Hong Kong–June 6, 2023

Not a lot of pictures today. I decided to go on one of the hikes described by the Hong Kong Tourism Bureau.

Honestly, the map on that page is pretty much useless, but I discovered a feature in Google maps: Live View. Apparently it has been around for about four years, and I never used it until now. You hold up your phone’s camera and show your surroundings, and Live View superimposes arrows showing you which direction to go. (This is much more useful than “go east 100 meters” when it’s night and you have no clue which direction is east.)

At any rate, I started the walk near the Wan Chai MTR station, seeing the usual graffiti and posters:

As I climbed the hill near the old post office, I saw this wall art which probably is for some school. A reverse image search doesn’t give me any productive results for the logo, so it’s a mystery to me what this place is.

At the top of that set of stairs, I saw that the tree roots had overgrown the stairs, which made navigating them a bit tricky.

And I saw this interesting wall...

...and this roof (second picture is a closeup)

More graffiti, and a picture to show you how steep these staircases were:

After some confusion and backtracking, I finally made it up to “Lovers’ Rock”, which did not seem all that impressive. There are quite a few little shrines around it, though.

For this, I climbed all the way up?

Well, at this point, I was planning to walk the rest of the path, but a very heavy rainstorm hit. I hid out under a small seating area with a roof, but still got totally soaked while getting there. There was some British guy there also, and we passed the next 15 or so minutes in conversation until the rain let up. Rather than try to figure out where I was and do the rest of the hike, I retracted my steps and went back down, passing the Blue House:

And that was pretty much everything I did that was picture-worthy.

Signage

I passed a Rolls Royce dealership (never saw one in person before) and was reminded of the old joke about a man who goes into a Rolls Royce dealership and asks “How much does one of these cars cost?” The salesman replies [imagine a British accent], “Sir, if you have to ask, you can’t afford it.”

This rather clever sign for a storage company:

The last two Chinese characters in these signs mean “bank”. It’s an interesting contrast between the print style and calligraphy style.

Miscellanea

A cute sculpture near the subway stop.

Apparently, the people who run the hotel where I’m staying aren’t superstitious. The hotel has both a 13th floor and a 4th floor. The number 4 is supposedly unlucky in some Asian cultures. By the way, my room is on the 13th floor.

(The wavy area in the middle of the picture is a plastic covering over the buttons.)

This is the chocolate tart. It looks great, and the icing was wonderful, but the cake part of it beneath was dry as dust.