After about five minutes, Bowen Road widens out with parking spaces for cars and a small park with a pavilion on the right. Continue straight on along Bowen Road. On your left is a metal information board with details of the Bowen Road Fitness Trail, which begins here. The narrowness of the road will give you an idea of the traffic conditions in early Hong Kong. Referring to the year 1919, Geoffrey Robley Sayer describes the traffic scene:
The internal combustion engine has yet to reach Hong Kong.....The streets are the unchallenged hunting ground of the pedestrian, the chair-coolie and the common carrier humping his load upon his shoulder. Even the few horse- drawn vehicles have gone these many years, and the only wheeled traffic, beside the trams, is provided by the rickshaw, the truck and the sanitary board dust-carts drawn by oxen and water-buffaloes. (Hong Kong 1862-1919, Geoffrey Robley Sayer, HKU Press, page 109)Beyond the houses continue on along a causeway built out along the steep hillside. This was the route of the early water conduits bringing water from Tai Tam to the houses in Wan Chai and Causeway Bay. From the middle of the causeway, you can see down over Kennedy Road below you to the western end of Wan Chai, which means 'Little Bay' in Cantonese. On the western side towards Central, the first Protestant and Catholic Cemeteries covered the area now comprising Sun, Moon, and Star Streets. The remaining graves were finally removed in 1889 to the Colonial Cemetery and St Michael's Catholic Cemetery at Happy Valley and part of the land used to build Hong Kong's first power station here in Electric Road.