the boneshaker

When I established the bike ride that I named ‘journey to the west’ in 2013, it immediately became our regular Saturday morning adventure. We had previously cycled to Sham Chung, in the Sai Kung Country Park, every Saturday, to eat a plate of our friend Tom Li’s pan-fried noodles. We would probably still be going there, but Tom hasn’t run the store for several years now, and the present cook lacks Tom’s culinary expertise, while the cycling—despite being a round trip of 72km—is best described as ‘boring’.

However, journey to the west is anything but boring. There are some seriously tough hills and awkward narrow paths for a start. The original concept of the ride was just an out-and-back excursion, with a general circuit around the Kam Tin area at the halfway stage. Part of that circuit took us through an area with a large number of graves, and it is this segment that is the subject of this report.

Because I had a few health problems, we didn’t do the journey last winter, but now that I’ve recovered, I suggested to Paula that it was about time we did something about such a glaring omission. Consequently, we’ve now done the ride for the past three Saturdays, and on the last of these, we set out to shoot some videos.

The only one of these videos that I’ve uploaded to YouTube starts from the end of ‘the yellow brick road’, a road that I rather facetiously described as an ‘avenue of the dead’ in Journey to the West: Part 3, because it leads to the area with many graves that I alluded to above. When you watch the video, the first thing you will notice are the two signposts, which proclaim, inter alia, ‘no cycling’:

They weren’t there when I first came this way, but I’ve heard subsequently that a group of irresponsible cyclists had been using this area to zoom around indiscriminately, including over some of the graves, prompting local villagers, whose ancestors occupy the graves, to complain to the Country Parks Authority. However, our route goes nowhere near any of the graves, and I was riding through here long before the signs were erected, so we will continue to do so.

The first part is deeply rutted, because construction vehicles were passing through the area regularly a few years ago, but the real difficulties start at 1:24. This is an illustration of the problem:

This section is unlikely to pose any problems for a big truck, but the presence of so many large angular lumps of rock (circa 8–10cm across) means that you have to focus intently on what is directly in front of you when riding a bike, with only the quickest of glances ahead to determine the best line through the debris. And if you watch carefully, you may notice that Paula, who was controlling the camera, encounters slight problems at 2:03 and 2:45.

The ‘rocky road’ ends around 3:00, and the subsequent gravel road is much easier to negotiate. This leads to a typical narrow country path, which I originally described in Journey to the West: Part 4. Definitely not boring! See for yourself: