The other Hong Kong
Northeast of the city, the Sai Kung peninsula and the islands beyond it were declared a national geopark in October 2009 and admitted to the UNESCO Global Geoparks Network on 18 September 2011, as China's twenty-sixth world-class geopark. The park covers 49.85 square kilometres of land and is one of the very few geoparks anywhere that lies inside a major metropolis. It has two regions and eight scenic areas. This day is spent in the western of the two, the Sai Kung Volcanic Rock Region.
What you are looking at
The columns are rhyolitic tuff - the deposit of a volcanic eruption on a scale Hong Kong has not seen since - and they cooled into near-vertical hexagonal prisms. They are about 140 million years old. Individually they average 1.2 metres across, which matters, because the comparison everyone makes is with the Giant's Causeway in Northern Ireland, a World Heritage site, where the columns are about half a metre. The field here covers roughly 150 square kilometres and most of it is under the sea; something like two hundred thousand columns are exposed on the shoreline. The sections on the coast of Fa Shan, at the High Island reservoir, reach a hundred metres and are described, accurately enough, as a natural hexagonal wall-painting.
Morning - the East Dam of High Island Reservoir
We drive across the peninsula to the East Dam, where the reservoir wall cuts through the column field. A geopark trail and its interpretation panels run along the water: the fault line, columns bent and twisted by later movement, a dark dyke of younger rock cutting across the columns, and, offshore, the sea stack of Po Pin Chau standing clear of the headland. Nowhere else is the structure so easy to read on foot, and nowhere else is it so easy to photograph.
Lunch - Sai Kung town
Back down to Sai Kung for lunch on the waterfront, where the tanks hold the day's catch and the restaurant chooses the fish for you rather than the other way round.
Afternoon - out to the islands
The rest of the geopark is only reachable by water. Weather permitting, we take a boat out past the Ung Kong group - Wang Chau, Basalt Island, Bluff Island - where the same rock has been cut into sea caves and sea arches by the swell. Four of them are named: the Oan Min Kok cave at about forty-five metres, Wang Chau Kok at thirty, Sha Tong Hau at twenty-four, and the arch at Conic Island. The sea cliff on the southeast coast of Sha Tong Hau Shan falls 140 metres, the highest in Hong Kong. Further out, the columns of the Ninepin group are the largest in the park, over two metres across. If the sea is up, the boat is not worth attempting and we spend the afternoon on the peninsula instead: the tombolo at Sharp Island, which appears only at low tide, and the lookouts above the bay.
Meals
Lunch (seafood, at Sai Kung)
Accommodation
Day programme - no hotel night included.
