Up and Out of Hong Kong

Everyone thinks they know about Hong Kong. They watch a few movies, read a few headlines, and suddenly they’re experts on the politics, the people, the food.

But trust me: you know a lot less than you think.

It’s complicated. It’s a dense pressure cooker of modern capitalism up against ancient traditions and in a perpetual state of change. It defies easy explanation. If there is one absolute, undeniable truth every person packed onto this beautiful rock agrees on, it’s that August is hot.

Not ‘uncomfortably warm’, hot. The air is a thick, wet, suffocating blanket that hits you in the face the second you step out of your air-conditioned lobby. Hong Kong is a claustrophobic concrete jungle so sweltering it might make the pope tear off his robe and jump into the nearest fountain if he dared to visit. It will chew you up and spit you out if you don’t find some fresh air.

My Saturday morning trail run begins at sea level, striding past the public housing estate beside my apartment building. It’s named ‘Healthy Village’, the kind of name only a bureaucrat could invent for an estate where people are struggling to get by and ‘healthy’ feels like an aspirational goal rather than a description.

Yet the kids are out on the basketball court under the sun, blazing hot at 11 a.m., slamming hoops, shouting in Cantonese. They’re running on the adrenaline of youth and seem immune to the heat. I’m over 50, my basketball days are over, but I use their rhythm as a pacemaker on the staircase behind their basketball court.

My escape lies uphill.

Look at that beast of a staircase. The moment you begin the climb, the gradient kicks you in the stomach. This isn’t a weekend stroll; it’s a violent, forty-floor climb up a staircase carved into a cliff, an assault against gravity. It rears up at a 45-degree angle, maybe 60. Don’t dare slip backward unless you fancy a broken leg or an early hip replacement.

The staircase doesn’t switchback. It just goes straight up, like it knows you have somewhere to be.

While we take a rest after that first climb, let’s go on an aside and discuss the geology of Hong Kong. It’s a cruel joke. Humanity needs to survive here crammed up against the shoreline, squeezed in by the jagged granite peaks thrown up 140 million years ago by an apocalyptic volcanic eruption. The experts say it made the Yellowstone supervolcano, the one the clickbait warriors at the New York Post obsess about, look like child’s play.

A millennium later, the air-conditioned towers of late-stage capitalism are now drilled into its base, and the mountains above them are crumbling, stubbornly dying over a geological time span. Boulders are being calved from the rock faces, broken up, and washed down raging rivers by centuries of brutal typhoon rains. One can see it in the stream above.

A group of elderly hikers pass. They call them the ‘morning walkers’, crews of seventy-year-old locals who glide up these hills at sunrise with an effortless grace. While you’re wheezing under a bush, waiting for your heart rate to drop out of the danger zone, an auntie in a sun visor glides past you backward. She’s clapping her hands for circulation, throwing you a look of polite pity.

At 200 meters up, the climb abruptly ends, and you hit the flat red dirt of Sir Cecil’s Ride. The forest finally grants the first whisper of a breeze. A century ago, British colonial governors rode their horses up here, lording it over everyone, gazing down at their colony below.

But these woods now hold darker secrets than ancient colonial history. In the spring of 1985, right on this quiet, wooded hillside, a young British couple crossed paths with a local gang. For the grand prize of a single dollar found in their pockets, they were brutally murdered. A jogger found them the next morning. It’s a chilling reminder that in Hong Kong, you are never truly apart from the human element, no matter how deep into nature you go. The jungle has swallowed the crime scene under wild ferns, but the air holds a quiet, eerie stillness.

Then, a river appears, and it’s time to get off the trail.

You are headed up toward the waterfall.

Soon you are scrambling up wet, slick granite while keeping an eye out for the deadly bamboo snakes endemic to the area. There is no opportunity to maintain a steady runner’s stride while you are grabbing at exposed roots, hauling your body weight up mud-slicked slopes using questionable, frayed nylon ropes left by unknown previous visitors. You are pouring sweat, your lungs are screaming, your shirt is soaked through with sweat, and the roar of the river drills a thousand frantic worries into your brain.

And then, out of nowhere, the jungle parts.

There’s a waterfall, with a pristine, hidden pool at its base.

On Sundays, there’s often a scene here that will crack a smile out of the most hardened cynic. The pool fills with domestic helpers. These women come from the Philippines to spend six days a week living in literal closets, cooking, cleaning, and raising the children of Hong Kong’s middle class — all so their employers can grind through two full-time jobs and probably a handful of side-gigs.

The helpers haul inflatable pool floats and picnic baskets up the mountain. Swimming, laughing, sharing home-cooked food, and blasting old American and Filipino rock ballads, they are giving a defiant middle finger to the economic machine grinding away just fifteen minutes down the hill. This mountain paradise has free admission.

Today, Chris, a trail runner from Germany, soaks his feet in the pool:

Once you rest, you push past, gasping for air as you continue the climb, now in the full sun. Your heart is a frantic, hammering engine in your ribcage, and your lungs burn. Already out of drinking water, you pass a discarded plastic bottle and for a second consider whether it has anything left in it, and if drinking untreated stream water is a good idea. You decide not and press on.

When the gradient finally eases, it feels like mercy. The stream flattens out on a plateau at the base of the higher peak ahead.

I’ve lugged my aging bones around the world, gasped for oxygen at 5,000 meters in the Karakoram, traversed wind-scoured ridges in the Rockies, hauled myself up the punishing slopes of Mont Blanc. You’d think a hill in Hong Kong, a mere bump on the map compared to those giants, would be a cakewalk. But this is a different kind of beast. It’s not the altitude that breaks you here; it’s the humidity, the slickness of the rocks, the claustrophobic stillness of the jungle. It’s proof that nature doesn’t need a ten-thousand-foot summit to humble us.

As I stand at the top, I look through the gaps in the jungle canopy. The massive housing estates of North Point and the shimmering expanse of Victoria Harbour look tiny from up here.

Living in Hong Kong, I pay a tax. A tax on my sanity, my peace, and my very breath. But if I work a little, scramble through mud, and face the ghosts of the jungle, the island can give me something spectacularly beautiful at the top.

Time to head back down. There’s a cold Blue Girl beer with my name on it waiting at the bottom.