cycling the hok tau country trails: part 1

I originally documented Lau Shui Heung Road, one of the most formidable hills in the Fanling area for cyclists, in Meeting Myself Coming Back. The title of that post reflected the apparently inevitable fact that having cycled up the hill and down the other side, it’s necessary to return the way you’ve just come—or so I thought at the time! However, a couple of weeks before I was due to head off to the UK in 2017, Paula and I cycled over the pass and down the other side before continuing up another long, arduous hill to Hok Tau Reservoir, an excursion that I described in Reservoir Dodges.

That title reflects an unexpected ‘dodge’ that we discovered after descending from the reservoir but before starting the climb back over the pass:

Regular readers will know that when I spot a path like this, I want to find out where it leads to. To my surprise and delight, we discovered that it led to an unnamed road at the point marked by a red circle on the eastern side of the map below. However, before I came back to Hong Kong that autumn, I checked out Google Maps and spotted that, in addition to the path we’d discovered, which was labelled ‘Hok Tau Country Trail’, I noticed that a path starting from the roundabout on Sha Tau Kok Road at its junction with Ping Che Road (the red circle on the west of the map) not only bore the same label but also appeared to lead to the same place:

Although the way we now ride these ‘trails’ starts with this second path, we refer to the second path as ‘hok tau country trail #2’ to reflect the fact that it was the second to be discovered, not the second to be ridden. And I will therefore start by describing #2.

Last month, on the day of the Ching Ming festival, we took the opportunity to shoot some video of the trails, and here are a few stills from the first video. The first image shows the junction marked A on the map. The ‘officially’ designated trail turns left here:

…and that’s the way I followed at first, but I was always going to want to know where I might end up if I continued straight on:

There is a small cluster of houses here, which means that the path isn’t entirely straightforward (especially at the point shown in the second picture):

The next image shows the junction (B) with the original path:

It helps to know that there is the start of quite a steep little hill around the corner, the only section of the trail that isn’t flat:

Most of the trail from the top of the hill was re-concreted last winter, but for some unexplained reason a short section was left in its original condition (second photo):

The rest of this trail is through forest:

The steps on the left almost certainly lead to a grave, although I’ve never stopped to check it out!

The green railings in the previous image were added, I think unnecessarily, when the path itself was being relaid.

This is the video from which these stills were taken:

We had intended to shoot a second video on the return journey, but as noted above, it was Ching Ming, the annual grave-sweeping festival, and large sections of the route were blocked by people (and their cars) visiting family graves. The return journey continues straight on at B and turns right at C on the map.

TO BE CONTINUED