We were planning to hike to Jardine's lookout which is one of the famous spots to get a panoramic view of Hong Kong city. Now, usually there are various ways you can hike to a specific spot within numerous hiking trails available on Hong Kong island and that sometimes might make it confusing for beginners. Well, same happened with us. We were thinking of hiking towards Jardine's lookout but little did we know that our starting point was completely on the opposite side of the trail!
Before I get into the specifics of the hike; I would like to share what really happened to us! We had plans to hike just one mountain however we end up hiking two in the process before descending down to the city centre. We started from the Braemer hill station which was somewhere connected to the Wilson trail while Jadine's lookout is on the Hong Kong trail! So basically, we started in between at the Wilson trail and in the middle of the hike joined Hong Kong trail to finally reach the lookout spot.
Let's start with our route of hike to give you glimpses of the trails. This blogpost is full of pictures to make it an engaging read. Hope you like it. Like I said, our starting point was the Braemar Hill station;
After climbing few stairs upfront, we came at the spot where you need to choose which trail you would be hiking as seen in below. For Jardine's lookout, you need to take right while for Braemar hill hike, you can take the left. If you want to explore the left side of the trail then you can visit my another blogpost where I talked about what to expect while hiking Braemar hill.
We took the right turn and started walking down the path. Soon we realised that the trail wasn't properly maintained; rather it had few stones in between randomly while walking along. That looked like a natural trail instead of a trail with concrete walkaways as can be seen in below snap.
We kept going and started seeing the concrete routes. Basically, it was only the initial part of the trail that a bit uncomfortable for walking while here onwards seemed to be more convenient. Throughout the trail, we had come across such joint pathways where you had to choose a side to explore further and that made our hiking experience rather unexpected in the end since we ended up choosing random trails without knowing the distance and slope we were supposed to cover!
Hence, sometimes it helps if you do a bit of research before venturing our on such hikes. We just assumed that navigation won't be that difficult and ended up in the middle of nowhere sooner. By the way, we took the right turn here and didn't take the stairs on left and this time it was a right turn we took!
We kept walking on the path for another 10-15 min and rewarded with a stunning view of the city that can be seen below. Initially, we thought that this must be Jardine's lookout. However, we were completely clueless that how far we were from the actual Jardine's lookout spot on the Hong Kong trail! Isn't it amazing that you get to see such a great view of the city after hiking just for half an hour. We could have gone back from this spot had we known the entire path; but in our case we were just getting started since it was a fine Saturday afternoon and we had no better things to do!
By the way, that day we were carrying a bag with some food and water which was the best decision we did right from the start of the hike. We had 2 snickers, 2 mini water bottlers, 1 pack of biscuits and few packs of tissues. We ended up using almost all of it throughout the trip to keep our energies high which was essential.
I always like to admire such city landscapes whenever I get a chance. I always feel like having an extra moment to just sit and watch it for sometime; which never happens since I get restless quite easily. Why do we always run so much in life and always in a hurry of doing things? Sometimes I wonder, why can't I just have a simple and peaceful life to sit back and relax while admiring such view on daily basis! This is what happens to me whenever I get closer to nature! I become a philosopher and such thoughts keep running through my brain endlessly. Enough of these, bottomline is how good is this view of Hong Kong!
After taking few pictures at this above spot, we started walking deeper in the mountain. As you can see it below, one side of the trail was completely closed with large trees while the other was completely open giving amazing views of the city building from a distance. A little caution for couples with kids to ensure they are not walking too far from you while hiking on this trail. be careful.
Best part about hiking on such trails is you get to see unexpected sceneries every once in a while; just like we did (below) on the way. This was a dry waterfall sight since we were visiting during early winter. Imagine it being filled with water; the sounds of running water would have soothed a disturbed soul, isn't it? Man, I really liked this sight.
We moved on along with fellow locals (surprisingly some senior citizens too) with the hike. I really get amazed by the fitness levels of Hong Kong locals; irrespective of their age. I am not a regular hiker myself but when I see these old folks hiking the hell out of these trails, I get ashamed of myself. One of the reasons why I started hiking over weekends these days.
Up to this point, so far we had almost walked for an hour from the starting point and had no clue which way we were heading to; and this is where it started getting interesting. We simply started following the old couple that you can see in above picture since we didn't have a clear plan in mind on what trail or which direction we should take on. This is the basic mistake majority of beginners do by just following the fellow hikers.
First rule of thumb is don't just blindly follow somebody during hiking trail; you have no idea how much distance they have hiked before you and what they are planning to cover next! Looks can be deceiving and HK locals are too fit for beginners like us (that we realised sooner on this trail). Below was the trail we started descending walking right behind the old couple.
That old couple had already disappeared somewhere and we had taken few different turns on the way and ended up in the middle of forest as you can see below. We also saw 'Beware of wild dogs' stand-posts on the way couple of times. We spent few moments at this spot just to make sure that we are going in the right direction.
We saw this mountain in front of us while figuring out the way out. We realised that there was a walking trail that was going right to the top of the mountain. You can see it from a distance below. We were being optimistic at this point in time that why don't we find out a way to reach at the basement of these stairs. Until this point it was still fine for us to proceed!
We realised that we could spend the whole day circling around since we didn't know the route. We decided to go back few steps from where we had reached to this spot. we came back to one of the junctions in between where 3 different routes were going in different directions. We waited for a bit and saw few locals coming out from one of the routes (most of them were carrying a dog with them). That's a smart thing to do while hiking to bring a dog for safety; as you never know what to expect out in the wild. We followed that route and had so much satisfaction when we saw the below board in front of us. We reached the basement of Mount Butler here!
Until this point, we both were excited to get to the mountain top. Hence, we started ascending it. It was a good decision then to climb the mountain and it was around 90 min. into the hike for us. While climbing up, we end up getting incredible views of the city (I am running short of adjectives now since we had plenty of sights to admire throughout the hike!) as seen below. I am simple speechless to see it; lush green shrubs around us and a sight of high rising sky scrapers at a distance. By the way, all these sights were completely free of cost! So much to explore in Hong Kong for adventure seekers. We took almost every type of a picture here.
Few more sights we kept capturing while ascending;
and more...
After reaching the mountain top, we didn't give enough thought on where should we go. I could see lots of people were descending the same stairs beside us. My basic assumption was that if we keep going now then we will end up on the other end of the mountain basement (that time it made sense to me!); However, I thought that it's a single mountain which was obviously a wrong assumption. So we keep going on the next path as seen below.
Amazing views around were giving us more energy to keep going, so we did.
We walked for 15-20 more min. and reached to the below spot! Now, this was still the point where we should have taken a reverse turn and gone back to where we started from; but we didn't. Now we had a choice either to take a right turn that goes to 'Tai Fung Au' or a left turn that goes to 'Hong Kong Trail'. We took a left turn. Little did we know that we were approaching towards a second mountain.
Soon we were lost and took a pause. We asked a lady that came from the other side and asked her how long its going to take to reach to the other side. She told us just follow the stairs and you will be fine. We relived on her comment and kept going!
I was mesmerised by this scenic view. Just look at this below!
More stairs were waiting for us ahead!
and more stairs!
On the left hand side while we were climbing down the stairs, this amazing view was waiting to admired by our eyes! How stunning is that as a sight to watch, right?
More stairs to climb down...
What you can see below is the other side of the Mount Butler! Yes, you read that right. We basically climbed up and down the entire mountain and in the process of climbing the next mountain.
We hiked for almost an hour tirelessly before reaching the below spot. As you can see that we had covered the right part of the Mount Butler.
Just behind the above navigation board, there was the 'Jardine's lookout' point! So finally we reached at this spot and boy oh boy; what a sight it was! See it yourself below.
After reading that board we were slightly relieved since it was no longer a climb up but climb down only. We started climbing down the last leg of stairs to get closer to city centre.
Phew! I was so happy to see these concrete building below while walking down the path. It gave a moment of relief to us that we are somewhere near to the city side. We were literally frustrated by this point since the stairs were never ending.
After descending to the end of the path, you get to see following signages. Basically, locals start their hike from this starting point for Jadine's lookout. However, we got to know that only after seeing this board!
Below was our end point of the 3.5 hours long hike. Phew! I mean we never thought that we can hike so much in one stretch looking at our stamina and fitness. Honestly, not knowing the end point helped in a way else god knows how we would have covered the trail if we had gone back the path where we started.
We were so tired and restless that within a minute we found a taxi on the road and got going! Lol, I mean it was a crazy and a bit scary hiking experience we had that day. We were fortunate that we started early afternoon around 2pm and reached at the above end point somewhere around 5:30pm in the evening just before it was about to get dark. For beginners like us, hiking 2 mountains in a single attempt was an accomplishment in itself and we were supremely proud of ourselves. It goes without saying that we end up resting for 2 days in a row to get our bodies back to normal!
Let me know if you liked this blogpost and do share with me if you had any such similar hiking experiences. Happy hiking!
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