fish out of water

The thing that I like most about cycling around the New Territories is that I never know, when I venture down an unfamiliar path, alleyway or track, what I might discover. Most of the time, all I do find is yet another dead end—I lost count long ago of how many of these ventures lead nowhere—but sometimes I discover a through route, which can then be incorporated into the ride I previously followed through that area. Just occasionally, I come across something that is totally unexpected, and that happened on Monday.

I already knew that the Civil Engineering Development Department planned to construct a cycle track linking the new towns in the central part of the New Territories (Shatin, Ma On Shan, Taipo, Fanling/Sheung Shui) with those in the west (Yuen Long, Tuen Mun). And I also knew that construction of the section starting in Sheung Shui was almost complete, but from the end of the section running alongside the Drainage Services (DSD) access road that follows the Sheung Yue River, I could see no sign of a continuation.

However, my friend Vlad had told me that the entire route is now complete, and with Paula preoccupied with an all-day online conference, I thought that I might check it out. My first impression was that it is extremely disjointed, with several significant gaps in the first section beyond the DSD access road. And I had to wait five minutes to cross Ho Sheung Heung Road, which provides access to a large number of quasi-industrial sites and therefore carries a lot of heavy goods traffic.

Things did improve as I cycled further west, although there are many other places where the new cycle track crosses a busy road, and by the time I’d reached Yuen Long, I’d decided that I didn’t want to return the way I’d just come. Naturally, I already knew how to do this, having first reached Yuen Long by bike back in 2013 by following back roads (Journey to the West), the main roads being far too dangerous for cyclists.

The section of the new cycle track that runs in parallel with the DSD access roads along the Kam Tin River and an unnamed tributary that passes Fairview Park isn’t a problem, because the original journey to the west followed these access roads anyway, but once the cycle track reaches Castle Peak Road on the way back to Fanling, I decided that I would cross this road to pass underneath the expressway with the intention of following ‘the Tam Mei loop’, a detour that I originally described in Journey to the West: Part 5. This detour illustrates my philosophy when constructing a bike ride: I’m not interested in following the shortest distance between two points but rather the most interesting, even if that makes the ride much longer. The original journey to the west was about 60km, but it is now more than 80km as a result of this philosophy.

Incidentally, not for the first time, I encountered a man playing a tenor saxophone in the underpass, presumably because the acoustics in what is effectively an echo chamber add something magical to his playing. Having exited the underpass, I decided to check out a few paths and alleyways that I’d noticed previously but never investigated. This included crossing a footbridge over the river, which landed me in a network of paths and narrow lanes, and it was along one of these lanes that I made an unexpected discovery:

Because the lane here is so narrow, it isn’t possible to take a frontal photo of the entire mural, but here are two images that provide more detail:

The writing on the left indicates that this mural is the work of pupils from a middle school in Tuen Mun, almost 20km to the southwest, so I wonder why they came so far merely to paint a wall. There is also a date (16th December 2018), although this is probably when the work was completed, because I cannot imagine it all being done in a single day. The calligraphy that overwrites part of the image is a nostalgic assessment of what life would once have been like in this valley, growing crops and catching carp in the nearby river, neither of which take place nowadays.

Perhaps I shouldn’t have been quite so surprised to come across this mural though, because I already knew of two other murals nearby that the original ‘loop’, which follows proper roads, passes on its way to rejoining the original journey to the west. They are located where the continuation of the lane containing the ‘fish out of water’ mural joins the loop, and I know that they are also quite recent, because when I shot a video of the loop in April 2018, there was no sign of them:

These two murals are separated only by the stainless steel gate that you can see on the right in the first photo.

I came back this way again yesterday to show Paula these murals, and she concurred with my assessment of the new cycle track: boring and pointless. Actually, my opinion is that it’s a dog’s breakfast, with several design features that I consider to be dangerous. It seems likely that whoever was responsible is not a cyclist!