journey to the west: the outer limits #2

For reasons that I outlined in Journey to the West: the Outer Limits, I didn’t expect to carry out any more exploration around the furthest point of journey to the west, but a few days after Christmas, Paula was away, and with nothing better to do, I just thought “what the heck!”

It turned out that none of the paths leading off the paths that I described in my earlier post led anywhere, but I did venture down another path that I’d noticed ages ago but never got around to checking out. That did provide a through route, although there are no tight turns or steep ramps. It’s easy, in other words.

Although I explored the path at the end of December, we’ve only just got around to shooting a video, which does show a few points of interest. The first video still shows the start of the new path and perhaps provides a hint as to why I’d never checked it out before:

The semi-permanent half-barrier is clearly there to prevent the entry of motor vehicles, although the road goes only about 30–40 metres before narrowing to a path, so why anyone would want to drive up there is beyond me. Incidentally, the elaborate gate on the right is a prime contender for ‘the gates of delirium’.

The next two stills convey something of what goes through your mind when exploring a new path, given that the vast majority of the paths I venture down turn out to be dead ends. The first shows the point where what had been a comfortably wide path narrows to a conventional width and becomes more broken. The second shows where that path then becomes a mere dirt path.

In both cases, the unavoidable impression is that the expected dead end won’t be long in arriving.

However, the dirt path soon transitions back to concrete, which suggests that this section was developed from the far end. In other words, there must be a through route:

And the path soon leads to a narrow road:

A complex network of narrow roads leads eventually to the road from which I started, just further along:

Then what’s the point, you’re probably thinking. It’s more fun this way.

Although I took several photos of firecracker vines during the same ride on which we shot this video, it was only when I watched the video that I realized that because I was so intent on remembering all the turns, I failed to spot what appears to be an incredibly spectacular firecracker vine:

I’ll have to wait until next year now to take a photo! Although I rode up the road on the left when I was exploring the area back in December, the vine hadn’t started flowering.

And this is the video:

The video ends a short distance before the start of path #1. Incidentally, I number related paths in the order in which they were originally explored, so as far as this bike ride is concerned, the sequence in which they are ridden is #3, #1, #2.