an unhappy accident

The frontier road had been in the so-called ‘frontier closed area’ until 2013, meaning that you needed a permit to enter, but once that restriction had been lifted, we were quick to find out what it was like along the border. There is just one road branching off the frontier road—Ma Tso Lung Road—and of course I also wanted to see where this might lead to. After passing through the village of Ma Tso Lung, I arrived eventually on Ho Sheung Heung Road, a road with which I was already familiar.

However, there is little but quasi-industrial premises along the last kilometre before the junction, and when I turned left at this junction, I found that Ho Sheung Heung Road is similarly populated by such premises for the first kilometre or so. This means that there are a lot of heavy trucks on both roads, and truck drivers show scant regard for cyclists, so I wondered whether I could find a way that avoided the anxiety caused by running such a gauntlet. I could!

At the point where the scenery changes from rural to quasi-industrial, I found a quiet road/dirt track that cuts across the angle to reach Ho Sheung Heung Road beyond the last industrial site on that road, and this became our preferred option when cycling this way. However, in January last year, I found the way blocked by a truck that appeared to be unloading its cargo, and, not knowing how long I might have to wait, I wondered whether I could find an alternative. I could!

I found a narrow alleyway that eventually emerges directly opposite the exit from ‘the heart of darkness’, an alleyway that cuts across the angle between Ho Sheung Heung Road and Ho Sheung Heung Pai Fung Road that I’d discovered earlier but hadn’t used because of the aforementioned industrial traffic on Ho Sheung Heung Road. I sensed immediately that the new alleyway would be best traversed in the opposite direction to the way I’d just come, but I would need to find some kind of continuation on the far side of Ma Tso Lung Road. And I could!

I’d already named the first alleyway ‘serendipity’ (‘happy accident’), so it was inevitable that I would name this new alleyway ‘serendipity #2’, retrospectively renaming the first alleyway ‘serendipity #1’. I wasn’t happy to be mixing it with industrial traffic on Ma Tso Lung Road, but there are several alleyways leading off #1, and one of these, which I named ‘serendipity #3’, leads directly to the start of #2.

There was just one small problem. Following #3 means missing out the best part of #1, but near the top of the hill on the latter, there is another narrow alley that branches off to the right. However, it leads back to Ho Sheung Heung Road, which did seem rather pointless, but at one point there is another alleyway on the right that I discovered leads back to #1. Obviously, I named this ‘serendipity #4’. This is the first of two paths that lead off #1 that I’d wondered where they might lead to. The second of these leads back to #1 close to the start of #3, so I now had a contiguous route through the alleyways, which I named simply ‘serendipity’.

The next step would be to shoot a video, which we tried to do back in May. This first attempt was unsuccessful, mainly because Paula fell behind just before the start of #3, but here is a still from that video at a point on #4:

Clearly, this is straightforward from a cycling point of view. However, when we did shoot a decent video of the route last month, things had changed from the scene shown in the previous video:

The leaning tree in the first still had been sawn down, and the clearance between the tree stump and the wall on the right is now very tight, but a slight shuffle as I pass through the gap seems to be all that is necessary. Unfortunately, I was wrong!

At the end of last month, we were cycling this way, and when I tried to pass through the gap, my handlebar snagged on the netting hanging down the wall on the right—a hazard that I’d failed to identify. I was thrown violently to the ground. I wasn’t hurt, but the violence of the crash meant that my left leg was jammed between the handlebar and the frame of my bike, and I might have struggled to extricate myself had Paula not been there to help. Once I’d got back on my feet, I took this photograph:

I have no idea where the log across the path came from—presumably it had merely been hidden in the undergrowth—and the violence of the crash dislodged it. The sad part of this misadventure is that the path is now impassable, and as Paula remarked, this is a back lane that is unlikely to be cleared, so we are now obliged to avoid #4 completely, which means that my carefully worked out solution to what was essentially a problem in topology is no longer viable. Damn!