25th May, 1997

Stage 4 and 5 of Maclehose Trail

Participants:

Sark
Shane
Graheme

Saturday night I was in bed by 9:30 and I woke up at 6:45 Sunday to go hiking. It was a stupid idea I know, but I had been looking forward to it all week. Participants were Sark, Graheme (who works with Chris on the phone) and me. Graheme found the Ma On Shan climb a little tough. Anyway it was a very hot day and his decision to bail out to Sai Kung later on stage 4 appears to have been a good one!

I had just bought this new dude hiking backpack which has this water bladder in it with this drinking hose that attaches to the shoulder harness, and it was really good. After about 5 hours I got this really bad pain from these new boots I bought in my left achillies tendon. Seems the boots pinched it, and I still had more than an hour to go before there was a bus stop.

I made it (after fighting off some rather agressive monkeys along the way - a bit like the ones in Bali) and am in a lot of pain today in that foot. I guess it will be a week or so before it comes good again. I have decided to give those boots a rest and bought some cross trainers instead. The hike turned out to be just over 23km, but very hilly, much more so than the 50km I did in HK at Easter on the Hong Kong trail. I am going to have a couple of weeks off the spastic hikes, and have a very leasurely couple of hours planned for next Sunday. The following weekend is Nepal, and the one after I will get back into the serious stuff.