The strong perfume of the betel palms filled the air as I passed small village after small village. Now that my day’s trip had a goal I would concentrate on getting to Guongfu, enjoying the ride, and only stopping for once in a lifetime photo opportunities. It’s one of the downfalls of being a photo nerd, or being unfortunate enough to travel with one. We’re always stopping and ruining the flow; halting forward progress in an attempt to capture a moment that will forever exist in the past. Space knows of what I speak first hand since Iris is even more into photography than I am. Not one to complain, he’s found the bright side in this agony and has taken to carrying a book with him wherever he goes. He gets though upwards of 50 books a year this way; Iris takes a lot of photographs.
Riding on a boring stretch of road in Guongfu I looked up and saw a waterfall in the distance. Here’s another chance I thought to myself. I rode towards it for quite some time before it finally started to get bigger and disappear behind a hill. I was close, I could feel it, and all I had to do was get over this hill…famous last words.
This trail didn’t try to deceive like the others, it was narrow and ugly right from the start, and quite obviously seldom used as there was vegetation growing down the centre. It was rocky, steep, twisty and wet, a dangerous combination for a guy who so often runs out of talent. I wanted to be brave, but there came a point where I was just being stupid. Everything has closed in on me and the thickness of the betel palms made it impossible to tell how far from the top I was or if I was even facing the right direction.
And so my descent began, but not without incident. Since I had forgotten to leave a trail of breadcrumbs my return path was not as simple. I took the wrong turn at a fork in the road and came to a dead stop when the wall of vines in front of me made it clear that I had gone the wrong way. I managed to turn the Irony Horse around but struggled to find grip with its well-worn rear tire and wet ground beneath me.
“Fuck you Robert Frost!” I shouted in my head. “Damn you and your road less travelled straight to hell!”
I didn’t mean it of course, the road less travelled may have brought me to this small version of hell on a mountainside in the middle of nowhere, but such is the material of life. Everything else had been great so far, so if I could just manage to keep the Irony Horse upright and making slow forward progress I would be OK…and I was. I tried two alternate routes in an attempt to reach the waterfall but was met with a similar lack of success.
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