Anybody have a flashlight?

The mother so subtly mentioned the other day that she never sees her name in this blog. My latest adventure had me thinking about her, so I am dedicating this post to the best mother ever!

Wednesday morning email exchange (edited - a lot):

Jo to Jill: Fancy a hike after work? There's a good, hilly, intense hike on Hong Kong island (The Twins and Violet Hill). I'll walk it and you can run it and we'll meet at the other end. It ends at Stanley. We can meet at 6:00 and finish by the time it gets dark.
Jill to Lailany: Hike tonight with Jo?
Lailany to Jill: Sure - we can get a good dinner in Stanley afterwards.
Jill to Jo: Lailany and I are in -- we will meet you downstairs at 6:00.

6:00 p.m.:  Meet up with Jo and take cab to start of hike. Begin hike, up a lot of steps and continued upward to the top of Violet Hill. I make a comment to Jo ("Were you freakin' kidding me when you said I could run this?" --- She was serious!)

6:something p.m. (okay, totally lost track of time):  We proceed down Violet Hill and get a glimpse of one of the Twins (yes, "Twins" means two, which translates to TWO MORE mountains to get up and down). At this point, I am just ecstatic to see the moon, as it is the first time I've seen the moon in Hong Kong.

We finished descending a few hundred steps on Violet Hill and then proceeded to climb up one of the Twins. Oh My God -- I could not believe how high up we were supposed to go and it was all steps . . . and it was getting dark! I kept thinking that my mother would be out of her mind if she knew where I was at that very moment. We were at a point where there really was no turning back -- either way, we were going to be stuck in the dark. Not only that, we kept walking into spider webs and spiders! So, here I was on a Wednesday night, stuck on the second of three mountains facing two of my fears:  spiders and falling down and breaking or spraining something that would keep me from running forever!

 

If you want to check out some pictures of what this hike looks like in the daytime, click here. If you look closely at some of the mountain photos, you can actually see the trail going up ONE of the mountains -- yes, we did that in the dark!

In all, we did probably close to 3,000 steps, hiked over rough and rocky terrain, disturbed about 1,000 spiders and prayed we wouldn't fall, have a heart attack or both! The entire time I kept saying to Jo, "You really thought I was going to run this?!"

We got to Stanley, finally (with no casualties), and got on a bus to the town center. As soon as we got on the bus, the driver took off like a bat out of hell before we were seated (which is normal around these parts) and I fell down hard in my seat. I said: "Wouldn't it be ironic if we had survived that entire hike only to break a bone on the bus?" That caused all of us to laugh our asses off.

Had a great seafood dinner and then took the bus back to Causeway Bay.

So, I have decided that I am going to do this hike out and back (probably 5-6 thousand steps in all for a round-trip) every weekend until the marathon -- in the daytime, of course!