Japanese Tunnels in the Tates Cairn -One Rise more- Fei Ngo Shan Area

Rob recently supplied me with maps of this area which showed approximate locations of 30 Japanese tunnel portals in the area mentioned above. I spent a full field day out in the area while I was back in winter and I wanted to share some of my exploits.

Me and a couple of friends managed to find over 10/30 portals found by Rob. Besides the extremely small tunnel detailed on gwulo here    https://gwulo.com/node/2012#17/22.35411/114.22162/Map_by_ESRI-Markers/100     every portal was an absoloute struggle to find. And I can easily say these are some of the most untouched tunnels in the most overgrown areas I have seen. Similar to how Rob told me how he found these to begin with, we basically had to stumble into the entrances (which had 1-2 meter drops some of them). Since there was such thick brush surrounding every entrance. It often took us a number of minutes to even clear the entrance to get inside the tunnels once we found them. Anyhow, most tunnels we found would go into the hillside and curve, half the time coming to a dead end. Some tunnels had a second exit, although most were partially collapsed. Some designs were very similar to some tunnels we have previously seen. But others were very unique. Perhaps the most unique was a tunnel that simply had an entrance and 3 large alocloves with nothing else (similar to a club seen on playing cards), and had another tunnel at the same entrance that was a 20 meter staircase to a lower exit. This is just one example, but there were some interesting designs for sure. https://gwulo.com/node/17977  was also interesting with its wide entrance with alocloves (we found 1 more tunnel of almost identical design).  According to the billboard on the maclehose trail the tunnels in the area were 'ambush tunnels' with only one entrance. This seems consistent with some of the designs, but definitely not accurate for all.

 I am back in summer and will try to find all 30 portals, but anyone who is interested I could give some detail and with Rob's maps. In terms of individual, seperate tunnels this is likely the highest concentration I have seen in all of Hong Kong even though there was only one 'larger system' we found ( >2 entrances). 

Although I realised I forgot to take as many photos as I would have liked, here are two.

Entrance to Tunnel, by Iloveoldhk

Entrance to Tunnel, by Iloveoldhk