So I never went to Hong Kong. I was totally ready to go on Thursday and then my friends bailed on me Friday. I still was going to go as a day trip but I decided to cancel that Friday night when some Chinese friends of mine pointed to the TV at their restaurant and told me a typhoon was heading towards Hong Kong. Sure enough there was a big swirly thing on the radar heading straight for Hong Kong. I'm not afraid of typhoons, but who wants to go visit a new city during the middle of a massive storm with pouring rain?
So Saturday I went hiking instead with my friend Nicole. I already talked about getting sick. My day was actually pretty interesting even before that.
I had gone hiking on a new mountain in the city with one of my English speaking contact teachers on Friday. (There are quite a few small mountains throughout the city, they are all public parks.) I had a lot of fun and the view was great. On Saturday Nicole asked me if I was willing to go back for a second try. Sure I said... so off we went. One minor problem, I forgot my map. We guessed a bus going in the right direction and got near enough to the mountain. Well, we at least though we were near the mountain. We could see quite a few mountains near us, but had no idea where we were and were generally unable to find the park entrance I had been to before, so we just walked alongside the mountain and asked where we could go to climb it.
All of a sudden a guard pointed us to a small stairway leading up to a door in the fence and told us that we could climb the mountain there. I had never seen this part of the park before, but hey, it was a mountain, and there was a trail, so we went on ahead and started climbing. Most trails in the parks here are really well developed. They are all paved, and you climb the mountain on endless stairways, many of which look very similar to the stairways you see in the Kung Fu movies, where the hero climbs what looks like miles of stairs to eat a single bowl of rice. The trails in this park were barely visible. Totally unpaved. It was great, really rustic, really adventurous, beautiful. Way more fun than the boring stairs.
After a few minutes we entered a clearing and found a military obstacle course. Barbed wire, walls to climb over, long balance beams to walk over, the whole works. At one end there was a shooting range, with some targets with remarkably low caliber holes through them. Musta been either a .22 or a pellet gun.
The trail continued and so did we. The next thing we discovered in the dense jungle was a massive spider. I was about to climb a tree and almost walked into it. It was as big as my hand. We took a bunch of pictures of it, but weren't sure if it was poisonous or not. The next thing I knew I walked right into another web and caught the spider running away out of the corner of my eye. The web was thick and covered with sticky yellow goo. Really nasty shit. I call it spider-cum. This happened a few more times even though I tried to be as careful as possible. Considering we though the spiders were poisonous, I guess I was being pretty stupid. I tried my best to look for them, but they are hard to spot even though they are so big because it is hard to see the webs in the low light under the thick foliage.
After a while the trees got thinner and the ground got sandier and rockier. We turned around and were blown away by some wonderful vistas. Great view of the city, but the weather kind of sucked. In a few weeks I want to organize a trip back to check it out again with more people. Soon after the jungle disappeared we got to the top, where we found the first other person in what we thought was a deserted park. There, all by his lonesome, was a security guard for the park chilling out with his dog. I rested for a while because by this time I was suffering some pretty severe cramps from the flu I was developing. Then we showed a guard a picture of the spider and asked him if it was poisonous. He said he had never seen one like it before. I guess the path we took up the mountain isn't used much. We took another more popular path down. It was tough going through light forests where the needles on the ground kept making you lose your step and start sliding down the steep incline.
On the way down we passed a lot of utilities. Water mains, big towers supporting power lines and random ancient looking concrete bunkers (those are still a mystery). Pretty soon we came out of the mountain at a hospital called the "Armed Police Hospital." Interesting name. Eventually we navigated the bus system home, and made it back to my place... which is where I started to get sick. The promised hospital story will be posted tomorrow.
Nicole navigating the obstacle course
My hand and the spider
The view halfway up the mountain. 
