Rant: Dragon's back-up

I'd gone hiking to get away from people. It's the one thing in Hong Kong you should be able to do without having to unintentionally grind against another human being.

Ha! How wrong can you be?

It was Saturday morning - peak time, clearly - on the Dragon's Back, on the south side of Hong Kong Island. Hardly the wilderness but, still, countryside is countryside and hiking is hiking.

When I got off the bus at the starting point, I thought I had died and gone to hell. A queue. A QUEUE? A queue for the trail? How? Why? Did they think there was a restaurant at the end of it?

OK, I thought, maybe it will dissipate once we all start moving. Maybe there is a bottleneck. Maybe there are roadworks. But this was the way it was that day. The queue snaked its way up and over the mountain; one long queue of snail-paced hikers carrying transistor radios and playing various iterations of cats being drowned.

Now, I'm not a snob and I don't own the mountain. And, of course, I was contributing to the throng, so I didn't mean to blame others. Except. Well, it was their fault. I was on my own. They were in football teams.