A walk in the park

Hong Kong's mountaineous terrain makes a walk though the park a really great workout . The majority of city's natural hillside ranges from 0 to 30 degrees, which means the different areas of parks are often connected by long flights of stairs.

I visited Hong Kong Park yesterday, which is in one of the hilly areas of the city. This turned out to be one of my favourite parks. It's truly a beautiful oasis in the middle of the concrete jungle.  Aside from an artificial waterfall and lake that's swimming with turtles and fish, there's a fantastic vantage point that overlooks the park.

This vantage point located in the Tai Chi Garden (Photo: CharK)

There are two flights of stairs to this tower, one to go and another to come back down (Photo: CathC)

At first I was a bit wary of to walk up the spiraling staircase of this 30-metre tower, but it actually takes a very short time to walk up 105 steps. At the top I had a great overview of the park (including the lake, aviary, tai chi garden) and also the surrounding neighbourhood.

A mix of old and new buildings near the mid-peak area (Photo: CharK)

You can get a peak of Victoria Harbour from here (Photo: CharK)

If you like bird watching, this is a great park for that. Even outside of the designated aviary, there were a number of cockatoos perched on the trees. I had the greatest view of these birds from the vantage point.

Walking over to the artificial lake, I was surprised to see so many turtles and koi fish--there must have been at least dozen swimming around in there. There were lots of kids watching the animals and they'd normally love to feed them. But there were signs everywhere which said not to feed the wildlife, and they were actually pretty good about following them too.

This turtle looked so cute sleeping on a rock at the edge of the artificial lake (Photo: CharK)

I love these weekend outings to the parks--it's a really relaxing way to enjoy the autumn weather. I hope this cool weather lasts for a couple more months...I'm not really looking forward to the damp and cold winter months...