the corpse road

I grew up on the fringe of the Lake District in northern England, where not every valley had a church. Whenever someone died in a valley without a church, the corpse had to be transported to the next valley for the appropriate religious rites to be performed prior to burial. The rough tracks over which the deceased were transported came to be known as ‘corpse roads’, because this was their sole purpose.

With this background, it was inevitable that I would assign the name ‘corpse road’ to the rough track that is one of the highlights of ‘the final frontier’, because the sole reason for its existence is to provide access to a large number of graves on the hillside. The remainder of this post is a commentary on the stills from a video that I shot of Paula on this segment.

The corpse road starts on a quiet road that leads absolutely nowhere:

Paula is about to turn left.

The first section doesn’t pass any graves, but you will get a sense of what it’s like to ride by checking out the following video stills:

I was cycling this route, on my own, a couple of years ago when I encountered a large group of middle-aged hikers around the point shown in the next image:

I remember this incident specifically because of all the shouts directed at me:

“Ho yeh!”

If you’re not familiar with Cantonese, the literal translation is ‘excellent’. The only other time that I’ve been ho yeh’d was 20 years ago, when I was climbing Suicide Wall on Kowloon Peak with Paula, and a large group of hikers appeared out of nowhere.

Incidentally, all the buildings that you can see in the distance in these images are in Shenzhen.

The downhill section starts here with a ‘chopstick road’:

I’ve no idea why anyone would go to the trouble of concreting what is a very small part of the whole, especially when the concrete section is as far from the outside world as it is possible to get. At least it allows you to generate some speed:

There follows a short, slightly uphill section:

...but it’s downhill once you’ve rounded the corner:

Note the ossuaries on the right in the next image:

…and what looks like a very elaborate grave in this image:

The final two stills show the steepest (and roughest) part of the descent:

I was cycling the corpse road with my friend Vlad a while ago, and when we emerged at the bottom of the descent, I said that it was my favourite part of the final frontier. Vlad agreed immediately.

Here is a link to the video from which the above stills were taken:

Paula, who is in front in this video, tends to ride more slowly than I would do, although that may be because she hasn’t had as many opportunities to ride this section, which until recently I’d thought was possible only on Sundays because of the amount of industrial traffic on the roads on weekdays. However, the day before I was due to undergo surgery last April, I discovered another way to reach this section that goes nowhere near any of the main roads. I haven’t yet been back, but you can be sure that I’ll be looking closely at the possible cycling options hereabouts.