some walking trails i’ve taken during my last trip to Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore, Malaysia.
Hong Kong
Tung Chung to Po Lin Monastery / Tian Tan Buddah
walk started at the Tung Chung MTR station, ~ 3km over asphalt roads and then narrow path up the hill. small buildings of monasteries on the way and views from above on the airport and Tung Chung district. way back – on a bus from the top to the Tung Chung hub.
Central to and The Peak and around
for the lazier tourists there’s first the Central–Mid-Levels escalator, for the rest – stairs in parallel to it. then – a bit of hiking with short visit in the small zoo with plenty of different apes and monkeys, even more of going up the hill and a circular walk around The Peak. for the best results plan to arrive after dusk to see the ‘lights of the big city’ from above.
Macau
this time we’ve arrived to Taipa terminal.. which confused me a bit. but we took first bus to ‘the casinos’ and there hopped on another bus to ‘Macau Outer Harbor Ferry Terminal’. from there walk to the Ruins of St. Paul’s, climbing up few stairs to Monte Fort, walk across the old town, quick round via Guia Hill Minicipal Park and back to the ferry terminal to catch a bus to casinos. there: an hour of looking at poor people getting ripped off in the tasteless surroundings that try hard to look lavish and mostly fail [but apparently that works for the target demographics].
Singapore
Singapore feels always fresh, orderly and much less crowded compared to Hong Kong. every day we took a walked across another park.
Southern Ridges
this map gave us idea for the Southern Ridges route from HarbourFront to Kent Ridge; we passed few different parks – over the hill tops, sometimes via passages quite high above the ground with views of city on the sides and tropical trees under our feet.
Marymount to Bukit Batok
that was definitively the best route we’ve taken; on the way we’ve seen plenty of wild monkeys running around, jumping between trees; some iguanas, exotic [for us] birds. Bukit Timah Nature Reserve felt like a tropical forest.
this one is definitively worth visiting again if i happen to visit Singapore in the future.
Singapore Botanic Garden
south and north beaches
first a walk from Eunos to Tanah Merah with detour to the seaside, later the same day – from Pasir Ris to the seaside and back:
as a side note – Singapore is full of ‘reasonably priced’ [ = cheap ] food courts – with great selection of food; we’ve eaten out nearly each day without much planning. once we got hungry we walked for 20-30 minutes and found some place we liked.
Malaysia / Johor Bahru
not much to write here. we took a bus from Queen Street Bus Terminal near Bugis to JB and walked there for a bit. we tried to enter big gardens west of the bus station but that did not work – so we walked around them. we’ve done some shopping in one of the shopping malls, eaten some local food and took a bus on the way back.