled the American West.

It had drizzled on me on the way up, but not to the point of discomfort. While whiling away the time on the bench, it began to pour: the rain came down in sheets and had I no raingear, I'd have been soaked as thoroughly as after a swim within a moment. Just as I was starting on the road back in this tempest, a black Peugeut pulled up alongside of me and offered a ride. I shared the back seat with a girl of about ten while her parents navigated in front. The couple were business people and spoke passable English by way of their dual Hong Kong - Canadian citizenship. The wife worked as a buyer at a Pokemon toy importer. They lived in the New Territories of Hong Kong and had just come to Hong Kong Island for Sunday. Unfortunately the typhoon interfered with their plans to see the expansive view from The Peak. I was quite interested in accepting the ride because I had yet to have any real tete a tete conversations with the locals (and because I'd given up any sense of a clean ascent after being stymied by razor wire fences). I would say the couple represented the upper middle class of Hong Kong: a rarity in that a disproportionate number of the non-taxi cars on the road are Mercedes.