Cycling - virtually to Beijing
Sunday, 9 May 2010
Enveloped in the misty and somewhat smoggy (and soggy) twilight of a Hong Kong dawn on Wednesday morning this week, I managed to achieve a personal target that I had set for myself at the start of the academic year nine months ago in August 2009.
I had resolved to ride at least 1000 kilometres on my bicycle between the start of term 1 (mid-August 2009) and the end of the academic year (which is now just two and a half weeks away). A target of 1000 kilometres may not seem very ambitious, but as I do not go out cycling on days when the air pollution is excessive or a typhoon is blowing, and as I can only find the time to ride on weekends or in the early mornings or evenings, the options start to become limited. And to put the target in perspective, achieving the target this week meant I had cycled the equivalent of Hong Kong to Beijing over the past two years.
I decided last August that my 1000 kilometres should only include cycling specifically for fitness, as I wanted my bicycle riding to contribute to this year’s ‘Amazing Voyage’. The Amazing Voyage is one of the College’s programs to encourage fitness among its students. 
Established a few years ago by our Head of Languages, Mr Ronny Mintjens, the Amazing Voyage is described on its dedicated Facebook page in these words: “The Amazing Voyage is a virtual tour around the world, crossing all the countries that are represented by students and staff at Li Po Chun United World College of Hong Kong. We only travel through physical power: running, walking, cycling, swimming and kayaking are the only activities that we can record. We hope to travel from Hong Kong to Hong Kong between the first day of school and Graduation Day ...”.
Graduation Day this year is scheduled for 24th May, and I don’t know yet whether our staff and students’ efforts will be sufficient to encircle the world, weaving back and forth through every country represented in the College – a distance of a little over 80,000 kilometres. However, as in life itself, the journey has been at least as interesting as the destination.
The Amazing Voyage is one of our College’s attempts to address several of Hahn’s concerns in a contemporary East Asian and international school context. We have purchased ten bicycles for student use, and these are used so much that we plan to add more to the fleet as soon as we can. Fortunately, we have an excellent network of cycleways near the College that means students can ride bicycles 
without having to encounter the “refreshingly extrovert and less than predictable” hazards of Hong Kong’s car drivers. This is not to say that riding bikes on the cycleways is always easy. On weekends, the cycleways near Sha Tin, for example, can become extremely congested – where else in the world could you encounter long delays caused by congestion on a cycleway?
There are other hazards too, such as the cyclists of all ages who ride with only one hand on the handle bars because they are making calls on mobile phones, or the pedestrians who wander aimlessly across cycleways oblivious to the world around them (often because they are playing on their iPods at a deafening volume), or the inordinate number of grown women who still ride bicycles using training wheels, or the groups of up to five children who choose to have a communal experience by riding the same bicycle at the same time, swaying wildly from side to side with arms waving erratically in all directions as they do so.
It is an opportunity to be part of Hong Kong, not just in Hong Kong.
The photos in this blog were taken on a camera phone last weekend (hence their relatively low quality), and they show some aspects of one of several cycle routes that I often follow. The maps below (which can also be clicked to enlarge) show some typical routes that I take while cycling (maps generated on Google Maps using the RunKeeper iPhone application).
Photo taken on a camera phone by a policeman as I took a short rest from cycling at Ma Liu Shui last Sunday afternoon.
