Sunday afternoon my host Chris and I went for a hike up to Victoria Peak.  It was a pretty good workout, two hours to cover more than seven kilometers and an elevation gain of, I think, about 300 meters (more than 900 feet).  It was also a chance to get a different point of view on a city that many consider to be a veritable urban jungle.

This is how most people view Hong Kong – tremendously dense and tremendously vertical.  But just a short distance from where I took this picture of an urban landscape, I also shot the picture below.

It could hardly be more different, right?  This hike was a pleasant break from a few days of being surrounded by concrete.  There were so many people hiking on a beautiful Sunday afternoon, enjoying the overcast weather and the temperature that dropped several degrees as we gained elevation.

A lovely waterfall on the back side of Victoria Peak, facing the south side of Hong Kong island.  Amazing, too, how much cooler the weather gets just by getting away from the pavement and concrete.  What a heat sink “civilization” is!

Here’s a map of the route we followed.  If you don’t want to gain quite so much elevation, you can walk the approximately 2-km circuit starting and ending at the Peak visitor center.  It is mostly flat and offers a view from several different angles.

All this hiking not only helped break in a new pair of cross-trainers, it also whetted my appetite for some Shanghainese food, which I’ll write about on Friday!