Sunday 23 August
Team members on call: Chloe, Elodie and Lorene
Special guest: Anne-Laure
Weather: Very hot weather signal
Objective: Section 1 & 2 of the Maclehose trail
Length: 24.1 km Difficulty: Easy and medium
For our first training session, we have a special guest, Lorene's friend, Anne-Laure from Biarritz. Therefore, we decide to take it easy and do section 1&2. It is all the more a good idea, that the very hot weather signal is on, and though the signal is on, it takes much more than that to stop Chloe and Elodie the warriors.
We meet at 10 am in Admiralty and start hiking at 11. It is indeed very hot. Section 1 runs smoothly, it is mainly road, flat, a nice walk around the reservoir, and no shadow. Elodie is walking ahead, normal she says, we only walk 24 km today.
After a long hour, we can catch a glimpse of the beautiful Long Ke Wan beach. However we also notice an unusual scene. There is the clear blue water, the many junk boats and, many people gathered on the beach while an helicopter lands on the beach. A few minutes later, the helicopter is gone and everything gets back to normal.
One hour and a half of walk and we stand on Long Ke Wan. It is just so hot, we cannot resist to jump in the water before lunch, and it feels so good. It is a popular spot for lunch, many fellow walkers next to us. We try not too stop too long though, 30 min break and we start again.
It is now that is gets hardcore. The weather gets hotter and hotter, we are digesting and a there is a hill of 300 m up. 300 little meters that take us hours. Lorene is the only one to notice the board at the beginning of the hill mentioning heat exhaustion and precising that many hikers experienced difficulties on it because of the heat. Because of the heat, we need to stop every 20 min to cool down in the shadow and drink a lot of water. We all feel a little bit dizzy. Who said doing the Oxfam Trailwalker would be easy!!
But we are not alone, at each shelter we meet fellow hikers who train for the Oxfam Trailwalker. Who else could be hiking with this weather? We casually chat about the trai,l the weather. A very promising atmostphere. It seems that it is difficult for all of us today.
We finally manage to reach the top of this f..ing hill. Forget about the time, it took us ages. Thanks God we go downhill and the weather gets cooler. We are so tired, so late in our schedule that we would only finish section 2 past 9 pm. Besides, the sky gets very dark, we can hear the thunder and fellow trailwalkers tell us that it is raining in Shatin. There is just no way that we walk under the rain. At 4:30 pm we call it a day. At 5 pm we are in the bus, Alleluiah!!!
The bus drops us in Sai Kung and as exhausted as we are, we take a cab. Not any cab. The "Dictee magique" cab. B-U-F-F-E-T, Buffet, our cab driver is learning English, F-R-E-E-W-A-Y, freeway. We are still trying to find the link between buffet and freeway.
At this stage, we believe we only did section 1, 10 km, in 6 hours. We are so far from our goal. I, Lorene, just think that we are still alive despite the heat. In fact, it appears that we did go as far as checkpoint 1, which is at one third of section 2, 17 km. And it was 35°c in the shadow while there was no sign of shadow on the trail. L'honneur est sauf. We were not that bad.
We really suffered but this was our first training and we got this feeling of accomplishment. We started training!!
