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When the ‘frontier closed area’ status of the area northeast of Fanling was rescinded at the start of 2016, I was quick to check out the cycling possibilities.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.