the final frontier: video action

When the ‘frontier closed area’ status of the area northeast of Fanling was rescinded at the start of 2016, I was quick to check out the cycling possibilities. I started by cycling along Kong Nga Po Road, which branches off to the east from Man Kam To Road, a major north–south road into China, because I’d ventured this way previously and had encountered a sign that informed me that I was about to enter the closed area, which would have been an arrestable offence, had I continued.

This initial venture wasn’t particularly encouraging. In fact, the route that I followed on that occasion was entirely on roads. However, I gradually added more and more off-road segments, and I wrote about the route that I’d developed to that point in Nothing to See, which was Paula’s initial comment, in June 2016. I subsequently compiled a detailed guide to the route in The Final Frontier in December.

Although I chronicled a few new additions to the ride in Is That It? the following April, the most significant change to the route since then has been the decision to avoid the village of Ha Shan Kai Wat, which I mentioned in the latter two posts as being a place that was hostile to strangers, especially cyclists, and was home to a psychotic dog.

I haven’t been doing ‘the final frontier’ too often this year, mainly because Paula and I have been going out cycling on Saturdays, and at my age going out on two consecutive days is a tall order—this ride is practical only on Sundays because of the sheer volume of industrial traffic on key road sections during the week.

However, on a recent public holiday—and Sunday conditions apply on public holidays—not only did we do the ride, we enjoyed it immensely. There are around 20 off-road segments, most of which we’ve shot videos of, and I thought that I would put together a collection of the best of these videos to illustrate why ‘the final frontier’ is my favourite bike ride in Hong Kong.

country and eastern
The entire ride as described in the three posts referenced above is located north of Sha Tau Kok Road, but that seemed like an artificial restriction, so now I follow the cycle track that runs alongside Sha Tau Kok Road as far as the junction with Ping Che Road. This is a rudimentary track, not up to the specifications of the main network, but it is convenient, providing access to the start of Hok Tau country trail #2. I’ve not included this path in this collection, but you can read about it in Cycling the Hok Tau Country Trails.

The path followed in this video starts a short distance from the end of the country trail and connects two villages, the names of which I’ve been unable to ascertain. The second part of the path, after a short but steep hill, is only about 70cm wide, with a drop off both sides in some places, but it’s quite straight, so it shouldn’t present any difficulties:

Man Uk Pin transit
I wondered how far east I could go while avoiding Sha Tau Kok Road, so I did quite a lot of exploration, which brought me eventually to the village of Man Uk Pin. The route that I found through this village is quite interesting, although the video ends at the start of a dirt road section that continues for another 300 metres before reaching the Robin’s Nest Jeep Track, which is then followed in reverse:

Ma Mei Ha circuit
The village of Ma Mei Ha is built on a hillside, which means that a circuit around its houses has some tricky moves that will test your bike-handling skills:

final frontier path #1
Following a short section along Ping Che Road, the ride rejoins the original route along the unnamed road between Kwan Tei North and Ha Shan Kai Wat. However, 300–400 metres before reaching the latter, there is a side road leading off to the right. It’s a dead end, but there’s a path leading off to the right just before the end, which is followed in the next video.

I used to ride this section in the opposite direction, coming along the path that the route now turns left from at 2.31 in the video. Once I’d checked out where this turn leads to, doing the whole thing in reverse made more sense because it led somewhere that was much more useful in terms of where to go next. The original way didn’t allow me to avoid Ha Shan Kai Wat:

final frontier path #2
Since shooting the video for this segment, I’ve added an extended start for which we’ve yet to shoot a video. This video starts with the crossing of a footbridge over a nullah (‘storm drain’), and the new section joins from the left just after the crossing of the bridge.

The route from the largest village in the area, Ping Yeung, to Ping Che Road also crosses this bridge but turns right immediately after the crossing. I’ve not included the video of this segment here because we now take a different route, for which a video has yet to be produced.

via caritas
This is the most recent addition to the route. The second half of this segment is along a dirt road that isn’t particularly exciting, but as I’ve described in Via Caritas, I found another path that reaches the start of the dirt road section and allows me to follow the first path in the opposite direction. And narrow country paths always present different problems depending on the direction of travel. These are the videos:

Chow Tin exit
The route then passes through the villages of Lei Uk and Chow Tin, and the first time I cycled the path that leads out of the latter, I did so in the opposite direction to that shown in the video. This is a surprisingly common occurrence—I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve added a new path to an established route in the opposite direction to the way it was originally explored. Incidentally, we now turn right when we reach the dirt road at 2.43 in the video instead of turning left, and we rejoin the original route further on:

the corpse road
During my original exploration of the area, I followed a road that led eventually to a locked gate—I found out subsequently that beyond the gate is a huge landfill site. During my retreat, I just happened to notice a barely discernible rough track leading off to the north and thought that I should see whether it led anywhere useful. It did!

On a subsequent occasion, I was doing the final frontier with my friend Vlad, and upon reaching the bottom of the hill that the track goes down, I happened to remark that this was my favourite segment on the entire ride. Vlad agreed immediately. Curiously, I’ve occasionally encountered cyclists here coming in the opposite direction, which makes absolutely no sense to me.

You can read a more detailed description in The Corpse Road, and this is the video:

Heung Yuen Wai Highway to Kan Tau Wai
I mentioned this path in Is That It?, in which I described how I’d discovered the path, starting in the village of Kan Tau Wai, but it ended then in a massive construction site that was no fun whatsoever to ride through. However, now that the highway has been completed, it’s back on the itinerary, following the path in the opposite direction to that originally explored:

*  *  *

Finally, I should mention ‘the switchback’, which we haven’t done for more than a year because the road is being ‘rebuilt’—the sheer volume of big trucks taking this route had seriously damaged a road that was once in the closed area and was therefore never meant to take heavy vehicles.

It starts with a long uphill slog, but the subsequent downhill sections are real screamers where I used to hit 50km/hr, making the switchback a fitting climax to the entire ride. I’d found it deeply frustrating to be confronted by a temporary traffic light on red near the bottom of one of the hills, which meant that you couldn’t use your momentum on the next uphill section.

buffalo(es in) spring( )field

After our encounter with a large male buffalo and three calves on Tuesday last week, we were cycling along the same rough track four days later—and, naturally, we were on the lookout for more of these fine animals to photograph.

“Do I spy buffaloes?” I exclaimed, as we reached the location of our previous meeting.

The first animals that I’d seen were a female and her calf, quite close to the track:

However, I’d also spotted quite a large number of animals further away:

It didn’t take long for them to notice me:

…and come to investigate the intruder:

Notice the animal just left of centre in the previous two photos, which may be the herd leader. And the group on the right standing shoulder to shoulder, which appears to be an instinctive defensive mechanism. They continued to advance:

Notice the individual that appears to have barged his way into the shoulder-to-shoulder line-up on the right.

At this point, I decided to switch to video mode, and this was the result:

Following the shooting of the video, I switched back to taking photos. And the ‘leader’ continued the posturing seen in the video:

After taking a couple more photos:

…it was time to retreat. But the buffaloes decided to follow me:

No need to panic. The herd chose to scramble down into the hollow on the right, where I’d photographed the mother and calf earlier:

I took two final photos before getting back on my bike:

And that was my latest encounter with feral buffaloes in this area.

facing the wall

At the beginning of last month, Paula and I cycled ‘down south’ for the first time since 2019. Although this option is the easiest way to rack up 100km in a day’s ride, because it’s almost exclusively on cycle tracks, we’ve been avoiding it since the start of the pandemic because it involves riding through built-up areas and thus coming into closer contact with people than we would like.

At one point on this ride, we passed a wall that was ‘decorated’ with graffiti. However, I didn’t want to stop and thus inconvenience Paula if I spent an inordinate amount of time taking photographs, but last Thursday I decided to go out by myself because Paula would be busy. One of my objectives was to photograph the wall, and what follows is the result.

However, before I reached the wall, just after leaving Taipo, I just happened to notice some interesting images on the noise screen separating the expressway from the cycle track:

In addition to the anthropomorphic guitars on the parapet of the bridge over the railway and expressway in Sheung Shui, photos of which I included in A Grand Day Out, I’ve seen identical images of guitars in at least three other locations. However, all these are black, and what grabbed my attention here is that all six guitars are different colours. The style is the same though, so it’s safe to assume that they are all the work of the same artist.

And notice the panel to the right of the guitars:

There’s an obvious connection between these six flowers, the faces of which all carry the same expression, and the guitars. The colours of the flowers mirror those of the guitars! And the wavy lines, top to bottom, are the same colours as the flowers, right to left. So it is a reasonable conjecture to suggest that both guitars and flowers were painted by the same person. I shall have to look out for flower/guitar connections in other locations.

The cycle track crosses the Shing Mun River via the most northerly bridge accessible to pedestrians and cyclists when it eventually reaches Shatin. On the far side of the river, a left turn leads to the new town of Ma On Shan, named after a nearby mountain, while if you follow the cycle track to the right here, this is what you will see after about 1.2km:

The following six photos provide more detail of the graffiti here, from right to left:

No! I don’t know what Bufu is, or what it’s doing in a hamburger.

One of the people responsible for these images is presumably called Jimmy. And bufu makes another appearance. The Chinese characters in the blue ovoid with crown read ‘move it!’.

The red characters read ‘no(t) two’, although whether they have any connection with the meditating figure underneath I’m unable to say. The characters below the yellow face are heavily stylized and are thus difficult to interpret, although the first two probably read ‘broken heart’. Mind you, the yellow face doesn’t look particularly broken-hearted!

There is only one word to describe the face wearing a hat that is much too small for it: silly; although whether it’s meant to be a counterpoint to the rather menacing face to the left is impossible to say. The Chinese characters may read ‘heal the soul’, although the fifth character has been smudged and is now almost illegible. the blue marks translate as ‘breathe’ from right to left.

Of course, everyone recognizes Michelin Man, and the arms of the raindrop look like hearts to me (the Chinese character is ‘drink’). I can’t help but wonder whether the eyes of the sideways silly face are meant to double as half of a butterfly, given what appears to be a pair of antennae above. The graffito below the face appears to be a quotation, but what is being quoted is anyone’s guess, although my guess is ‘believe in yourself’.

I’m curious about the reasoning behind the anthropomorphic pill bottle, and the blue homunculus is in an identical pose to a light brown one in an earlier photo. Of course, one can always enjoy a steaming bowl of noodles.

Finally, this is a view looking back along the wall. I didn’t realize that I’d cut off the left-hand face when taking the previous photo:

Incidentally, the small white rectangles that you can see in some of the photos read ‘POST NO BILLS’, in English and Chinese. Of course, these graffiti are not bills; nevertheless, on the grounds that the owner(s) of this wall don’t want bills, they probably don’t want graffiti either, so I expect them to be scrubbed off before long.

I haven’t seen any more graffiti anywhere in this area, although I’m always on the lookout. The mural that I described in Down by the Riverside is on the opposite side of the river, while the mural in Ma On Shan that I featured in Tunnel Vision, which I cycled past on Thursday, was seriously damaged by protesters in 2019. Why they chose to daub their slogans across such a wonderful mural, when the opposite wall of the tunnel was completely clear, helped to change my attitude towards the protest movement.

guess who we met today

Paula and I had an interesting encounter earlier while out cycling. The weather has been appalling recently—I was woken up one night by the thunder from a nearby lightning strike—and it was our first time out for more than a week. As usual, we went ‘out west’, which has become our default ride except on Sundays and public holidays, when we go east—this ride is only possible on these days because of the sheer volume of industrial traffic on key road sections at other times.

And ‘journey to the west’ is no longer a single bike ride. We always follow the same route to reach the Yuen Long/Kam Tin area, but once we get there, we choose which narrow path and alleyway sections to follow, and which to leave out. Although it is possible to do everything, it takes around 10 hours, and I had decided that we would omit everything in the Shap Pat Heung (‘eighteen villages’) area on this occasion. I usually make these decisions because I have an overall mental picture of how everything is connected, while Paula just remembers the individual segments but not how they connect in space and time.

Consequently, once we’d reached the village of Shui Mei, we did the nearest two of the five outer limits paths before returning to the village. There are three options from here to return to the Kam Tin River on the start of our journey back home. We usually take the median option in terms of distance, but I asked Paula whether we should take that option or follow a long sequence of alleyways that we’ve decided to name ‘alley ballet’, because it is quite a feat of route-finding. To my surprise (and delight), she chose the alleyways.

Anyway, in order to reach the start of alley ballet, we used to follow a single-track road, but as I outlined in A Grand Day Out, this option meant having to put up with stupid car drivers who didn’t give us enough room—even though they could. However, on the occasion that I described in this post, I discovered a rough gravel track that led to the start, and on the occasion I’m about to describe, we spotted a buffalo with three calves on the track ahead.

Naturally, we stopped, because I wanted to take a photograph if possible. However, by the time I’d got my camera out, the group had wandered some distance away from the track. I took a photo from distance, half-thinking that it would be the best I could manage before they disappeared:

However, as you can see, they had noticed my presence as I walked slowly towards them. I took this photo as I drew closer:

At this point, I decide to wheel away to the right to take some photos from a different direction:

Suddenly, the big boy decided that he didn’t like a human intruding on his space (I’ve assumed that this beast is a male, but in fact I was too distracted to be able to determine its sex, or the sex of the three youngsters, who may have been tagging along with the big boy merely for protection). He gave me a fierce stare:

I don’t think I was able to capture just how intimidating his eyes were, but nevertheless I kept clicking:

Notice how high he is holding his head. He knows who’s boss around here!

Suddenly, he started walking slowly towards me:

Naturally, I retreated (slowly). But he continued to follow me:

This is the last photo I took:

I think that it reflects an air of triumph by big boy and his acolytes. We don’t take any nonsense from mere humans. We saw off this intruder onto our territory.

Incidentally, I don’t understand the social grouping here, but I would conjecture that the little ones are tagging along with big boy merely for protection, although they do seem to be getting the idea of how to confront human intruders. I have photographed buffaloes in this general area before, but not for several years. This is a photo from 2014:

However, a couple of weeks ago, I did see a large group of what I assumed at the time were merely cows—I’m used to seeing feral and free-range cows in many places—in the distance of the first photo as I cycled past. So I’ll be keeping an eye open for more buffaloes, which I believe are feral, around this location in the future.

one mystery resolved, another emerges

Back in January, I wrote about encountering a huge number of egrets in a fish pond that we pass whenever we’re cycling along San Tin Tsuen Road, which circles around San Tin to the north and west (see map below). This is a photo from that earlier post:

At the time, the fish pond appeared to be in the process of being drained—the reason wasn’t obvious—but because we always cycle along this road when we’re heading ‘out west’, we’ve noticed that significant work has been taking place, with trucks on the dried-up pond bed and what appeared to be some kind of structure being built in the middle.

On one occasion, when the pond was filling up with water again, Paula commented that the structure looked like solar panels. Although I agreed with her observation, this did seem to be a highly unlikely location for such an installation. However, work here has now finished, and several notices have appeared around the area recently. This one is located alongside the road to the right of new railings that have replaced the original wire-mesh fence between the pond and the road:

So they are solar panels! When I saw copies of this sign in other locations—some more than 2km away—I wondered why they were trumpeting a stormwater pumping station. I never had time to read the second line as I cycled past. And I didn’t realize until a few days ago that the homunculus on the left of each sign that I passed—a kind of mascot of the Drainage Services Department (DSD)—was pointing out which way to go.

In fact, it isn’t obvious what this pond has to do with pumping stormwater, although the area is flat and is probably prone to flooding. I assume that the solar panels have been installed to power any pumping that needs to be done, but where is the machinery? And where is any floodwater to be pumped to?

Although I can understand the DSD’s involvement in flood control, I fail to comprehend its motive in promoting an ‘ecological floating island’. Leaving aside the misuse of the word ‘ecological’, which I railed against in a recent post, what is the motivation here? And this is a second sign, located to the left of the sign in the above photo:

This sign implies that there is something to see here (although that something doesn’t conform to the conventional definition of a polder). These are photos that I took a few days ago of the ‘floating photovoltaic system’ from different angles:

I’m guessing that the function of the line of buoys is to carry power away from the solar panels. The last photo also shows the ‘ecological floating island’, and you will notice that there is something in the back left-hand corner. Paula reckoned that whatever it was had purple flowers.

This is a photo taken a few days earlier that shows the purple flowers more clearly:

I took the next photo yesterday, and the floating island is now fully stocked with plants, which appear to be in pots:

There are two people on the island, but I was too late to capture a third person who was wading through the water pushing an empty float that had presumably been used to ferry plants to the island. This is a closer view that shows the two workers on the island more clearly:

I don’t know whether there will be anything else to record here, but we cycle past here regularly, so I’ll be on the lookout for more changes. One thing that I can predict with reasonable confidence: we won’t see egrets in this pond again!

Location map:

constructivism

Constructivism is a modern art movement that originated in Russia in the early days of the Bolshevik Revolution, but I’ve appropriated the term to describe a construction site that we ride past on our way home after cycling ‘out west’. Every time we rode past it, I couldn’t help but notice the abstract images of birds on the hoardings enclosing the site:

Both these photos were taken looking in the opposite direction to our direction of travel. What you see on the right in each photo is a dedicated cycle track, which means that the only hazard we encounter here is pedestrians, who should be walking on the pavement (sidewalk) but aren’t.

A few days ago, I happened to glance to my right as we passed the end of this hoarding and noticed that there were more images along the side of the site, so I resolved to take a closer look on foot (after taking photos of the artwork that I described in Jockeying for Position: Update).

It took me quite a while to locate the site, because although I know my way around the cycle track network, nothing looks the same when you’re on foot. This is what I’d seen looking down the side of the site:

The image partially obscured by the parked car contains some interesting information:

The construction company and the Architectural Services Department are namechecked at the top of the poster, which also proclaims that they are building a community health centre with social welfare facilities on this site. The image appears to be a reproduction of the winning entry in a colouring-in competition for local schoolchildren, although whether it influenced the colours of the birds represented on the hoarding is unclear.

As I walked alongside the site, I gradually became aware that each avian image is not unique, which was slightly disappointing. There are in fact six different images, which repeat in exactly the same sequence around the entire site:

This is a view of the corner of the site:

When I’d taken all the photos I wanted here, it was time to head back home, and the most convenient route meant crossing the expressway and railway by a path that runs alongside a busy road. I took the final photo from this path:

Although I wouldn’t describe the artwork here as ‘impressive’, it’s certainly better than a bland wall of blank hoardings. I wonder what local residents think. The current situation is an improvement on last year, when piledriving on the site created a seismic shock every few seconds. I know this because there is also a cycle track running parallel to the path, and it used to be part of our route home after cycling ‘out west’. You could feel these shocks even from the other side of the road.

However, negotiating this section was always something of a nightmare. The path leads to the main entrance to Sheung Shui MTR station, and it is always thronged with people walking to or from the station from the residential areas west of the railway line. People walking in the same direction as we were cycling would step into the cycle track to overtake slower walkers, invariably without checking whether it was safe to do so! To try to mitigate this behaviour, I would ring my bell nonstop, but it was an extremely nerve-racking experience every time. Needless to say, I never spotted any of the images that I’ve documented here, because there was never an opportunity to look around. The alternative route that we now use may be quite a bit longer, but that isn’t a problem. At least I can safely look around from time to time.