A lovely week so far

 It's been a lovely week of leave.  To have that break, and rediscover oneself is fantastic.  All the things that are so easy and lovely to do, but too time-consuming to tackle outside the weekends, at which point the roads and beautiful places are very quickly peopled.

On Monday

I achieved very little - enjoyed my birthday with the homies, and speaking to you...

...after a decent stint of lazying about and reading in bed with the cat.

On Tuesday, I tackled a circuit of exercises and then went for a longer than anticipated run.  No pictures of that of course.  On Wednesday however...

...we hit the hills with Robyn, Pieter and hound Hugo, and walked the newly opened mountain bike trail.

Really lovely view from the contour part of the trail, water crystal clear at the beach that I swim at, bottom left of the picture.  It's amazing.  You can see the coastal reef and the sand bottom thereafter; you can also see how the waves coming into the bay fold around the point and into the bay.

On Thursday I decided it was time to break away from Clearwater Bay.  I resolved to brave the grey and chilly windy weather (11C, wtf?), got up well before sunrise and cycled through Sai Kung to the country park on the other side.  I arrived there as the dawn was breaking, went through the booms, and onto the road that runs up through the hills...

...and comes out at the High Island Reservoir, which is a massive piece of fresh water.

Staying on the road, eventually you climb all the way up to a saddle, and can look back over the reservoir (the first photo above is taken from in the trees behind and to the left of the pump-station tower, top left, to give you an idea of scale)...

...before you descend the other side which has really lovely views.

At the very end of the road is the start of the UNESCO Global Geopark's walking trail, with the reservoir on one side and the...

... run-over dam with the sea on the other side of that on the other.  As it happens there is a South African connection, because the sea wall itself is constructed of Dolosse, those perpendicularly ended concrete bollards the design of which I understand to have originated in East London of all places. A harbour engineer, Eric Merrifield, invented them in 1963 to rebuild a part of East London harbour which had been trashed by a storm (in case you've ever wondered, they weigh 80 tons each).

I had no idea what a UNESCO Geopark was, so looked it up; quite interesting for those who have budding geological urges to fulfill.  There are apparently 161 UNESCO Geoparks globally.  What they have in common is that each one has a unique geological feature.  The HK Geopark unique feature is that it has hexagonally shaped volcanic rocks that violently pushed up out of the ground.  They look like they came out of some sort of giant grater.  Here is the website for the HK Geopark, and a few pics taken from there and a website called Culture Trip - thanks to them for these.

Massive cliffs made out of the hexagonal columns.

Love how some super-extreme force shaped and bent them.

One of the cliff faces into the Reservoir really shows the column's through their decay.

Just to confirm that you can take Covid precautions whilst staying committed to disgusting-I-watch-too-much-of-the-TDF-neon lycra for cycling.

...and yup, Big Blue outside the Sai Kung post office, just in case you'd forgotten; it's an ironic statement ... to wear neon lycra to and then ride a dik-wiel with mudguards ;-)