Parkland Has the Run of Hong Kong

Late at night, the flickering progress of flashlight-bearing joggers can be traced in the steep, rocky hills above Hong Kong. During the day in the crowded business districts, thin and extremely fit people are observed at noodle shops and Italian restaurants “carbo-loading” on double and triple orders of pasta.

And practically every social event risks being dominated by what one local newspaper has dubbed “The Trailbores”--men and women whose conversations are limited to details of their latest nighttime training run or troublesome left calf muscle.

These are the days leading up to the annual Trailwalker competition, a grueling, 60-mile team cross-country race that is one of the world’s most daunting physical challenges and a kind of cult event here. Initially held in 1981 as a training exercise for the elite British army Gurkha units--knife-wielding mountain men recruited from Nepal--the Trailwalker has evolved into a civilian charity that attracts four-member teams from around the world.

But in another way, the footrace, which begins this morning with 3,040 competitors, is also a celebration of one of Hong Kong’s greatest, and least known, assets: its unique system of interconnected country parks and nature trails that covers nearly 40% of its territory.

The 158-square-mile park system has more than 300 miles of trails, sandy ridgeline paths and granite steps leading up the steepest slopes. The system is accessible from almost any point along the populated coastline.

The effect on those who reach the highland trails is euphoria. Around hikers is a 360-degree panorama of ocean and continental range. Eagles and pariah kites soar as billowy clouds scud past.

“There is nothing like this anywhere else,” said Dick Baram, a 50-year-old government civil servant who was hiking alone on the Wilson Trail high above Hong Kong’s skyscrapers on a recent weekend. “Where I live, I can be in the center of town in five minutes or in the same amount of time at the top of a mountain, looking out over all of Hong Kong.”

Few places on Earth have a more congested urban morphology than Hong Kong, a noisy, throbbing, polluted nightmare of high-rise buildings and growling traffic. Hong Kong ranks fourth in the world behind Monaco, Macao and Singapore in population density. Hong Kong Island and the Kowloon Peninsula, where most of the territory’s 6.6 million people live, have a population density five times greater than Manhattan.

The green side of this Malthusian horror is one of the few places in the world, and particularly in Asia, that offers instant relief from urban hubbub, provided here through a vast system of public parks and nature trails that lace the highlands above the developed areas.

Much attention has been paid to Hong Kong’s giant new airport and container ship port, both paid for with tax money earned in the colonial era. But the country parks and trail system may turn out to be one of the most enduring legacies of British rule, which ended July 1, 1997, when the colony was returned to China.

“Our park system is rather unique and not much understood,” said University of Hong Kong geography professor C. Y. Jim, who helped plan the system. “Hong Kong is so famous for urban tourism, but most people don’t realize that half of our territory is countryside and 40% of it is protected.” Jim is pushing the government to encourage ecotourism.

The explanation behind the country park development is partly topography--most of the central land mass is waterless and too steep for development--and partly historical, owing to the succession of outdoor-loving British governors who ruled here and walked or rode the rugged hills.

The most important of these governors was Murray MacLehose, an outdoorsy Scotsman who served as governor from 1971 to 1982. In a telephone interview, MacLehose, now a member of Britain’s House of Lords, said he felt an urgency to create protected parks in Hong Kong because of unrest and instability in neighboring China, which was in the middle of its bloody Cultural Revolution and spilling refugees into Hong Kong when he arrived as governor.

“In the late 1960s,” said Wong Fook-yee, a senior bureaucrat with the Agricultural and Fisheries Department who has written a book about the Hong Kong park system, “there had been rapid social and economic change in Hong Kong . . . widespread riots and disturbances.”

Wong said the government concluded that rural parks were needed to help reduce the “antisocial feelings” of Hong Kong youth.

MacLehose remembers that the urgency to create what are now 22 country parks was compounded by the speed of urban development.

“We realized,” MacLehose said, “that unless something was done very quickly, there wouldn’t have been any country area left in Hong Kong.”

Building on stone trails constructed more than two centuries earlier, MacLehose and his planners were able to link wilderness areas into a park system that allows hikers to traverse the territory with only minimal exposure to automobile traffic, making it an ideal trail runner’s locale.

“Hong Kong is not the best city in terms of culture and performing arts,” said Keith Noyes, a 34-year-old UCLA business school graduate who works here as a derivatives broker. “But particularly if you like outdoor sports like climbing and trail running, there can’t be any more convenient place in the world.”

Noyes will be competing in his sixth Trailwalker event today.

For 48 hours, more than 750 teams--with names such as Moonbats, Capitalist Running Dogs and Definitely the Last Time--will run or hike through eight public parks on the MacLehose Trail.

The competitors climb Hong Kong’s highest peak, Tai Mo Shan, descend into thick jungle with wildlife that includes barking deer, pangolins and deadly bamboo snakes, and teeter on the ridgelines over one of the world’s busiest harbors.

The fastest of the teams should finish the 60-mile course in under 15 hours. The record, set in 1983 by the 10th Princess Mary’s Own Gurkha Rifles, is 13 hours, 18 minutes.

The Trailwalker is expected to raise more than $1.5 million for programs administered by the Oxfam poverty relief organization.