The other side of Hong Kong

By COLIN MOORE

The week before I made my first visit to Hong Kong I spent the weekend at Great Barrier Island.

There, some 1500 people choose to escape the Auckland metropolis and survive on their 285sq km retreat on relatively low incomes for a millionaire lifestyle.

In the perpendicular city of Hong Kong the contrast is inescapable, the comparison inevitable.

There, nearly 7 million people live and work on top of each other in an area probably smaller than the Hauraki Gulf island.

Skyscrapers dominate Hong Kong Island and the Kowloon Peninsula, row upon row of them, a surreal urbanscape of tiny windows reaching skywards, each one decorated with a pole flying the day's washing.

The city's spanking new airport at Chep Lap Kok was built on 1248 hectares of mainly reclaimed land to handle 80 million travellers a year, and at 10 pm when we arrive it seems it is already running at capacity as we wait and wait for Hong Kong immigration to approve our entry.

The delay is just human inefficiency. The cavernous airport welcomed 10 million visitors last year and is many years and many millions of travellers from being overcrowded.

And on the super-efficient transport system that shoots us from Lantau Island over the world's longest road and rail suspension bridge, and then underground to Kowloon, there are seats aplenty.

Next morning, a Saturday, this huge Asian city is almost dead at street level.

Maybe the citizens are scurrying in their tower-block homes or beavering away in the tower-block offices or tower-block factories, where each floor may house a company producing some different product.

But on the footpath in downtown Kowloon it is quiet and peaceful.

No car horns honk, no jackhammers work. The newspaper does not arrive outside my hotel room until 8 am. Very civilised.

The prevailing sense is orderliness, with none of the frenetic scramble of cities such as Manila or New York.

This seems rather at odds with the towering concrete surrounds and, in a way, with why I am in the city. By rights there should be nothing but push and shove on the streets because some 70 per cent of this 1100 sq km Special Administrative Region of China is largely uninhabited countryside that the citizens choose to ignore.

About 40 per cent of the islands and patch of mainland at the Pearl River delta that constitutes Hong Kong has been reserved as country parks. The parkland rises precipitously out of the sea, as high as 900m, and it is why David Whitwam, the Hong Kong Tourist Association's New Zealand representative has brought us here.

Whitwam wants to show us the other side of Hong Kong, the side that he enjoyed regularly for nine years as an expatriate banker.

He also wants us to see how easy it is for visitors to enjoy the backcountry of this huge city and port.

It seems ironic that the parkland owes its existence to Hong Kong's commercial and industrial success. Before Britain colonised the enclave in 1841 the hills were used for agriculture, the hillsides terraced for rice paddies, the forests cut for fuel, and regrowth burned every year to enrich the valleys with ash.

But as the British turned the city into a temple of trade, its people came down out of the hills to find work and the good British administrators began to reforest the hills.

The process had a bit of a setback when the Japanese invaded in the Second World War and the locals went back to the hills and stripped them for shelter and sustenance. But since the 1950s Hong Kong has been planting up to 300,000 trees a year on the rugged heights around it. Cast your eye over the top of a skyscraper and the backdrop looks for all the world like a fairly close Waitakere, Coromandel or Kaimai Range. And it is considerably easier to get to.

About 80 per cent of the population, some 5 million people, rely on public transport. To move them, the city has 10,000 buses, 15,000 taxis (which it is in the process of converting to LPG), a huge fleet of mini-buses and 77km of underground railway that carries 2.2 million passengers a day. It is quick and efficient, with the use of smart cards that commuters pass over a beam that debits the correct fare.

There is a station less than a block away from our downtown Kowloon hotel. A $HK7.50 ($NZ2) ticket quickly dispensed from a machine, takes us to Lai Chi Kok station. From there, for $HK5.50 ($NZ1.50) we take bus 86B to the Kowloon Reservoir.

The Hong Kong hills have a quite practical purpose. Every drop of rain ends up in a reservoir with nary a drop reaching the sea. But it's still not enough to sustain the city and a lot of water is piped in from mainland China.

Our morning trek is along Smugglers Ridge to the Shing Mun Reservoir, returning to Tseun Wan township.

The trail is a paved footpath, but although it is Saturday our only company is a few monkeys. In places along the ridge are the remains of the Gin Drinkers Line, so named because the expat Brits drank gin while overseeing the locals digging a defensive line. The Japanese over-ran it in less than a day.

This is section six of the MacLehose Trail that runs up and down the region for more than 100km. It was named after Sir Murray MacLehose, Hong Kong's governor in the mid-1970s and a keen walker.

Every year 3000 people - the numbers are limited - line up to walk the trail in a single stretch. Whitwam has done it in 30 hours.

The trail has a numbered marker every 500m. Get into trouble and you can dial up a rescue helicopter to pick you up from the relevant marker.

Before you scoff, let me tell you that the morning's newspaper carried a report about a walker who died from sunstroke by the time the helicopter arrived.

We can relate to the problem because our exploration of Hong Kong's other side is probably a couple of months too late - there were no airline seats available - and walking up these hills in 30 degrees and 85 per cent humidity has us rapidly depleting Hong Kong's water supply.

It is worse in the afternoon when we take Route Twisk in the Tai Lam Country Park. It is a wonderful highland trail with views to the skyscraper suburbs and across to mainland China, but it is steep up and steep down and the paved surface is more punishing on feet and calf muscles than bush tramping.

I am down to a dawdle 17km later, as saturated as if I had dived into the pool I wish I could find. Whitwam meets me at the end of the trail with a cold beer and never has it been so welcome.

In deference to the workout, we start a bit later for our Sunday hike to the Sai Kung East Country Park. For $NZ2 we ride the underground to Choi Hung, then grab a mini bus to the marina and fish market at Sai Kung where you choose your meal while it is still swimming.

A double-decker bus takes us to the park entrance. The public shelter has been taken over by a herd of wild cattle that are quite tame and I am mystified as to why they haven't become someone's steak.

The trail to Chek Keng is delightful and even sports street lamps, but the seaside village is deserted and I am mystified by that too. The residents of Great Barrier Island would surely be also. Apparently the folk in Hong Kong consider it too far from work and would never consider travelling from Whangapararoa or Pakuranga to work.

So an old lady sits in one empty house and sells cold drinks to Sunday walkers and we have a cup of instant noodles and cold beer at the adjoining Cheng Yau Kee store at a cost of about $NZ8.80 each.

Then we catch a motorised sampan to Wong Shek (cost $NZ6.50) and bus and train back to Kowloon. It has been a most enjoyable diversion, yet we have encountered a fraction of the people you would find on the Auckland waterfront on a Sunday or in the region's parks.

Perhaps only mad dogs and Kiwis go out in the Hong Kong sun and humidity.

* Colin Moore trekked Hong Kong's other side with the help of Cathay Pacific Airways, the Hong Kong Tourist Association and the Great Eagle Hotel.

CASENOTES


GETTING THERE: Cathay Pacific flies from Auckland to Hong Kong daily with fares starting from $1599.

COUNTRY WALKS: See Exploring Hong Kong's Countryside, a Visitor's Companion, published by the Hong Kong Tourist Association. Some guided nature walks are also available.

WHEN TO GO: Spring is March to mid-May; autumn, late September to early December.

FURTHER INFORMATION: A comprehensive guide to all the attractions of Hong Kong can be found on www.hkta.org