that was the week that was

Last week started well but then went steadily downhill, although Sunday was something of a landmark. Since completing my 14 days of home quarantine in mid-October, I’ve been getting out regularly on my bike, racking up at least 70km per ride. However, perhaps it’s my age, but I always felt far too tired the following day to consider going out again. That changed on Sunday.

Although I’d completed a 70km ride the previous day, I felt that I couldn’t miss doing ‘the final frontier’, which is only practical on Sundays and public holidays because of the amount of industrial traffic on key road sections. This, my favourite ride, passes through a long section of what had been, until 2016, part of the ‘frontier closed area’, so I’d never carried out any exploration northeast of Fanling until I heard that this restriction had been lifted.

Over the past few years, I’ve usually done this ride by myself, because Paula goes to church on Sundays, but following a recent surge in coronavirus cases, she has had to make do with a virtual church service, so she would be available once the service had finished. And the final frontier is only about 50km, so I did a short ride while she was otherwise occupied. I opted for the ‘detour de force’, which I hadn’t done previously since returning to Hong Kong.

Once out on the ride, we stopped at a public toilet on Ng Chow Road, and while Paula was using the facility, I noticed a rather grand village house that stood alone nearby:

The vast majority of such houses, which are restricted by law to a maximum of three storeys and a maximum footprint of 700 square feet, have a far more prosaic design, and most are subdivided into three separate apartments, but I suspect that this house has a single occupant. The clues include the difference in balconies between the first and second floors, and the guardian lions at the gate, which could well be solid bronze.

I took the photo because I thought that I might compile a collection of photos of other village houses to compare architectural features (see below).

The ride went well enough, although on the climax, ‘the switchback’:

I had to drop to the small chainring on the first hill, which is a bit of a grunter, for the first time ever. The video starts from the top of that first hill. It isn’t often that I come across hills in Hong Kong where brakes are not required—except in an emergency, of course—but the first two downhills are real screamers where I’m exceeding the speed limit for motor vehicles (50km/hr) as I hit the bottom.

Although that would have been enough to qualify as a good day’s work, I thought that a detour to take in an alleyway that connects the Ng Tung River with Fu Tei Au Road would make a fitting conclusion to the ride. As you can see from this photo, the exit is quite steep:

The flowers are an outstanding example of firecracker vine.

The following day, I wasn’t about to do any more cycling, so I decided to walk to the villages of Kwan Tei and Fu Tei Au, a couple of kilometres east of Fanling, to take a few photos of village houses. Having done so, I was on my way home when I was suddenly accosted by a man who kept screaming:

“Why did you take a photo of my home?”

I would have told him, but I couldn’t get a word in edgeways. And, he told me, he’d called the police. I did consider sloping off when he wasn’t paying attention, but I thought it better to wait for the coppers, because as far as I was concerned, I’d done nothing wrong. When the police finally arrived, I gave them my camera to examine, and they happily accepted my explanation that I merely wanted to compare architectural features. I imagine that the screaming man thought that I had some criminal intent.

And the week didn’t get any better. On Wednesday, Paula wanted to do ‘the long and winding road’, which we had yet to do this winter. An Australian friend described this ride as “thrilling”—and that was before I upgraded it to include ‘the spiral ramp’! Everything went well enough until we embarked on ‘the iron bridge path’ segment:

The last time we’d done this, the section between 2.36 and 2.50 on the video had been choked with vegetation, and, having decided to try to ride through it, I’d then spent 15 minutes removing twigs and other vegetative matter from my chain and gears. I was prepared to get off and push this time if it was still overgrown, while making a mental note to avoid it in future.

But it had been cleared. Unfortunately, all the vegetative debris had simply been piled up at the start of the previously overgrown section, leaving a fairway no more than 30cm wide—OK for anyone on foot, but far too dangerous to attempt on a bike, given the two-metre drop on the right.

Worse was to come. The dirt road section:

…provides access to a small temple, and for the past few years to a small motocross area where we often noticed people riding scrambler motorbikes and small four-wheel-drive vehicles. This time, however, we couldn’t help but notice that earth-moving machinery was being used to expand this area, and when we embarked upon the dirt road, it was obvious that it had been altered significantly. We had no option but to proceed with extreme caution.

Towards the end of the ride, the route follows a Drainage Services Department (DSD) access path that runs alongside a large nullah (storm drain). This gets overgrown too, but it’s cleared from time to time by DSD staff. However, this time the trimmings had simply been left in place. We could ride over this, although I was concerned that a wooden splinter might puncture one of my tyres—a concern that proved remarkably prescient. Paula did get some vegetation in her gears, which took a while to remove.

So the long and winding road is no longer going to be a regular excursion in future, although I will have to work out some way to continue to test ourselves on the spiral ramp.

After this disappointment, Paula had to head off home because she had something else to do, so I thought that I would do some more by myself. I decided that I would start with ‘ping kong ping pong’, but as I was riding along the road to the village of Ping Kong, I suddenly began to hear a cyclical click from one of my tyres. I thought that I must have picked up a piece of paper or similar debris, but when I stopped to investigate, this is what I discovered:

It had penetrated the tread of my back tyre. I don’t carry a spare inner tube, or repair equipment, so I had to push my bike to the bike shop we always use in Sheung Shui, a distance of about 3km. I was in no mood to continue after my bike had been fixed, so I came home. And, according to my speedo, I’d done just 4km that day! The battery obviously needed replacing.

On Friday, after obtaining a new battery for my speedo, we would do ‘the frontier road’:

As you can see from the video, this used to be a quiet road with almost no traffic (it had been part of the ‘frontier closed area’ until 2013), but in the past year or so it has become infested with construction traffic. This road was never built to handle heavy vehicles and is now pitted with potholes, some of which are impossible to avoid. On this occasion, we encountered no fewer than eight big tipper trucks laden with earth on the section of the road east of a police operational base—and the road is so narrow here that you have to get off it completely to allow one of these behemoths to pass.

West of the police base, the road has been widened, so this isn’t a problem, but I began to think about returning via a different route to avoid any more encounters with tipper trucks—the frontier road has usually been an out-and-back excursion. The obvious choice would have been the new cycle track connecting Sheung Shui and Yuen Long, but both Paula and I think it’s boring, as well as being very poorly designed. However, a few years ago, I’d discovered an alternative over the hills that we’d stopped using because it involves a short but difficult portage section. On our way to join the cycle track, I suddenly remembered this alternative, so that’s the route we decided to take.

None of this route seemed remotely familiar—I wasn’t sure we were even on the right road—and at one point we came to a massive construction site (constructing what, in such a remote location, I cannot say). We had to cross over from one road to another via some steel plates that had been placed across some otherwise open trenches, and until it was too late, I didn’t notice that they were wet. Suddenly, my front wheel slid violently to the left, and I was on the deck, the impact concentrated on the fingertips of my left hand. Although I was able to get up, gingerly, almost straight away, the index finger of my left hand did feel quite sore. However, we continued, and eventually we reached a location that we both recognized: a flight of rudimentary stairs that was the portage section I referred to earlier. In this direction, the steps lead downhill, which is easier, and I was able to get my bike down them without too much trouble.

In fact, we continued with our planned route, which involved a sequence of narrow but quiet roads through an area southeast of the large village of Hang Tau. We eventually reached a small pavilion next to ‘the witch’s house’, where we always stop for a short break. Our next objective would be ‘swiss roll’, which both Paula and I rate as harder than the spiral ramp! My finger was definitely sore though, and I couldn’t grip the handlebar as tightly as I would have liked, so I suggested that we miss it out. However, having set off, and before we had to make the turn towards swiss roll, I suddenly decided that I can still do it. And I could!

The following day, we were walking through Luen Wo Hui, the easternmost district of Fanling, when Paula noticed that the local 7-eleven convenience store was selling 500ml cans of Heineken for just HK$7 each. She suggested that we come back later to buy a few, so we returned with my airline carry-on wheeled suitcase and took home a full case.

As Shakespeare wrote, all’s well that ends well. I think I’ll have another beer.

Cheers!

an unwelcome development

There are five ways out of our village. Two are single-track roads (with passing places); one is a footpath that eventually reaches the same place as one of the roads; and one is the footpath we follow if walking into Fanling. The fifth route is the Drainage Services Department (DSD) access road that runs alongside the Ng Tung River:

Although the signs are explicit—‘No Entry’—it didn’t take us long to notice that nobody appeared to pay any attention to them, and we found that a stroll along the river was a pleasant experience, because although the DSD access road is not accessible to motor vehicles, pedestrians and cyclists could simply pass through the conveniently provided gap.

Other branches of government were clearly aware that this road was a popular leisure resource for locals:

I wrote in 2011 (Owt Fresh?) about the solar-powered streetlights that had been installed by North District Board while I’d been away in the UK for the summer, and prior to that, the Home Affairs Department had built covered seating at strategic intervals along the river, presumably after consulting the DSD. Although the DSD continued to maintain its ‘keep out’ stance (I took the above photo last winter), this prohibition has now been relaxed. ‘No Entry’ is no longer inscribed on the signs at the access point.

Unfortunately, back in October signs appeared warning people that access would be prohibited from 1st November. The signs referred to a ‘Fanling east bypass’, which struck me as both unnecessary and unwelcome. The eastern boundary of Fanling is currently defined by Ma Sik Road, a four-lane dual carriageway that carries a lot of traffic but is never congested, but between this road and the river, there is a wide area of land that was extensively cultivated when we moved here in 2008.

However, in 2011, a local property developer began fencing off the area (Turf Wars), and construction of what I imagine will eventually be a high-rise private residential estate began a couple of years ago. I suspect that the existence of this estate is the main reason behind the plan to construct a ‘bypass’ even further east.

We had been using this DSD access road regularly whenever we wanted to cycle out west, but there are alternatives. However, these involve following cycle tracks through the urban area, which I would prefer not to have to do, because they involve crossing roads at light-controlled junctions, where legally I’m required to get off and push, although I never do so. In any case, the prohibition on the DSD access road hasn’t been rigorously enforced, although some sections have been temporarily blocked off. These can be avoided by paths that only locals like myself know about, but as you can see below, the level of destruction that is envisaged here is truly horrifying, and access for cyclists, and pedestrians, will be impossible.

A few days ago, I noticed that all the trees along the river had been tagged either ‘retain’ or ‘fell’:

…and I couldn’t believe the extent of the planned destruction, which has already started:

These trees are all slated for ‘demolition’:

There are two footbridges across the river, and I’d initially assumed that the planned tree clearance applied only to the section downstream from the first bridge, but that was because the tagging process hadn’t been completed. Every tree between that first bridge and our village is also doomed:

…including two trees that are around 15 metres high:

This implies that the proposed bypass will eventually reach our village, from which, as I pointed out above, the only exits for motor vehicles are single-track roads. But there are other ‘obstacles’ in the way of clearance, and I do wonder whether they will go too. This is an example of the covered seating that I referred to above:

…while this is a pavilion and seating area, outside the DSD road, that was already there when we moved into the area:

This is a view of the final section of the road before it joins the road linking our village with the nearby village of Siu Hang:

The two eucalyptus trees in the photo are also about 15 metres tall.

The building in the previous photo is a public toilet that was opened just a couple of years ago:

Is that also slated for destruction?

Incidentally, there aren’t many trees on the river side of the DSD road, but the one in this photo has also been tagged ‘fell’, even though it has a trunk almost a metre in diameter, and it doesn’t appear to interfere with any planned new road hereabouts (I featured the red flowers that you can see in Autumn Flowers #3):

Hong Kong is always changing, but from my perspective this is one change too far!

autumn flowers #5

Never say “never”! You might think I should have learned that lesson at my age, but when I wrote in Autumn Flowers $4 that it would be the last in the series, I really did think that I couldn’t possibly find enough new examples to justify another post on the subject. However, autumn is drawing to a close, and I haven’t seen any new flowering plants for the past week, so this will definitely be the last. Several of the plants in this survey were not in flower two weeks ago, so I would have walked past them without a second glance.

On the other hand, my first photo was taken last month, between posting #1 and #2, and I somehow forgot to include it in either collection:

The next photo was taken just a day later, while I was exploring the Tam Mei valley, and from a distance I thought it was bougainvillea, even though pink bougainvilleas are very uncommon. As you can see, it looks nothing like bougainvillea:

The remaining photos were taken between 13th and 21st November.

I was walking along a path in my immediate neighbourhood when I noticed two elderly ladies ahead. They were pointing at something by the side of the path. Whether the object of their attention had some medicinal value or was simply extremely rare I’m unable to say, but this is what they were looking at:

I took the next photo just 20 minutes later, on a path that I don’t often walk along, but the Drainage Services Department (DSD) access road along the river is blocked because major road construction work is just beginning, and it does help to know that there are alternatives:

I mentioned the rafts of floating vegetation on an unnamed river that runs parallel to Tun Yu Road in Hares Meet Tortoise, but I’ve since been able to scramble down to the bank of the river, where I took the next photo. I always refer to these flowers as ‘water hyacinths’, although that’s unlikely to be their official name:

There are just a few flowers in the previous photo, but I included two photos of a large pond next to the Ng Tung River, just before it flows across the border into Shenzhen, in Photographic Highlights: 2019–20, Part 1 that is completely covered in flowers.

DSD workers had been clearing vegetation from the banks of the river, and I took the next photo directly behind the camera position of the previous photo. The small white flowers were quite striking despite the debris:

I took the next photo from a bridge over the Ma Wat River, which I have to cross (via a different bridge) when walking into Fanling. I think that this tree must be related to the trumpet-shaped yellow flowers that I included in Autumn Flowers #4, although this is a tree, and the other plant is just a shrub. And the flowers are smaller and the leaves much narrower:

I’ve taken several photos of examples of the bush in the next photo and not used them, because I expected the flowers to open out. But they don’t. This is what you get:

There aren’t many plants that employ aerial seed dispersion, but the next photo shows one of them. This plant appears to be distantly related to the English dandelion, but that is merely speculation:

The small bush in the next photo, which was growing alongside a cul-de-sac near where I live, is another example of the flowers being overexposed because my camera exposes for the darker background:

The next photo was taken along the same cul-de-sac. Notice that although most of the flowers are yellow, some are red:

This appears to be the same species, although it was taken some distance away on a path that few people know exists:

I don’t think the next photo does justice to these red flowers, which struck me at the time as quite unusual:

The next photo is of a flowering shrub that I spotted in a small garden next to Fanling station:

Some of the flowers that I’ve included in this series weren’t out when I started, and one morning recently while walking into Fanling from our village, I noticed several examples of the white flowers in the next photo that hadn’t been there the previous day:

I took the final photo when I showed Paula the ‘secret garden’ that I mentioned in Autumn Flowers #4. These flowers weren’t there when I discovered the place:

I don’t rule out posting more photos of flowers in the future. More than 3,000 species of vascular plant have been recorded in Hong Kong, and some of them produce impressive floral displays in season.

more autumn flowers
Autumn Flowers
Autumn Flowers #2
Autumn Flowers #3

an american tragedy

What is wrong with America?

It is now three weeks since the US presidential election, and more than two weeks since it became clear that Joe Biden had won, yet not only has the incumbent declined to concede defeat, he also continues to claim that he ‘won’, citing widespread fraud for his apparent loss. To anyone who has followed US politics during the past four years, such intransigence should not be a surprise, and neither should the widespread belief among his supporters that the election was ‘stolen’, echoing their hero’s preposterous claim. But why?

There are two distinct voting blocs who continue to support Donald Trump: right-wing working-class citizens and evangelical Christians, and both groups are predisposed to believe bullshit, which Trump spouts relentlessly, especially on climate change (“a Chinese hoax”) and the coronavirus pandemic (“drink bleach to kill the virus”).

I suspect that most people in the first group also believe the QAnon conspiracy theory, which postulates that a Satanist cabal of leading Democrats and Hollywood A-listers is running a child sex ring, and that Donald Trump is leading the fight against them. I can’t prove that this is nonsense, but I can say that if you do believe it, then you clearly have never heard of Occam’s razor.

The second group was notably anti-science well before Trump came along to reinforce their ignorance, reserving particular disdain for the theory of evolution. When I was a student in Manchester in the mid-1960s, I used to listen to Radio Caroline—a pirate radio station broadcasting from a ship anchored in the Irish Sea—whenever I was back in my lodgings. As a pirate station, it broadcast on an unauthorized frequency, and in the evening it was progressively drowned out by the big commercial stations on the continent, such as Hilversum and Radio Luxembourg, that were broadcasting on nearby frequencies. Consequently, it used to close down for the day at 9pm, and because music reception was already poor by 8.30, it ran a 30-minute talk segment under the title The World Tomorrow with Garner Ted Armstrong.

To be honest, I’ve no idea why I kept listening, because Armstrong went on and on, and on about the theory of evolution, employing an almost endless stream of utterly specious arguments to demonstrate the falsity of this theory. At the time, I couldn’t understand what he had against evolution, which only an idiot would think was wrong, given the vast body of supporting evidence, but in retrospect I now understand the motive for his tirades. Armstrong was a fundamentalist Christian, someone who believes that every word of the Bible is literally true. And evolution directly contradicts the version of creation recorded in Genesis. It’s a garbled version that doesn’t bear close scrutiny:

1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
4 And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
5 And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.

Bear in mind that God doesn’t create the source of the light (the Sun) until the fourth day of his labours. And day and night cannot exist without the Sun! This is the belief system of a primitive tribe of nomadic herdsmen living 6,000 years ago that has no validity in the twenty-first century.

As evidence of this fundamental animosity towards and general ignorance of science, I present the following four quotations, which I culled from a Christian website several years ago, although I can’t provide a detailed attribution because I made a note of them purely for amusement:

Some things cannot be explained by science. Take for example, rainbows. Rainbows are a mystery and you cannot touch them, just like God. Despite this fact, they are still there even though there is no scientific explanation for them.

Yes. DNA can never be proven. Evolutionists are obsessed with it because they always say “chimps share 97% DNA with modern man” etc. That’s great, however you would then need to prove DNA is real.

If evolution was real, humans and animals alike would not need reproductive organs.

Let me see you take hydrogen and oxygen to make water? God can. But the smartest man ever to live can’t.

The woeful ignorance on display here is appalling. Give me unlimited supplies of hydrogen and oxygen, and I will make as much water as you want. And I’m not God!

And what about the ultimate Trump bullshit? All his ‘make America great again’ and ‘America first’ rhetoric cannot disguise the fact that he is actively working against the admirable ideal of America as a shining city on a hill, as expressed in Emma Lazarus’ poem The New Colossus, which was written in 1883 and inscribed on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty in 1903:

“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

America may have been founded by disgruntled colonists, but it was built by immigrants, and it is now being destroyed by the descendants of those ‘huddled masses yearning to breathe free’.

At the beginning of this essay, I posed the question ‘what is wrong with America?’ This is my diagnosis. The first problem is with education, which, like healthcare, is seen in America as a money-making opportunity rather than a basic right. Consequently, if you can afford it, you send your children to a fee-paying private school, because America’s public schools are a disgrace. I would wager that the majority of Trump’s working-class supporters attended public schools, where they might have learned to read and write, and perform simple arithmetic, but they would not have learned how to construct an argument or how to separate fact from bullshit.

The second problem is with the constitution, in particular the first amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Freedom of speech is a noble ideal, but it is no accident that Fox News is banned in the UK, Australia and New Zealand, because it presents a biased, radical, right-wing take on events. But there are far worse outlets that are permitted under the first amendment. One America News Network (OANN) is now Donald Trump’s favourite news channel, mainly because he no longer considers Fox News sufficiently supportive. The problem is that people who watch these channels don’t watch any others, so their political views are constantly being reinforced in a perpetual echo chamber.

And what about Alex Jones’ Infowars channel, which focuses on promoting conspiracy theories like QAnon and the notion that the Sandy Hook school massacre in 2012 was a stunt staged by actors? Of course, the conspiracy theorist-in-chief is Donald Trump himself, who regularly accuses an imaginary ‘deep state’ of trying to undermine him and his policies.

At the same time, Trump constantly berates news outlets of which he disapproves, such as the Washington Post and New York Times, which have the temerity to point out that many of his statements are false, as ‘fake news’. Following his lead, Trump supporters then complain that responsible news outlets like these should not be criticizing his gross mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic but should instead be focusing on his ‘accomplishments’, of which there are none.

There are no easy remedies for the malaise that afflicts America, but Joe Biden can make a start by appointing someone who actually understands education as secretary of education rather than the present holder of that office, whose only credentials for the job were that her family has made billions of dollars running fee-paying charter schools. Although it is probably a bridge too far, I would also tear up the constitution, because a genuine democracy doesn’t need one. The American constitution didn’t prevent a self-regarding, narcissistic demagogue from becoming president. And fundamental human rights don’t need to be enshrined on a piece of paper. They should simply be understood.