The Peak

The Peak is one of those redolent words great wealth (often trapped in ugly concrete box houses) packed high above magnificent, peerless Hong Kong harbour; a bastion of colonialism (no Chinese allowed to live there until the 1950s); the Peak Tram humming up its impossibly steep track; the typhoons and gin of The Honorable Schoolboy.

Do take the obvious walk Lugard and Harlech Roads (i.e. concreted paths) around Victoria Peak, with its outstanding views over the harbour, its towers so huge that even here, hundreds of feet up, you still have to look up at their tops; then down over the green mountainsides of the South Side toward Lamma Island looming in the hazy South China Sea. Although you will always be in company (with crowds, even, near the Peak Tower, the upper station of the Peak Tram), it is unmissable. A fabulous diversion is to walk 10 minutes down to the WWII battery below High West, with its marvellous views over the western harbour toward the mountains of Lantau spectacular at sunset.

Other routes, however, make gripping walking while avoiding the tourist crowds: the loop of Mount Kellett Road and, even better, circling the eastern mass of the Peak on Severn Road: vast vistas of harbour, hills and sea mixed with snooping onto the villas' most heartwarmingly-ugly of the super-rich.

One of the joys of the Peak is its vegetation it is sufficiently damp and vaporous here for it to feel like cloud forest, with vines, moss and other parasite plants making a comfortable living, thank you very much, on the boughs of the sturdy evergreen trees. On Severn Road, it is a riot of paddle-leaved plants, bamboo and vividly coloured, sculpted foliage. And the birdsong!

There are endless walking options here: swing down steep Peel Rise (below Mount Kellett Road) through particularly fine woodland, to a vast storm drain above the fishing village-turned-factory-town-turned-high-rise-hub of Aberdeen, then contour around the hillsides for miles, emerging back at the Peak Tram to the west, or at Middle Gap, high above Aberdeen Reservoir, to the East.