jeepers creepers #4: part 2

…continued from Part 1.

Last weekend, I spent some time checking out alleyways south of Sha Tau Kok Road that I don’t use much and may never have walked along at precisely this time of year. This is what I spotted down one such alley, which is probably in Wing Ning Tsuen:

One to watch in future years?

The next village to the south of my home village is San Uk (‘new house’), and thanks to the construction work that I’ve mentioned in several recent posts, we’re obliged to walk this way into Fanling nowadays. There is nothing of interest along the path we follow (apart from a study hall and a few traditional houses), but the only time we ever walk through the eastern part of the village is late at night, after alighting from a minibus on Sha Tau Kok Road. Were there any firecracker vines in this part of the village? Yes:

I included a photo of the next specimen, which I came across as a result of my attempt to find a mysterious tower just off a very minor road on the south side of the Ma Wat River in Jeepers Creepers #2. (This location is marked on Google Maps, but the tower was in a different location, and I now know that it no longer exists):

I took the following two photos of this location nine days after the first photo. They show parts of the extensive display here from different angles:

Having complained about the weather earlier, we did cycle ‘out west’ on Tuesday last week, when we included a ride around the Tam Mei valley for the first time this winter. This is the firecracker vine next to the minibus terminus in Yau Tam Mei, which I included in Jeepers Creepers #3, but it has a much higher flower density this year:

I have no idea how I came to miss the next example, alongside the road that we follow around the valley, but I’ve no record of ever having photographed it before:

You could argue that the two bougainvillea around the gate outshine the firecracker vine here.

I included a frontal view of the next firecracker vine on the route around the valley in Jeepers Creepers #2, but that photo was taken shooting into the sun, and on Tuesday, despite a forecast of ‘sunny intervals in the afternoon’, it remained quite murky all day, so I was able to take a much better photo this time:

…and this is the side view (also included in Jeepers Creepers #3):

The purpose of the expedition I described in Educational Excursion was to check out a firecracker vine that I considered the most spectacular I’d seen anywhere (see the first photo in Jeepers Creepers #2). I was surprised to discover two other vines that hadn’t existed the last time I visited the area at this time of year. This is the first, located just before the last of several right-angle bends in the path through the houses:

Rounding this corner, I was also surprised to see the vine on the right for the first time:

These photos provide a closer look at this ‘new’ vine:

…while the vine that I came to see was as impressive as it had been when I first saw it:

Last Saturday, Paula wanted to walk along the Wa Shan Military Road, an adventure that I’ll be writing about in the next few days, but to reach the start (from the eastern end), we had to walk along an unnamed road that I originally included as part of my ‘final frontier’ bike ride. This ride now takes a different route, which is probably why I’d never seen this firecracker vine before:

Judging by the amount of flower debris below the vine, this display was already past its best by the time we saw it.

Just before we reached the start of the military road, we passed an impressive display along a side road, a photo of which I included in Jeepers Creepers (this section of the road remains part of ‘the final frontier’):

I photographed the next example near the start of the Hok Tau Country Trail #2. This is another example of a vine that would probably have looked better a few days earlier:

Finally, we were cycling ‘out west’ again last Thursday, and this time we included all ‘the outer limits’ paths. As I explained in Jeepers Creepers #3, path $3 passes an unusual example of a firecracker vine that I didn’t notice when cycling past. However, we were shooting a video at the time, and I spotted it when watching the result. So we went back to take some photos. This firecracker vine is strange because while almost all the other examples I’ve seen are cultivated, this one is wild! This is what it looks like this year:

‘Unusual, but not unique’. That is how I described a less impressive wild firecracker vine in Educational Excursion. This is a photo that I took, from a distance, on our way back home after completing our walk along the military road:

And that’s the best of this year’s firecracker vines. I’ve found several other locations that I didn’t think were good enough for this year’s larger than usual collection, including another wild specimen, but I’ll be checking them again next year for possible inclusion in next year’s collection.

other posts in this series
Jeepers Creepers
Jeepers Creepers #2
Jeepers Creepers #3