MacLehose Trail – Stages 1 & 2 – Pak Tam Chung-Pak Tam Ao

Pak Tam Chung – Pak Tam Ao (Stages 1 & 2)

Monday 23^rd January – 5h 02mins – 26.31km

A monster hike for the new (lunar) year, and the start of the final trail.

            The MacLehose has an undramatic start – just a board announcing it and then a road winding its way up a hill. Taxis and minibuses tootle past. I found myself wondering if this was the actual trail, if I hadn’t missed a turn-off somewhere.

            Section 2 was the first real hike I ever did in Hong Kong, at Chinese New Year a decade ago. A decade… But I’d never done Section 1 before, always sped along it in a taxi. It’s a nice enough stroll around High Island reservoir. The sun was out, but the hilltops and the far away dams were obscured by mist. The water level in the reservoir was very low, with it being midwinter, meaning that lots of strange space-age looking structures – drains and emergency overflows, I’d guess – emerged from the exposed rocks.

            Soon the clouds had reached me, or I had reached them, and I completed the first ten kilometres in a gray haze. The roads here are lined with cows, placidly grazing on the grass and leaves, as vehicles pass by at slightly alarming speeds. And then the hike starts in earnest, with a climb up then down to the first of three beaches: the smallest, and cutest – Long Ke Wan.

            There were a few campers here, as there were on all the beaches I passed, looking slightly bemused at the clouds after they had presumably left a sunny city behind. The weather was welcome, in terms of the temperature and the reduced risk of sunburn; but it meant that the stunning views Stage 2 is famous for were pretty well obscured. I kept up the hope that the clouds would break, or that I would emerge above them, looking down on fluffy pillows of white, but it never transpired.

            I had had half a mind to cut the hike short at Sai Wan, but persevered on. This beach isn’t as pretty as the others, but it is the most populated, meaning that I could get a drink, some chocolate, and an ice lolly before tackling yet another small climb over to Ham Tin.

            Ham Tin is the biggest and most impressive of the beaches, and as you climb you can see over to Tai Long Wan in the distance too. The beaches were surprisingly clean – I’ve seen them in some horrible conditions – and the rickety bridge over the river at Ham Tin has been rebuilt after it was washed away in a typhoon a few years back (rebuilt in even more haphazard style, I’d add.)

            Then there’s the trudge inland from Ham Tin, which is a slog, and with much more of an incline than I’d remembered. By now my hips and calves were groaning, as I passed the pretty bays and abandoned villages that line the route to Pak Tam Ao, and a very welcome bus back to Sai Kung. By now it was clear that the clouds were here to stay – very occasionally the sun would break through – and that a cold front was on its way.