An alternative way up to Castle Peak & the Badlands. From fun scrambling to dangerous walls. Choose wisely according to your experience.

  • Beauty/fun: 6/10 fun scrambling with spectacular (when the clouds allow) city views. Short on its own but a perfect entry for a longer day in the badlands.
  • Difficulty (check this link if new here, this is not your standard HK hiking web): 6/10 for Tsing Tip itself (brown line). High scrambling but with good hand and footholds on good quality rock. It can be slightly wet in some small sections but in the driest days. On the upper section, it is a bit sandy slippery but not high. 4/10 if you go up the second option a bit further South (blue line), way easier scrambling. Other options (red for example) 8/10, with dangerously weak rocks, trees down, sandy, little hiked, high cliffs…
  • The map (how to download to your phone offline maps)

See full screen & the Garmin track of the first day going down to Ha Pak Nai & the second day in easier mode to Mong Hau.

Tyler had not visited the badlands yet. He is easy to overheat. So January reverse mode, starting on Tsing Tip stone river (青蝶石河), the hardest climb first, and heading down from Castle Peak towards Ha Pak Lai after looked like a good plan. Next weekend I went around again to check further the area. There are tons of route possibilities on these cliffs.

Starting point is Tsing Wun stop if taking public transportation. There are a lot of buses and light trains passing by. The ride, even from HK Island or other far places, might be faster than you think through the Tuen Mun Road Bus Interchange. If you go by taxi head directly to the 青山禪院山門 (Tsing Shan monastery) to avoid the initial uphill kilometer road. Cute small buildings open to the public.

In case you see it on the OpenStreetMap, there is a bathroom there but it is pretty shabby (Jan 2023).

Continue up towards the usual Castle Peak hiking path, but in little time you will need to head South on a flat concrete path. Very easy to spot if you are checking the GPS. Once there, time to decide which ridge you will scramble up on. On the upper photosphere, you can zoom in a lot and see some of the paths. Roughly marked here.

North to South, right to left. Starting from Tsing Tip usual route itself (brown). Go up these stairs.

In no time we found ribbons heading back to the stream. But we needed to connect back to the stairs once upper as there is a landslide protection structure and

back to the dry stream again just a few meters later. Easier scrambling in this initial section. Once you arrive at the fork I have marked on the map (D1 circle) it gets a bit spicier.

We could see quite some ribbons and a few ropes that we didn’t use. There are a few high scrambles before you arrive at the sandier but less steep ground.

Able to see already the huge antennae on top. After we went down to the badlands (purple line on the map) starting on this path.

A few pics and a video of it.

The entry to the second route, the blue line, is here. Tsing San pit (青散坑).

This route is significantly easier, even if we checked a bit some additional side paths.

A video with the easiest version.

If you wish you could connect with Tsing Tip itself in the aforementioned fork. There is a very clear path at the very bottom of the big boulders. If you are with a group of weaker hikers on the brown line and they do not feel comfortable with the challenge you can use it as an easy escape route. A little bit higher there is another connection again that it seems was used to avoid the initial high scrambling. But it requires traversing and it was a bit overgrown so I did not connect back fully while checking around. There are tons of old ribbons all around with different variants, some ending on top of high cliffs. Beware. If you zoom in on the map above you can see the few I checked. On the right side of the fork, there is also another path that goes almost parallel to Tsing Tip (black line). Sandy slippery, loose rocks. I did not like it at all. On top, I could connect to the original route and also saw another scramble that goes to the right walls, which can end up in a pretty dangerous scramble. Bring full climbing gear if you are going to try it, in case you need to descend back.

On the second day after the blue line scrambling Luke jog back down to the starting point, as he was in a rush that day. In the meantime, Enrique and I went to Mong Hau creek, green line, easy downstream but long exit.

The last route explained in this post is the red line. I had found this gohikinghk post that I tried to follow on my own. Tricky… The post is quite old and since then a typhoon threw quite some trees down making the route more difficult to follow. My poor Chinese did not help either. Therefore I decided to follow the completely dry creek.

Tons of loose terrain, also loose big rocks, very tricky in a few sections. Not very high drops but really easy to injure yourself here. It doesn’t offer any additional fun or views. So, not recommended.

Everything you should know before stream hiking, a big part of the information is good for scrambling this kind of route too.