With covid finally in full swing in HK, and New Years' eve quarantines completed, we set about making the most of the activities still available, namely hiking and boozy brunches. Why not dinners you ask? Well duh - restaurants are currently closed at 6pm, because of course, that’s the time that covid comes out at night.

Luckily there is no shortage of hikes or brunches in Hong Kong and plenty of willing mates as we were all in the same boat. Sometimes necessity leads to creativity and we had a couple of great Friday evenings doing night hikes. Finding our way to a great view point then hanging out with some baileys and hot chocolate/coffee in a group much larger than the legal limit of 2 (eye-roll), was a great way to get some fresh air, socialising, and exercise all in one.

I was also in training for the 70km Lantau trail so trying to get some more proper training hikes in as well. The highlight was definitely the 8 immortals hike, a series of 8 peaks with each one named after a different “Immortal” from Chinese mythology. We had stunning weather and view of both HK and China, it’s an awesome hike as it’s mainly on a ridge so you have views a lot of the time. The name is definitely slightly misleading as we climbed way more than 8 peaks that day!

After another few local training hikes, it was time for the real deal, Lantau Peak over 2 days. We had decided to split it at Tai Po, head to Discovery Bay for the night then restart from Tai Po the next morning. Day 1 was, well, pretty brutal, Lantau and Sunset Peaks one after the other is a tough enough ask alone, but to follow it up with another 15km of hiking afterward was something else. The final descent into Tai Po is this ridiculous angled concrete path that I am fairly sure was designed for torture purposes and nothing else. Suffering aside the hike itself was pretty awesome, with lots of nice views (between the clouds) and not many people around. Having eaten way too many gummy bears during the 28.5km (8.5 hours) hike, we needed some real food, and totally destroyed the spaghetti bolognaise our friend’s husband served up that night. After which we attempted to stretch and massage-gun our muscles into freshness in preparation for day 2.

We had a super early start the next morning, the weather was really rather miserable: rainy, cold and windy. And I was sore. Really sore. My hips ached, but the worst was the blisters on my two little toes, I have NO idea why I didn’t put proper blister plasters on them for Day 1, I always get blisters there… regrets indeed. I was essentially hobbling my way along til my hips warmed up a bit, and then just popping anti-inflammatories and panadol regularly to deal with that. I couldn’t seem to find a way to relieve the pain from the blisters though. After a forced detour (adding altitude, kilometers and time) and some convincing from my friends watching me limp along, I reluctantly threw in the towel after 17.8km (nearly 5 hours of “walking”) on day 2. The friends I was hiking with stopped along with me, and we agreed the 3 of us would come back to complete the remaining 26.5km together another day*. The weather was still awful, so we headed straight to a pub for warm soup and cold pints.

We’d timed our Monday-Tuesday hike for Chinese New Year week so we had the rest of the week to recover. I headed to an AirBnB in Cheung Chau with some friends for a few days. Despite the freezing conditions, and awful AirBnB, we had a great time. We were mostly to be found cooking elaborate meals on the rooftop using a dodgy BBQ and our raclette grill and also snuck in a great meal at Pirate Bay plus a little beach walk when the sun finally peeped out.

In the last 6 weeks we also ate and drank our way through:

• a Mexican boozy brunch,

• our first meal at the Buenos Aires Polo Club (good but not worth the $$$),

• a Japanese birthday brunch,

• a champagne-fuelled farewell brunch,

• and a fair few feasts at friends’ places (luckily HK never restricted private gathering numbers!).

With all the frustrating covid restrictions and the impending departures of quite a few close friends, it was a bit of a weird time. Despite how fun all these things were, we are overall feeling pretty desperate to get out of HK, see our families, and travel a bit. We’ve started hatching some plans to escape for a few months, watch this space!

*As of October 23rd, we still haven’t done this, the 2 friends I hiked with proceeded to catch covid and then move away from HK. I also left for 3.5 months, then as soon as summer was over and hiking weather commenced I hurt my foot. Finishing the Lantau Trail WILL happen one day soon though!