Unfortunately, the walking path up to Victoria Peak is pretty inadequate. You have to go through a lot of the city before you really hit the forest of the mountain, so the path keeps breaking off and restarting a little ways away. Eventually, we were walking on a road where first the sidewalks disappeared, then the road narrowed to one lane. I was pretty uncomfortable with it, since the taxis sped through this area with little concern to any pedestrians, so we turned back. The above picture shows our rather inadequate ascent.
After we gave up, we went to an awesome public aviary in Hong Kong park. It was free, but it was the best aviary we’ve ever been to! Our personal favorite was the magnificent golden pheasant seen above. Andy agrees with me that it looks like a box of crayons.
Unfortunately, we lost our rose-tinted glasses through which we saw Hong Kong when we came back to Shenzhen. Hong Kong is so much more concerned with the health, safety, and happiness of its citizens than Shenzhen is. Where Hong Kong has wonderful public gardens and lots of PSAs warning about Dengue fever and such, Shenzhen has huge, gaping holes in the sidewalk with no warnings or traffic cones to keep you from falling in and braining yourself. The people are more polite in Hong Kong too – they sometimes actually wait for the next subway instead of trampling those in their paths to shove into an already overcrowded car. Our first welcome back to Shenzhen was a rat we saw on the walk home! Welcome back to the mainland! Anyway, we’ll forget about Hong Kong in a few days and get re-accustomed to the wilderness of Shenzhen.
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