another bloody accident!

For the second time in a month, I’ve failed to identify a potential hazard while out riding my bike, this time with potentially catastrophic consequences. Fortunately, however, I sustained only minor injuries, and although it seemed prudent to abort the ride, I found no problems on my way home, a distance of 11–12km.

On Friday, I was out for a ride with Paula, and we’d already done the frontier road, with its added ‘attractions’, ‘way of the dragon’ and Liu Pok Hill. My accident in serendipity #4 at the end of October had resulted in that way being blocked, and I thought it likely that the blockage hadn’t been cleared yet, so I decided to try another way of navigating the maze of alleyways here.

These are two stills from the video that we produced in October:

The first image shows an early stage of the route that I originally worked out, in which I’m riding past a T-junction. The route involved looping back via #4, then turning right onto #5 at the junction (second image).

This is a closer look at the junction:

In order to avoid #4, I’d come back to the junction by traversing #5 backwards. The turn right did look quite tricky, with quite a drop off the path on both sides, so I was focusing intently on the path. So what was the potential hazard that I failed to take into account? Take a look at the following photograph, which I took once I’d got back on my feet:

Still not obvious? This is a close-up of part of the previous photo:

I’d assumed that the bougainvillea was just a mass of thin, drooping branches at head height, which I could happily brush through, but the way the plant had been pruned had left a solid stem 5–6cm in diameter. My head hit this lump of wood, and I was thrown violently into the drain below the mural. My shoulder slammed into the wall, and my forearm probably hit the edge of the path. I landed upside down, with my bike on top of me!

Paula has since told me that she was relieved when I shouted to her to “pull me up”. I’ve no idea how I might have managed to extricate myself without her help. At this point, I would like to record my heartfelt thanks to the lady who lives in the house behind the wall. Her dogs had kicked off on hearing the commotion outside the wall, and she had come out to see what was amiss. Once she had seen what had happened, she went back into her house and came back out with a selection of cold packs and dressings for my forearm, which had sustained a small but bloody gash. My only other injury was some minor abrasions to my shoulder.

My head was unharmed, because I was wearing a helmet. I never get on a bike nowadays without one, and I simply cannot understand the vehemence with which some cyclists protest that such an obvious safety precaution is unnecessary, usually on the grounds that it won’t help if hit by a fast-moving car. It does help though when hit by a stationary bougainvillea!