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.