Jubes!

The Jubes Mountain Bike Park, near Golden Jubilee Field in North Wahroonga, has had a makeover.

It's looking good, and I'll have to get over there with my bike next time.

Back to the bike

The bicycling bushwalkers were out in force the other day, negotiating the in places alarmingly crowded cycle tracks of Olympic Park and thereabouts. A nice day out.

Covid countdown - Western Sydney Parklands

Today's legal exercise was a bike ride through the Western Sydney Parklands. I'd walked the northernmost bit a few weeks back, and was hoping to get through to the southern end and back.








Not quite so easy. Nurragingy Reserve is still closed, so I got onto the (now extremely well patronised) M7 cycleway. I stuck pretty well with that afterwards, finding that the options for parkland traversing were more limited than I'd realised.



Here's a nice little diversion, on Border Rd, Cecil Hills.

The cycleway occupies one of the many bridges forming the tangled M4/M7 interchange.

Sun Moon Lake

Every tourist visiting Taiwan gets taken to Sun Moon Lake. It's a scenic tourist resort approximately in the centre of the island. You're supposed to be able to see a crescent moon and a sun within its complex shape, but we were having trouble with this, despite it all being carefully pointed out.

Anyway, it was a nice place to spend a few hours. A day off between our first two big day hikes, and the higher altitude challenges to come.

What do hikers do at Sun Moon Lake? They hire bikes and become bikers of course! We were told we didn't have time to cycle right round it. It's over 30km after all. But we did a few km of it, and generally had some fun. We were all a bit surprised though by how many of the local tourists seemed totally out of their depth on bicycles. We whizzed past them as they wobbled and weaved! Seems most Taiwanese abandoned their bikes decades ago, and moved on to motor bikes and cars. You do still see lots of sporting cyclists though, and Taiwan is a very proud centre for the world's bicycle manufacturing.

After our bike ride, we were promised a swim at a lakeside pool. Turned out the pool wasn't yet built. It was all a bit bizarre, wandering through a town centre in our swimming togs, to a swimming pool that didn't exist. And I loved how tour guide Samantha managed to hide her embarrassment about it, until she owned up to that several days later!