sitting on the balcony

I realized recently that I’ve been taking photos regularly of the same view: what you can see looking southeast from our balcony. Of course, the photos are only superficially similar, and I took each one because there was something transient in the view that I wanted to capture. I thought that I would post these photos, in chronological order, to illustrate what I mean.

The first photo, taken on 26th October last year, was an attempt to capture the sunrise. Unfortunately, my phone camera isn’t very good at rendering colour:

However, I tried again six minutes later and got a much more satisfying result:

The long, narrow building is what in British army days was this base’s married quarters, although I’d never seen it occupied since we moved here in 2008. The high-rise blocks are part of the recently constructed Queen’s Hill Public Housing Estate, which has yet to be occupied. The mountain is Lung Shan (‘Dragon Mountain’).

I took the next photo, on 4th November, because some clown had decided to make a bonfire of grass, leaves and other organic matter. Not much land is under cultivation in that area, but I do see smoke rising from that location from time to time. Not a major contribution to global warming, but I’ve never seen evidence of composting, which to me is the obvious course of action in such circumstances, anywhere in Hong Kong:

I mentioned not having seen the former married quarters being occupied above, so this was the first time (2nd March):

The soldiers of the PLA, which now occupies this former British military base, do a lot of coordinated shouting, starting from reveille at 6 o’clock, but a few days before I took this photo, I’d become suspicious around 10 o’clock because I’d heard no shouting that day. Perhaps there had been a covid outbreak, and shouting had therefore been banned. Obviously, this is the kind of news that will never be officially confirmed, but the former married quarters do make a handy isolation unit for suspected cases.

Notice too the number of lights on in the right-hand tower block. We had heard rumours that this block had been earmarked as an isolation centre for suspected covid cases in the general population (Hong Kong has subsequently endured its worst outbreak of the disease since the start of the pandemic).

Its often foggy as winter gives way to spring in Hong Kong. This photo was taken early in the morning on 18th March:

…and this one was taken 11 minutes later:

I often see huge fields of grass flowers in the more remote areas of the New Territories in springtime as I cycle around, something that I don’t see back home in the UK because grass is used for grazing or is mown as hay. This is scarcely a ‘huge field’, but I took the photo because it shows grass flowers—this field used to be maintained by outside contractors but hasn’t been since the start of the pandemic (26th March, late afternoon):

I simply had to take this photo of a low-level streak of mist early in the morning of 10th April:

Two photos of the Moon rising over the housing estate in the late evening of 18th May, taken 13 minutes apart:

The next photo was taken on 25th May, shortly before sunset, which meant that the housing estate was quite sharply illuminated. However, it was the positioning of the clouds that prompted me to take this photo:

The mid-level mist in the next photo, taken on 27th May, was much more regularly defined when I first saw it, but it had begun to break up by the time I’d got my camera ready. However, this photo also shows flowers on two flame trees in the foreground. These trees are native to the savannas of East Africa and therefore have a wide spread. They usually flower in June but have been early this year. Unfortunately, heavy rain has since washed off all the flowers on the right-hand tree, and whether it has time to make a comeback—flowers normally cover the entire tree—is debatable:

You can’t miss the pylons on the slopes of Lung Shan, but I don’t recall ever seeing the actual power lines, which is why I took this photo in the afternoon of 29th May:

My final photo was taken on the same day, shortly before sunset, hence the slight redness of the clouds. Our balcony faces east, and, surprisingly, I often see more redness in the clouds from here than I would if I went up to the roof and looked west. This phenomenon is, I believe, caused by the absurd amount of air pollution over southern China, which diffracts the light when the Sun is low in the sky:

And the power lines are still visible!

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.