Fa Tam (花潭石澗 flower pond) is a cute easy-ish stream. Good to test newbies; with incremental difficulty, several early exits, and nice waterfalls and pools midway.
- Beauty/fun: 6.5/10 Initial flattish area where to test shoes and skills. Several beautiful pools and waterfalls upper. Mossy areas. The MacLehose trail on the top, third stage, is a picturesque route too.
- Difficulty (check this link if new here, this is not your standard HK hiking web): 5/10 The navigation is simple, there is basically only one point where you could feel not sure which tributary to go up through (marked on the map below). There is only one spot too where the walking surface is a little bit loose and slippery almost on the very top. If dry it should not be a problem. Marked on the map too.
- Map (how to download to your phone)
See full screen and Garmin track of the way up.
You could arrive at the stream in different ways. The easiest might be by public transportation to Pak Tam Chung. Start walking on the family walk just above the bathrooms.
Connect with the concrete path (Yung Pak corridor) going towards Pak Tam village.
Once there the corridor continues North. Instead, here
you should turn East and a few meters later find the path getting close to the stream. There is a lower section of the stream up until here, also known as 龍坑 Lung Hang stream. Very flat. So usually we avoid it completely. Even that way the initial stream part is quite flat and you will be able to walk either in the path next to the stream or directly in.
Here some pictures and a video of me checking the stream in early March. Drizzling, but still with no much water. Looks way nicer in late spring and summer time.
There are ribbons and only one clear fork, marked on the map above, where you need to turn right. After that point, the vegetation increases and you walk within the forest. Slope increases and you have all the major pools and waterfalls. You will come out eventually to the MacLehose trail, next to this sign.
Continue SW direction and you will arrive back to the Yung Pak corridor from where to go back to the starting point.
Pictures in early June 2019 after a very rainy week.
And canyoning and climbing mode after heavy rain in Sep 2020.
December 29, 2022 at 12:54 pm
We would like to warn other families of the dangers of this hike. We had done over 10 stream hikes before, such as Ma Dai, Luk Chau, Tai Shing, Wang Chung etc without incident, and the description made this one sound relatively easy. However please note this Fa Tam stream hike is not well known and not hiked by many people which has several implications.
1. There are many tree branches as obstacles and overgrown shrubs, which slows progress,
2. We did not encounter any other people along the whole 5hrs+ hike despite being a public holiday,
3. Not many ribbons left by other people, so it’s hard to find bypasses or exits. We had to climb the first couple of waterfalls with steep rock faces, slippery, with poor grip to place feet or hands, and dangerous sheer drops as we could not find a way to bypass. By that time it was too late to turn back,
4. About 75% along the stream, a little before Slider waterfall there was an unmarked fork, and we veered away from the track. Once we realised, we tried to cut across back to the track through shrubs, and it was extremely slippery despite having good hiking shoes and gloves, and we could not progress further while retracing our steps downhill was dangerous due to poor grip. It was getting dark and we had to give up and call 999. In the end we were rescued by CAS Mountain Search & Rescue with a 3 hr challenging hike to safety in pitch black (no safe place for helicopter to land), and reached home at 1am. We were extremely lucky to have 1-bar mobile signal so we could send accurate GPS location to the rescue team, as the police, fire dept and CAS had not heard of this Fa Tam stream before.
December 30, 2022 at 7:29 pm
Hi Phil.
First, I’m really sorry to hear about your story.
For the difficulty of this stream and others. Tyler below has already partly explained. Let me elaborate further.
Very few people are stream hiking at this time of the year. Last Sunday after checking some dry routes around, downstream Ma Dai, which might be one of the most crowded streams in summer time, we were basically alone. I guess there has been no one in a remote stream like Fa Tam for months. Even in summer time, if you are lucky, you might have the stream all for you. That is the beauty of those remote ones. If you are looking for tons of ribbons, wide, easy navigation streams you might want to check http://www.hongkonghikes.com/ instead.
The difficulty here, as linked in every post “This is not your standard HK hiking web and the difficult rating, therefore, tends to be significantly lower than those. Some routes would be considered completely crazy and dangerous by, among others, local Gob” and Fa Tam perfectly matches with the 5/10 rating: Smoother rocks. Several points where you need to scramble a bit. Most surely with ribbons in several sections, but with no obvious best path to hike first times doing it. As explained in the How to start and others “The higher the difficulty mark the higher the chances of having a serious accident if you are not physically, mentally, and gear-wise ready.”
Several of the streams that you have mentioned nowadays have TOO MANY ribbons and other additional shortcuts that were not considered when I graded them. We go all the time next to the water or directly in. We avoid as much as possible the side paths (bypasses) and all the ropes and others set by recent hikers. They provide a false feeling of safety.
Regarding realizing that you got out of track and tried to cut across. Please do not do it until you have tons of experience and full gear. You would need a lot of knowledge, patience and pruners/machete to find/open your way. Most people just get further stuck in deeper jungle. I have seen people getting lost in the most surprising places. A friend of mine in Wong Lung Hang, that might be another of the most hiked streams in HK. Just above the main waterfall… He turned left up the hill and in some minutes he was lost in the jungle. He continued on which was just a wild boar passageway, not a real path, and once he turned he could not find his way back. Took me a long while to find where he was and get him down. Always retrace. Have an app or GPS watch that can help you with it and do it as slow as necessary. Even if you need to do it sliding on your ass. Ideally you would not need it if with really good grip shoes (what were you wearing?) and a short rope to help you.
Be safe you all!
December 30, 2022 at 5:06 pm
You went stream trekking in the middle of winter, when there’s been minimal rain for months (low flow, stagnant water, overgrown vegetation, no one else stream trekking because it’s cold, etc). It’s a smaller stream (fundamentally different from highly accessible large stream favorites like Tai Shing, Ma Dai, Wong Chung) and so that exacerbates all of the above. Nature does not remain constant over time, you need to decide when/where to go based on the conditions of the day. Fa Tam is totally fine in summer (when almost everyone does stream trekking). Though I don’t recommend stream trekking with kids at any time unless you’ve been there before or have a guide, so that’s another factor.