The three Countryside Series maps that detail the terrain showed only one area en route with a camping site, unlike Hong Kong's premier trek, the 100-kilometre MacLehose Trail, which has around a dozen sites, and can be tackled without any major deviations by any fit and well-equipped walker.
I had completed the MacLehose Trail twice without having to leave it, but the lack of camping facilities would force me to break the Wilson Trail daily, and return each morning to the point where I had left off.
The plan was to trek for five days, doing two of the 10 sections each day. A costly, time-consuming way in which to tackle a long-distance trail, but there was no choice.
Also, there was still no official map of the course, and I had set off from Stanley armed with a leaflet in Chinese and English issued by the Friends of the Country Parks, which offered brief details of the various sectors, and my three Countryside Series maps.
The Wilson Trail, which will be officially opened on January 21 by the former governor, Lord Wilson of Tillyhorn, covers the same ground as the MacLehose Trail briefly on the Sha Tin Pass Road, and bisects the longer trail at Lead Mine Pass.
Apart from that, the two take totally different directions; the MacLehose running east to west, the Wilson south to north, and as the MTR train pulled in at Lam Tin station I was looking forward to this second day of the trail, and the challenge of new ground.
The sign-posting on the Hong Kong Island sections had been excellent, and the bright, new addition at Lam Tin MTR station, clearly marking one of the exits 'Wilson Trail' was a promising start for a walker without detailed route maps.
Little did I know that I was about to embark on a journey full of frustrations, with hopelessly inadequate sign posting, in parts non-existent, and at times misleading.
The problems started as soon as I took the MTR exit, straight into Lam Tin's fume-filled bus station fronting on to a busy dual carriageway.
'From Yau Tong ascend and go around Devil's Peak' were the instructions in the leaflet, but how to get to Yau Tong, and which stop to get off at? There were no further Wilson Trail signs here.
Lesson one. If you are a gweilo, and want to do the Wilson Trail, take Cantonese lessons, or better still, take a Cantonese speaker with you. I had brought my Chinese wife, and after what would be a day of minor disasters, would make sure she accompanied me on the whole trail.
But even being a Cantonese speaker is no guarantee that you will be able to negotiate the Wilson Trail.
None of the personnel at the bus station had heard of it, though there was a bus to Yau Tong. But where would we alight? No, we'd have to get a taxi. No luck here either, though the second driver we approached offered to try to find Devil's Peak, after studying the map.
No Devil's Peak, but we were dropped off on a hillside with perhaps a few resident angels. The new Chinese Permanent Cemetery, in fact, row upon row of identical head-stones towering above us, an army of the dead, thousands of them, in death as in life, squeezed into a few square feet, regulation size.
We made our way up the steep steps between the terraces, a wonderful view over the sea, ensuring these silent residents good fung shui, but this was certainly not the Wilson Trail.
And then, much higher, at the top row, I saw it, Devil's Peak, way off to the left.
We clambered higher, well beyond the last line of gravestones, to the bare brow, and there was no doubt about it. A track snaked from Devil's Peak to a concrete path far below us, on the other side of our hill. There was only one way to join it without retracing our steps, so we inched our way down the steep, trackless slope for 45 minutes.
At last we were on the Wilson Trail, but we were well behind schedule already, and would have to try to make up time to reach Sha Tin Pass, the end of stage 4, and some 16.6 kilometres from Lam Tin, before darkness.
We crossed a rickety bridge with one side damaged and dangerously exposed to a drop of around 15 metres, before starting an immediate climb towards Black Hill, which offered a panoramic, but hardly pleasant view over Junk Bay and its massive reclamation area and tower blocks.
If nothing else, this promised to be an educational trek, starkly portraying the speed with which our countryside is being swallowed up in the name of progress.
Descending to Ma Yau Tong, we came across sprightly 84-year-old Lee Chun-bor, keeper of what appeared to be the most irreverent Buddhist shrine in Hong Kong, its entrance guarded by Japanese soldiers.
Talking to the jovial old-timer was the highlight of what would become a very frustrating day.
He explained that he had been coming to this hillside for 23 years, and had planted fruit trees and even used his small government pension to buy cement to build a pathway which is now crossed by the Wilson Trail.
Eight years ago, while removing undergrowth, he came across an abandoned Buddhist shrine under a boulder, which he restored, and then set about sculpting his brightly painted guard of honour on the pathway he constructed outside the entrance.
This weird assortment includes the Japanese soldiers, rifles at the ready, a sumo wrestler, Sikh bank guards, a dog, a pop singer, a couple dancing, a drug addict smoking from a water pipe, a belly dancer, and even a pregnant woman.
'I make them from cement and soil, and then paint them,' said Mr Lee. 'It's good fun. I create anything that comes into my mind. People love it. See that one over there with the blue and white striped shirt and the white hair? Well that was supposed to be Sun Yat-sen, but it didn't work out, so I made him into a gweilo instead.' He also made a picnic site at the side of the track, but dismantled it because people were leaving too much rubbish. I left wondering if walkers on this new trail would do the same.
The path now led through a village and we soon had to cross the busy Po Lam Road and on past another village and a stream which looked as if it had seen fresher days, before coming out on to the dual carriageway of Clearwater Bay Road, where traffic hurtled past the once peaceful settlement of Tseng Lan Shue.
It doesn't help when an arrow has a pointer at both ends, but this seems to be the case with most of the Wilson Trail signs. Presumably one is meant to walk in the same direction as the painted figure. Logical, but not if the little fellow is heading in the wrong direction, which would prove to be the case a number of times.
The Wilson Trail uses two kinds of sign, a yellow stencil and, less frequently, small concrete posts, some of which, during my walk, had not been embedded, but were left lying at the side of the path.
The arrow on the post at the junction with Clearwater Bay Road pointed in both directions parallel to the road, but I decided it was wise to walk towards a subway, a few metres to the left - according to the map we would have to cross the road to head on towards the village of Wong Keng Tsai and up to Sha Tin Pass.
But there were no signs in the subway, nor at the other side of the road. So we back-tracked and walked for 30 minutes beyond the subway entrance without success.
Re-crossing the subway, customers in a dai pai dong said they knew of no signs, but told us how to reach Wong Keng Tsai, though they warned us it would be well after dark before we could cover the 8.6 kilometres to Sha Tin Pass.
I confess. At this point I cheated. We had lost too much time. It was bad enough trying to follow this trail in daylight. I flagged down a taxi in a lay-by and got him to take us near Tate's Ridge, where we walked the final stretch of this section.
The view on this latter part is terrific, high over Kowloon with planes on the Kai Tak runway looking like toys, and Victoria Harbour and The Peak beyond. A Chinese peacock crossed out path, the first time I have ever seen one in the Hong Kong countryside.
But I had done this part of the walk twice before. The view is not exclusive to the Wilson Trail. We were encroaching on the MacLehose Trail.
The MacLehose goes on to climb Lion's Rock, but the Wilson cuts off to the rear of the rock and down to Tai Po Road and Shing Mun (Jubilee) reservoir, sections 5 and 6 of the trail, a distance of 14 kilometres.
But I would have to return to tackle this section. It was quickly getting dark, and we made out way in the opposite direction, down the steep hill towards the bright lights and pollution of Wong Tai Sin.
THE walk to Shing Mun reservoir is hardly spectacular, following a catchwater road below Amah's Rock The trail goes on to follow a jogging track for more than five kilometres from the south end of the reservoir to its northern end, flat, and mostly featureless as much of the view is hidden by bushes.
Anyone attempting only this Shing Mun section would be confused by poor sign-posting if they were not familiar with the area. At the information centre where most visitors arrive, I could see nothing to indicate that the Wilson Trail continued here.
And at the south end of the reservoir, where the first yellow sign has been stencilled, the figure is striding out in the wrong direction, back towards Lion Rock.
Coming out on to the concrete path at the end of the jogging trail, the figure, surely, was again pointing in the wrong direction, and of course, the arrow was double ended.
After examining our map, we chose to walk in the opposite direction, which turned out to be the right way, but on reaching another junction, where a family of perhaps 20 monkeys were searching the rubbish bins for food, there was no sign-posting for the trail.
We managed to get our bearings after trial and error, and started the long, steep ascent of a concrete path towards Lead Mine Pass, a 'crossroads' for the MacLehose Trail. One of the very irregularly placed small posts again had the figure of a walker stepping out down the hill and suddenly I realised why the sign-posting was so misleading.
In some cases the signs had been placed on the wrong side of the road, the double-headed arrows pointing walkers in both directions, as usual, but the painted figure stepping in the wrong direction, north to south instead of south to north.
The reason was quite simple. In the case of the yellow stencils, left is right. Right is wrong.
If the stencil is on the left-hand side, then the figure is stepping in the correct direction, but if it is on the right side, then of course the reverse applies. And often, the stencil had been painted on the wrong side of the trail.
The less frequently placed posts must be on the right-hand side, but were sometimes placed on the left, so our little friend again tries to lead us astray.
Having cracked the code, I felt more confident as we approached the brow of the hill, and Lead Mine Pass.
The miniature walker was trying to persuade me to turn round and head back down the hill, but I continued straight ahead. The official leaflet offered this advice: 'Ascend to reach Lead Mine Pass. Then descend to Yuen Tun Ha in Tai Po.' I continued on, looking for the turn-off to Yuen Tun Ha, but there were no further signs. I climbed until I could see the skyscrapers of Tai Po and in a valley beneath a clearly defined track.
Obviously I would have to back-track to find its starting point. I returned as far as the concrete post, and another walker, who was also confused, suggested we turn left into the picnic site at Lead Mine Pass.
Surely enough there was an old sign, badly weathered, faintly advising that this was the way to Tai Po. But there had been no Wilson Trail sign pointing towards the picnic site.
Near Tai Po, the Northeast New Territories map comes into play, but we were unable to find any signs leading us away left before reaching Tai Po centre, so we walked on into Tai Po Market (not a market at all, but an area of sprouting high-rises) to seek advice.
We took a taxi back to the trail in search of the turn-off, but even though the driver tried his best and asked locals, we never found it.
We would eventually complete the trail in reverse, travelling to Nam Chung, its end, to Tai Po, and would find the sign-posting on this section excellent, and the scenery terrific.
Indeed, the start of the Trail, across Hong Kong Island, and the end, Tai Po to Nam Chung, are tough and rewarding. But let's face it, the Wilson Trail is not a new trekking route.
The trail was there all along, even before Lord Wilson donned his plumed hat to take over the governorship.
The hills and mountains of Hong Kong have long been etched with tracks made by walkers. Many were a means of communication between villages before the roads were driven through, and the sky-scrapers built, when tigers still roamed the New Territories.
But around $12 million has been spent to improve those individual tracks cutting from Stanley to Nam Chung, and they have been packaged as one, the Wilson Trail.
Sign-posting can be improved, and I have no doubt it will be. Detailed maps of these 68 kilometres will probably appear in the Government Publications Centre, too, and I am told that a more detailed booklet is about to be published.
However, one cannot escape from the fact that the Wilson Trail is basically flawed. There is no generous sprinkling of camp sites, so only a masochist would stay with it the whole distance, and much of the walking is mundane.
It is a safe bet that serious long-distance trekkers will stick to the territory's king of walks, the MacLehose Trail.
Friends of the Country Parks were given the task of co-ordinating the improvements to be made to sections of the trail.
The work was started in December 1994, and many of the materials used had to be brought in by helicopter.
Lord Wilson, himself a keen walker who enjoyed trekking Hong Kong's country parks, suggested the trail before he left the territory.
