a grand day out #4

Since resuming cycling in March following a 14-week lay-off as a result of an accident in which I fractured a bone in my wrist, I’ve been getting out quite regularly, but our first ride last week was the longest—and toughest—to date.

Because of construction along the Ng Tung River, nowadays we follow the cycle tracks through Fanling whenever we ride ‘out west’. We used to take the cycle track that runs next to Sheung Shui station in order to cross the railway and expressway, but the sheer number of pedestrians—and their tendency to step out onto the cycle track without looking—means that we now take an alternative route that follows a flyover further south. This flyover does carry a pedestrian walkway in addition to the cycle track, but we don’t see many pedestrians—or cyclists for that matter, because the first half in both directions is quite a steep climb.

Anyway, once we’ve negotiated the flyover, we simply follow the various cycle tracks on the west side of town until we eventually reach the village of Tai Tau Leng on the west bank of the Shek Sheung River. From there, we follow the Drainage Services Department (DSD) access road northwards until we can cross the river and continue via the DSD access road on the east bank. We eventually have to cross back to the west side, from where we usually follow the DSD access road further north. This section used to be part of the ‘frontier closed area’, so we never ventured further north here, but this status was rescinded in 2013.

There are two large ponds on the west side of the river, and on this occasion the more southerly pond was choked with water hyacinths. Naturally, despite the treacherous nature of the descent to pond level, I scrambled down to take a few photos:

This is a closer view of the flowers:

After taking these photos, we headed south to the village of Ho Sheung Heung, where there is a so-called ‘rest station’ (and a toilet) for our first sit-down rest of the ride. We have been following the new cycle track to Yuen Long from this point, but last week I decided to follow the frontier road (also part of the ‘frontier closed area’ until 2013) when out cycling by myself. We had been avoiding this road, once a pleasant excursion, because its use by fully laden tipper trucks had turned it into a cart track (it was never designed to carry heavy traffic). However, it has been resurfaced, and there still isn’t much traffic on the road, so I suggested to Paula that we go this way this time. It would certainly be a better option than the cycle track, which is extremely disjointed along the section that the frontier road replaces.

This is a video of the frontier road that I shot before construction began here:

The video ends just as it reaches the village of Ha Wan, where we could take a break in a small garden at the end of the village, just before the road through the village joins Lok Ma Chau Road. This road leads to a border crossing point and carried almost no traffic during the covid-19 pandemic, when the border was closed. However, it’s now busy again. Shortly after joining this road, we stopped to take some photos of a lotus pond:

This is a close-up of some of the flowers:

When the border was closed, we used to cycle along this road as far as its junction with Castle Peak Road, but both heavier traffic and construction along the road now make this a dangerous option, so we turned off through the villages of Pun Uk and Chau Tau. This option eventually reaches Castle Peak Road at a light-controlled T-junction, and on this occasion there were two cars waiting on the side road. My intention had been to bump up onto the pavement on the left and use the light-controlled pedestrian crossing to reach the cycle track on the far side, but as I came up behind the second car, the lights changed, so we simply followed them until we reached the crossing, turned abruptly right and reached the cycle track without even stopping. A favourable omen for the remainder of the ride?

We followed the cycle track through the San Tin Public Transport Interchange, which had been quiet while the border was closed. During that period, we used to follow the pavement on the opposite side of the road, because there were no pedestrians, but that is no longer a practical option. However, we still needed to recross Castle Peak Road, because we always follow San Tin Tsuen Road nowadays—if we’d continued on the cycle track, we would have had to negotiate an extremely busy light-controlled junction. And this is an exceptionally scenic road, with fish ponds on both sides, that loops around the northern perimeter of the mega-village of San Tin, provides breathtaking panoramic views of Shenzhen and carries very little traffic, so it’s clearly the better option.

When we reached the end of this road (its junction with Castle Peak Road), we merely had to wait for a gap in the traffic on the latter before bumping up the kerb on the far side and rejoining the cycle track. A short distance further on, there is another official ‘rest station’, where we always stop for a short break. And it really was a short break on this occasion. Paula is very susceptible to mosquitoes, but these pests were also biting me, so we continued on our way.

The next section of the cycle track includes an up-and-over hill, but it’s one of very few hills on this route, so it isn’t a problem. However, at the bottom of the hill on the far side, the cycle track crosses San Tam Road, and the next section is extremely disjointed, crossing several roads—there’s even a significant gap where there is no cycle track. So we’ve started following San Tam Road instead. This road runs parallel to the expressway here, and it carries some high-speed traffic, but it’s quite wide, so overtaking vehicles can give us plenty of space, and we feel perfectly comfortable cycling on this road. When we reach the junction with Ngau Tam Mei Road, there is a convenient subway under the expressway, and when we emerge on the far side, all we need to do is cross Castle Peak Road (again) and rejoin the cycle track.

Before the cycle track was opened a couple of years ago, we used to follow the DSD access road from this point to the Kam Tin River, but the cycle track runs parallel to this road, so we follow that now. We’ve always stopped at the point where we first reach the river, and I’ve taken some great photos here in the past, but on this occasion there was nothing to see, so we continued northwards along the river. During the pandemic, the authorities built a community isolation facility along this next section, which meant that part of the cycle track was blocked, but there isn’t much traffic here, so it isn’t a major problem. However, I do wonder whether the cycle track will ever be restored. I’ve also been amused by the publicity surrounding this new cycle track, which touts the ‘great views of the river’ here. The cycle track is well below the level of the DSD access road, and you would need to be a giraffe to even see the river here!

Anyway, at the end of the road, there is another official ‘rest station’, this time without mosquitoes, so we stopped for a short break. Our next objective would be a bus shelter in the village of Kam Hing Wai. There are several diversions that we could have taken on the way, but I specifically wanted to detour via ‘the hospital path’, because Paula had recently bought me a new mountain bike, and I particularly wanted to see how it would handle a tricky hidden ramp:

Verdict: easy!

The hospital path eventually debouches onto the cycle track, which we then followed in reverse to reach a three-way interchange that allowed us to cross the main road and continue back towards the Kam Tin River along a cycle track on the opposite side. When we reached the river, we bumped our bikes down a flight of stairs to reach Ko Po Road. This road runs alongside the river, and although there was absolutely nothing to see on this occasion, I’ve shot several videos of egrets in the river from here, like this one:

Incidentally, at one time we used to follow the road on the opposite side of the river when heading home, but it’s quite narrow, and I found it dangerous (note the speed of the blue truck in the video). We now follow a different route (see below). The elevated railway is the West Rail Line, now renamed the Tuen Ma Line (because it links the new town of Tuen Mun in the west with Ma On Shan in the east—it didn’t originally.

So we reached the bus shelter, and it was time to decide what to do next. We could have headed home, but I wanted to do something extra before doing so. That would mean following Chi Ho Road eastwards, and as we cycled along, Paula spotted some graffiti on the other side of the river, which at this point is much narrower than it is downstream. And there is a convenient footbridge, which we crossed so that I could take a few photos:

The graffiti here are nothing like the graffiti that I’ve recorded in the Fanling area (see A Grand Day Out #3), and I conjecture that it’s all the work of a single artist. I love the various facial expressions.

And then it was back to Chi Ho Road and the start of a path that leads to the original path I discovered when I first started exploring this area ten years ago. This is a video of the first path:

Nowadays, we don’t follow the original path exactly. I was exploring a path that starts further east along Chi Ho Road a few years ago, and to my surprise I found that it leads to the original path just before it comes to an end. So that’s the way we go now, because this additonal path is quite exciting. This is a video of the complete segment:

The turn onto the additional path occurs at 5:35 on the video. If you watch until the end, you will notice that I turn left, but that’s because when we shot the video, we would then have been going to ride the five outer limits paths. However, on this occasion we turned right and simply followed Chi Ho Road back to the bus shelter in Kam Hing Wai.

Having mentioned an unsuitable homeward route above, I can say that we now follow Shui Mei Road. However, if we follow this road to its end, we would have to negotiate a busy junction to cross Castle Peak Road, so we turn right onto Mei Fung Road and head north for a short distance, until a path leads off to the left that leads us through the village of Sha Po Tsuen.

If we’d been doing the complete ride, instead of following Shui Mei Road we would have followed a series of dirt roads that lead, eventually, to a long series of alleyways that I’ve named ‘alley ballet’. However, we can still do part of this exciting sequence, which crosses Mei Fung Road, so we did:

The video shows just the last part of ‘alley ballet’, but the end seen in the video coincides with the end of the first alley, and on this occasion, instead of turning left we crossed the road diagonally to the right to ride through the second sequence of alleys before heading to Sha Po Tsuen. The advantage of coming this way is that we can cross Castle Peak Road via an underpass that I didn’t even know existed for many years!

The general plan was to follow the route that I’ve described above in reverse (except for the frontier road), but when we stopped at the rest station next to the Kam Tin River, I asked Paula whether she fancied riding through the fish ponds. This was one of my first additions to the basic ‘journey to the west’, but partly because there are so many other additions now, this is one we hadn’t done for quite a while. This is the video:

And then we were really homeward bound. However, as we approached the earlier mosquito-ridden rest stop, Paula shouted that she didn’t want to stop. So we continued along San Tin Tsuen Road until we could detour into San Tin, where we already knew there was a convenient place to sit down:

Did I mention that I have a new bike? That’s mine on the right. Paula’s is also new.

I took this photo of a flowering shrub to the right of the benches that I’d never seen before anywhere else:

At the end of San Tin Tsuen Road we would normally turn right, but Paula wanted to see whether there were any flowers on the water hyacinths that clog a small river that runs parallel to the road hereabouts. So we turned left onto Tunafish Road. We did see quite a few flowers, but they were too far away to take any worthwhile photos.

A word about the name of this road: its real name is Tun Yiu Road, but yiu is Cantonese for ‘fish’. You can guess the rest. It’s just like Psycho Road, which I wrote about in The Road to Nowhere and which runs parallel to the river on the other side. Its real name is Sai Kwo Road. You can guess the rest.

In order to avoid the major construction work along the cycle track, which is disjointed through Kwu Tung even without this added nuisance, we always use a footbridge to cross the expressway a little further on and follow Kwu Tung Road, which doesn’t carry too much traffic. Because of this diversion, we’ve recently been riding through ‘oriental garden’, an entertaining alleyway, quite frequently. We could continue on the road, but ‘oriental garden’ terminates on a road that runs parallel to the expressway and is a dead end, so we never encounter any traffic:

The flyover that we negotiated on the outward journey is a tough ask late in a ride, but we managed. And everything is flat from that point to home. A cold beer (or two) was extremely welcome. We’d clocked 85.7km for the day’s ride, so we were well satisfied.