that was the week that was

Last week started well but then went steadily downhill, although Sunday was something of a landmark. Since completing my 14 days of home quarantine in mid-October, I’ve been getting out regularly on my bike, racking up at least 70km per ride. However, perhaps it’s my age, but I always felt far too tired the following day to consider going out again. That changed on Sunday.

Although I’d completed a 70km ride the previous day, I felt that I couldn’t miss doing ‘the final frontier’, which is only practical on Sundays and public holidays because of the amount of industrial traffic on key road sections. This, my favourite ride, passes through a long section of what had been, until 2016, part of the ‘frontier closed area’, so I’d never carried out any exploration northeast of Fanling until I heard that this restriction had been lifted.

Over the past few years, I’ve usually done this ride by myself, because Paula goes to church on Sundays, but following a recent surge in coronavirus cases, she has had to make do with a virtual church service, so she would be available once the service had finished. And the final frontier is only about 50km, so I did a short ride while she was otherwise occupied. I opted for the ‘detour de force’, which I hadn’t done previously since returning to Hong Kong.

Once out on the ride, we stopped at a public toilet on Ng Chow Road, and while Paula was using the facility, I noticed a rather grand village house that stood alone nearby:

The vast majority of such houses, which are restricted by law to a maximum of three storeys and a maximum footprint of 700 square feet, have a far more prosaic design, and most are subdivided into three separate apartments, but I suspect that this house has a single occupant. The clues include the difference in balconies between the first and second floors, and the guardian lions at the gate, which could well be solid bronze.

I took the photo because I thought that I might compile a collection of photos of other village houses to compare architectural features (see below).

The ride went well enough, although on the climax, ‘the switchback’:

I had to drop to the small chainring on the first hill, which is a bit of a grunter, for the first time ever. The video starts from the top of that first hill. It isn’t often that I come across hills in Hong Kong where brakes are not required—except in an emergency, of course—but the first two downhills are real screamers where I’m exceeding the speed limit for motor vehicles (50km/hr) as I hit the bottom.

Although that would have been enough to qualify as a good day’s work, I thought that a detour to take in an alleyway that connects the Ng Tung River with Fu Tei Au Road would make a fitting conclusion to the ride. As you can see from this photo, the exit is quite steep:

The flowers are an outstanding example of firecracker vine.

The following day, I wasn’t about to do any more cycling, so I decided to walk to the villages of Kwan Tei and Fu Tei Au, a couple of kilometres east of Fanling, to take a few photos of village houses. Having done so, I was on my way home when I was suddenly accosted by a man who kept screaming:

“Why did you take a photo of my home?”

I would have told him, but I couldn’t get a word in edgeways. And, he told me, he’d called the police. I did consider sloping off when he wasn’t paying attention, but I thought it better to wait for the coppers, because as far as I was concerned, I’d done nothing wrong. When the police finally arrived, I gave them my camera to examine, and they happily accepted my explanation that I merely wanted to compare architectural features. I imagine that the screaming man thought that I had some criminal intent.

And the week didn’t get any better. On Wednesday, Paula wanted to do ‘the long and winding road’, which we had yet to do this winter. An Australian friend described this ride as “thrilling”—and that was before I upgraded it to include ‘the spiral ramp’! Everything went well enough until we embarked on ‘the iron bridge path’ segment:

The last time we’d done this, the section between 2.36 and 2.50 on the video had been choked with vegetation, and, having decided to try to ride through it, I’d then spent 15 minutes removing twigs and other vegetative matter from my chain and gears. I was prepared to get off and push this time if it was still overgrown, while making a mental note to avoid it in future.

But it had been cleared. Unfortunately, all the vegetative debris had simply been piled up at the start of the previously overgrown section, leaving a fairway no more than 30cm wide—OK for anyone on foot, but far too dangerous to attempt on a bike, given the two-metre drop on the right.

Worse was to come. The dirt road section:

…provides access to a small temple, and for the past few years to a small motocross area where we often noticed people riding scrambler motorbikes and small four-wheel-drive vehicles. This time, however, we couldn’t help but notice that earth-moving machinery was being used to expand this area, and when we embarked upon the dirt road, it was obvious that it had been altered significantly. We had no option but to proceed with extreme caution.

Towards the end of the ride, the route follows a Drainage Services Department (DSD) access path that runs alongside a large nullah (storm drain). This gets overgrown too, but it’s cleared from time to time by DSD staff. However, this time the trimmings had simply been left in place. We could ride over this, although I was concerned that a wooden splinter might puncture one of my tyres—a concern that proved remarkably prescient. Paula did get some vegetation in her gears, which took a while to remove.

So the long and winding road is no longer going to be a regular excursion in future, although I will have to work out some way to continue to test ourselves on the spiral ramp.

After this disappointment, Paula had to head off home because she had something else to do, so I thought that I would do some more by myself. I decided that I would start with ‘ping kong ping pong’, but as I was riding along the road to the village of Ping Kong, I suddenly began to hear a cyclical click from one of my tyres. I thought that I must have picked up a piece of paper or similar debris, but when I stopped to investigate, this is what I discovered:

It had penetrated the tread of my back tyre. I don’t carry a spare inner tube, or repair equipment, so I had to push my bike to the bike shop we always use in Sheung Shui, a distance of about 3km. I was in no mood to continue after my bike had been fixed, so I came home. And, according to my speedo, I’d done just 4km that day! The battery obviously needed replacing.

On Friday, after obtaining a new battery for my speedo, we would do ‘the frontier road’:

As you can see from the video, this used to be a quiet road with almost no traffic (it had been part of the ‘frontier closed area’ until 2013), but in the past year or so it has become infested with construction traffic. This road was never built to handle heavy vehicles and is now pitted with potholes, some of which are impossible to avoid. On this occasion, we encountered no fewer than eight big tipper trucks laden with earth on the section of the road east of a police operational base—and the road is so narrow here that you have to get off it completely to allow one of these behemoths to pass.

West of the police base, the road has been widened, so this isn’t a problem, but I began to think about returning via a different route to avoid any more encounters with tipper trucks—the frontier road has usually been an out-and-back excursion. The obvious choice would have been the new cycle track connecting Sheung Shui and Yuen Long, but both Paula and I think it’s boring, as well as being very poorly designed. However, a few years ago, I’d discovered an alternative over the hills that we’d stopped using because it involves a short but difficult portage section. On our way to join the cycle track, I suddenly remembered this alternative, so that’s the route we decided to take.

None of this route seemed remotely familiar—I wasn’t sure we were even on the right road—and at one point we came to a massive construction site (constructing what, in such a remote location, I cannot say). We had to cross over from one road to another via some steel plates that had been placed across some otherwise open trenches, and until it was too late, I didn’t notice that they were wet. Suddenly, my front wheel slid violently to the left, and I was on the deck, the impact concentrated on the fingertips of my left hand. Although I was able to get up, gingerly, almost straight away, the index finger of my left hand did feel quite sore. However, we continued, and eventually we reached a location that we both recognized: a flight of rudimentary stairs that was the portage section I referred to earlier. In this direction, the steps lead downhill, which is easier, and I was able to get my bike down them without too much trouble.

In fact, we continued with our planned route, which involved a sequence of narrow but quiet roads through an area southeast of the large village of Hang Tau. We eventually reached a small pavilion next to ‘the witch’s house’, where we always stop for a short break. Our next objective would be ‘swiss roll’, which both Paula and I rate as harder than the spiral ramp! My finger was definitely sore though, and I couldn’t grip the handlebar as tightly as I would have liked, so I suggested that we miss it out. However, having set off, and before we had to make the turn towards swiss roll, I suddenly decided that I can still do it. And I could!

The following day, we were walking through Luen Wo Hui, the easternmost district of Fanling, when Paula noticed that the local 7-eleven convenience store was selling 500ml cans of Heineken for just HK$7 each. She suggested that we come back later to buy a few, so we returned with my airline carry-on wheeled suitcase and took home a full case.

As Shakespeare wrote, all’s well that ends well. I think I’ll have another beer.

Cheers!