Turquoise water, a few nice waterfalls, shallow pools, bushy mid way & therefore short outing on its own. Combinable.
- Beauty/fun: 5/10 just one more stream in the area with similar characteristics. The water color as the only remarkable thing.
- Difficulty (check this link if new here, this is not your standard HK hiking web): 4/10 a few medium height scrambles and a relatively easy navigation if you exit mid stream. A few bushy non thorny areas. Mix of good grip and slime covered rocks.
- The map (how to download to your phone offline maps)
See full screen & the Garmin track.
The last significant stream that I had missing from the last MacLehose 10 area. Kau Tsing creek 九青坑. I did not understand why it had that name. As mentioned before several times, usually the names of the streams are based on either relevant points around or the start and end of the stream. That way most streams around are based on the main peak above: Kau Keng Shan. You have therefore: South Kau Ken creek, West, even Right West Kau Keng creek. But this had that Tsing 青 character which was confusing. The same as in Tsing Yi, which made no sense for me. Until we were there 😅 That character means turquoise too + the stream used to end in 青山灣 Castle Peak Bay. Diverted now by the catchwater.
Bus to Tuen Mun. In our case, we have an express one next home that is super fast, but with a few stops. It added 20min of city walk that you could avoid with other transportation combinations to Tsing Sin Playground. Walk up the stairs and you will be in the MacLehose Trail section 10 Barbecue site. A few more minutes and cross on the right side of the bottom of the stream here.
Video
There are quite some water gathering structures in the first section. This time, the fence protecting the turquoise water “pool” (3) was open and we got in to take the pic.
Going up you can find some small waterfalls and barely one natural pool deep enough to dip into.
After the fork (5), we took the main left tributary, the flow decreases and the vegetation increases. There are a few higher scrambles up till the main exit (6). Summer had read that hikers tended to exit here. But I could see on the satellite image another hiking path crossing the stream 200m higher (7). She didn’t want to fight with the potential dense vegetation (clever girl 😉). I wanted to give it a try. So she went up the hiking path with the backpack on and I tried to go as fast as possible on the stream with just the phone, in case we needed to communicate.
Just a little after there is a cute waterfall (1:50) and next to it a hut with all kind of amenities, a swing included. Moving up the vegetation increases, a few thorns includes, and there are a few big boulders to navigate. Nothing worthwhile checking. I eventually met Summer in the aforementioned slightly bushy track (2:26) and we went down back to the starting point through one of the very clear paths coming from Kau Keng Shan.
There is an interesting well, marked with H2O.
We were in a rush and we went directly back to Tuen Mun, but you could combine this stream with Kau Keng North creek 九逕北坑, or several others in the area.
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