Sections 6, 7 & 8... And the team finishes the trail!

Saturday, October 24th

Team members on call: Lorene, Chloe
Sections 6, 7 & 8: from Tai Po road to Twisk
elevation: 1,100m + , 800m -
length: 20.5KM
time: 5.45h

Beautiful Saturday morning of a 3 days week-end in Hong Kong: that's the perfect timing for the two of the team who has not walked all the 10 sections of the trail to finish it!

Here we go then, start at 6am, more or less awake, with few recommandantions from a colleague of the top of our mind: don't get too close to the monkeys of section 6, pay attention to the cows on section 7 & beginning of Tai Mo Shan, be careful where you put your feet on the way down from Tai Mo Shan...

Nobody fooled us about it: section 6 is most probably the easiest and the shortest section of the whole trail. Monkeys were here as well, but not aggressive at all. The only difficulty of this section is definitely not to get lost! Carried along by our enthusiasm, we did not see the turn to make and continue along Golden Hill road up to the end. Guided by a group of old Chinese people that we made laugh a lot, we found back our way but lost around 15 min.

Section 7 starts with a beautiful point of view which totally rewards the hike up to Needle Hill. Elodie, who did it 3 weeks ago, warned us before: don't watch Needle Hill from the bottom. It really looks insurmountable, but we found the 1,000ish stairs easier to take that the ones of our weekly Twins' hiking.
Grassy Hill's slope is quite smooth and nice environment who remind us the French country side (cows are definitely part of the landscape but we hadn't seen them).

Tai Mo Shan the highest mountain of Hong Kong (957m) was not worse than expected. The way goes up to the top in a not too steepy slope.

The hike in general was quite smooth, but most probably because we did it early morning and avoid the heat of noon time. We did not go too fast, but did not take any break of more than 2minutes, and have plenty of time to chat(usually we stop speaking on the way up, but this time, the slope was not steepy, and except from the way to Needle Hill, we managed to speak the whole hike...)

Conclusion: we feel ready for the rumble!