Cycling in Hong Kong

I'm lying on my bed, racked with pain and exhaustion, after spending the day cycling in the north of Hong Kong. It turns out that my body isn't too forgiving of my two-year failure to go biking, particularly when I celebrate it with a four hour ride.

Hong Kong is full of hills, and riding them is a remarkably civilised affair; you hire a van for a few hundred HKD, you're driven to the top of a mountain like Tai Mo Shan, and then you ride down again. The trails we rode today are remarkably similar to wooded trails I've ridden in the Lakes, or near Les Gets in France. That is, they're tight and twisty, with lots of rocks and roots and river crossings, and with occasional flat-out bits and steep drops.

On the other hand, you don't usually get plus-90 percent humidity in the Lake District, or temperatures in the thirties. Otherwise all those stout men in sensible beards and hiking socks would promptly expire.

It gets warm in the summer in the Alps, but there still isn't that oppressive heat that Hong Kong is good at; plus the only pollution to deal with is the noise of cowbells drifting over from Switzerland, rather than smog pumping out of a ipad factory in Shenzhen.

But apart from that, remarkably similar. Lots of roots. Oh, a hell of a lot of roots. I was a battered wreck before we'd gone a mile down the trail, and there were a host of obstacles left to clear. There's also a lot of variety: tight rooty singletrack, then steep sandy singletrack, then wide open drop-offs of doom, and at the end, 5km of frankly murderous flat trails round the reservoir: just when you think everything is done, a big set of steps appears and you have to clamber off the bike and stumble up a few yards.

The negative side to riding in Hong Kong is that there are only a small number of legally sanctioned trails; they're good for what they are, but there's a lot of mountain that would be perfectly fine for riding, that is supposedly prohibited. (Although it's not as if there's a angry park ranger continually looking for offenders, so perhaps some people are getting away with it. Perhaps.)

Oh, and did I mention the heat? Within half an hour of riding, I had to ditch my shirt, so for the rest of the ride I was tooling around bare-chested. That's not something the good hikers of Windermere have to put up with.

Also, export strength Guinness tastes revolting, and doesn't aid recovery at all. Hence I'm still lying on my bed, practically paralysed with pain. Next time, I hope it will hurt less.