Hiking through High Junk Peak Country Trail

In a city with over 7 million people, it's a challenge to find a quiet spot away from the crowds. That's why I love to go hiking on the weekends. Hong Kong's rugged landscapes and natural environments are often overshadowed by its night-life and shopping. But Hong Kong actually has over 50 different scenic hiking trails that vary in difficulty and terrain. Since Hong Kong is a coastal city the view of the marine areas at different points during the hike really is beautiful.

I've gone hiking a couple of times this year in the Spring and early Summer, but I like hiking in the Autumn best. The weather is warm but breezy and more importantly the humidity low (<50%).

CharK and I started at the High Junk Peak Country Trail entrance just off Clear Water Bay Road and followed the trail to the Pavillion. It was our first time through this trail and stopped to take a lot of photos along the way. It really helped that we had seen some photographs of the trail before hand, from www.hike.hk This is a fantastic site which features many of HK's trails, and the owner offers some good descriptions of the landmarks to watch for on your hike. Our hike was about half of the length of the entire trail and we took about 1.5 hours...pretty slow but we took a lot of photos along the way and spent some time to enjoy the scenery.

The main entrance to the High Junk Peak Country Trail on Clear Water Bay Road (Photo: CathC)

We headed in the attempted to head to大廟 (Photo: CathC)

Typical hiking trail--lots of stairs and rocks (Photo:CathC)

The trail had a wide variety of vegetation include this young bamboo trees (Photo:CathC)

The houses look very picturesque from up here. You can even see they carved out a corner of the mountain for the house on the top right corner (Photo: CathC)

A view of the latest developments in Lohas Park from the trail (Photo:CharK)

The HK government takes care of these hiking trails and they've placed a series of distance posts along the trail to help you find your way (Photo: CathC)

We exited the trail here and ended up back onto Clear Water Bay Road (Photo: CathC)

My favourite view during the hike. We looking in the direction of Port Shelter (Photo: CathC)

There is still another half to this trail that I'd to come back and finish. This part of the hike is famous for the amazing view of the Clear Water Bay beaches. After that hike it'd be nice to head down to the beach too. Autumn is turning out to be one of my favourite time of the year...