The reason I’ve written pretty much nothing for the last week here is because I was away at camp. I live in Hong Kong as a lot of you may know and it’s a densely populated and mostly urban city but there are some wildlife and green spots in the city, especially on the large island known as Lantau, which is where I and about 30 other people went camping from Monday to Friday.

It worked like this, the first two days, Monday and Tuesday, we would wake up and catch the 9:30 ferry in Central that goes to Lantau Island (Mui Wo), we would do the day’s activities and then catch the 4:00 or 4:30 ferry going back to Central. The last three days we slept in a hostel and in tents. So here is a day by day playback of what we did.

Monday
I met my friends at the Tsim Sha Tsui Star Ferry Pier to take the Star Ferry, which is a small, old, cheap and frequent ferry that shuttles between Tsim Sha Tsui and Central. We then walked to Central Pier 6 and met other people going on the camp with us there. At this point in time, I am quite a stranger to most of those people. We then got on at about 9:20 and started off for Lantau. Upon arriving at Lantau, the instructors gave us a short briefing on conduct and what we will be doing and said the first activity would be mountain biking. I know how to ride a bike but I hadn’t done for almost 5 years so at first I was a bit wobbly on the bike. But then after that I was fine and was in the lead most of the time. I fell off my bike at one point into a 3 foot ditch but luckily it was filled with hay and I just got some minor scratches.

After the biking and a short lunch, we took a ferry to the small island of Peng Chau where we did the “Great Race”. This was sort of an Amazing Race type of thing where we had clues and had to go around the island collecting letters to make a word. Quite fun. My group of 3 was the second:”(6th place with the word we made though, it was a Scrabble type of thing and our word was “hairy” )”: team to finish all the checkpoints and we were quite happy. After that, we went back to Lantau and took the ferry back home.

Tuesday

Same thing with the ferries on Tuesday. Once we got to Lantau, we were split into two groups with one going kayaking and the other canyoning. I was in the group that went kayaking. In the beginning, we had to sit in the boat in the water and intentionally flip our boat:”(While most people only had to flip once, I had to flip twice because I had a change of partners halfway through the activity. Aargh.)”:. Three words: water was cold. We kayaked around, I flipped in the beginning but it was “smooth sailing” the rest of the way. The worst part of this is that we had a mud/wet sand fight and I was dirty after that and didn’t wash off in the showers too well.

The next activity of the day after lunch was canyoning. We climbed rocks and stuff. At the end of the trail, there was a fountain and a stream and a place where you could jump from the rocks into the water. I jumped three times from the lower jump because I am too much of a sissy to go on the big one. I will next time.

Wednesday

I had to pack my backpack with enough clothes, toiletries and stuff for three days. It was a heavy backpack. Upon arriving at Lantau we got on a bus that took us all the way to 400 meters up Lantau Peak. We walked to our hostel, left our bags, took our lunch, ate it and started the hike to the top of Lantau Peak, which is 934 meters (see picture:”(You can see the rest of the pictures from the camp on my Flickr account )”: below). It was a great hike and I was the first to get up there. Then we went back down which took about a quarter of the time to get up and went back to our hostel and some people cooked, some set up the tiny rooms we had to share amongst 6 other people and some, like me, played badminton. I learned that I am not good at badminton. We then ate dinner and had a contest where we were split up into groups and had a fashion show. I was a judge so all I had to do was, well judge. There were three groups. Two were really great and hilarious and one was okay but definitely not as wild as the other two. Then we messed around a bit and went to sleep.

934 meters baby. I am not photogenic.

Thursday

The beds were uncomfortable. The fan was blowing on my head and it was really annoying. No air-con but tons of mosquito bites but fine apart from that. My group cooked breakfast, it was good. We also made lunch for ourselves but I forgot to take it with me and had to pilfer other people’s lunches. We checked out of the hostel and began the journey to the beach where we would camp for the last night. It was a long hike to the beach, we had to come down 400 meters but it was down a mountain so go figure. It took the whole group over 3 hours to get to the beach. Once there, we had to set up our tents and then we were allowed to swim in the ocean. There were rather large waves and it was fun to be pushed by the waves all the way back to the shore. The boogie boarding was great. We then had to cook our dinner. We had burritos and I was really thankful that we finally had some meat to eat. After that, we just set up our tents and stuff and went out to the campfire. Ate some marshmallows, talked and listened a lot. Went to bed homesick and exhausted.

Friday

I woke up feeling rather tired and mosquito-bitten. Got up, ate breakfast, packed my backpack and sleeping bag and went out to swim again. I got a lot more boogie boarding done this time around. After that, we packed away the tents, ate lunch and hiked to the place where the bus would pick us up. I was very happy that one of the girls was nice enough to buy me a drink because I was dehydrated and the group ran out of water. It’s not what you think, she was just being friendly.

Once we got back to the ferry pier in Mui Wo, I remembered that I had found 2 dollars earlier in the week and had it stashed in one of the shorts in my backpack. I found it and bought an ice-cream at McDonalds. I’m lovin’ it.

Conclusion

Holy schmoly that was long; I should divide this into two entries. Anyway, it was a great trip and I had lots of fun. I met some new people, did a lot of new activities, became more confident in the water and got used to being bitten by bugs. I should do this more often. I am itching to go biking again.

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