It looks fun. I think I’ve never climbed this one.
I remember climbing one of the two roads to the East of this one. I can’t remember exactly which one it was now, because it was many years ago. I remember buying a sport’s drink to fill the bottle and also filling the backpack bladder with water just before doing that climb. I run out of liquids around before the big cemetery. A good samaritan gave me water in the Fengguizui area, not before scolding me for not bringing water into the mountains. Oh, if he knew that I started the climb with almost 3 l of liquid…
My ride today was a little bit different - I participated in the New York 5 Boro Bike tour - with 32,000 “friends” through Manhattan, The Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn and Staten Island. What’s special is being able to cycle on roads, highways and bridges that are normally only available to cars - you get a completely different perspective on the city. It would be great it Taipei would do something similar, can you imagine cycling along Civic Blvd, or on the Jianguo Elevated road… how cool would that be.
The only real downside was it can be crowded at times, 32,000 people is a lot to go through some narrow roads and bridges.
For full disclosure, I took the ferry back to Manhattan from Staten Island, Strava has me swimming across NY harbor.
I remember it was on a Car Free Day a few years ago. The ride started at City Hall, went down Renai, made a right on Jinshan and continued up Xinsheng expressway. It finished at the Shilin Official Residence. Got very congested in Shilin, but it was fun overall.
Definitely worth the trip out to XiZhi if you’ve never done it.
The roads leading to the beginning of the route are shit, so you can actually consider riding up FGZ from Shilin or WuZhiShan from Neihu and dropping down into XiZhi and going back up.
On Saturday, I decided to spice things up and give the “五指山” climb a try per ranlee’s recommendation. I went up the FZD side and then descended down that road to the start of the 五指山 segment. This road is super wide, great tarmac and very flowy with only a handful of sharp turns…but since the roads are so wide it can still be a very chill descent. I can’t believe it took me this long to go down this road into Xizhi.
This 五指山 segment was the last ‘longish’ climb of the morning for me and it was already getting close to 10am with no cloud cover and the temps rising. I’d say in ‘hotter’ months this climb would be better as a ‘1st’ climb of the morning as there is not a lot of tree cover. When I did hit a few shady areas with a cross-wind it felt like a refreshing cold shower…for a handful of seconds at least before getting baked by the sun again.
It’s a really nice climb…and many sections that just begs you to attack. I’ll definitely will try to create a route with it as my first climb out of the city limits as the heat and humidity roll in.
thanks, the 34 chainring and going from an 11-32t to a 11-34t cassette has given my legs extra life. Still trying to work up some endurance to give the Buddha Hand a shot one of these days.
Nice Aster! A bell is not the coolest thing to have on a road bike, but when I was riding on the riverside a lot in 2020 I was so glad I bought one. But I still had some close calls with runners making U-turns without even a look and a teenager making a u-turn with a ubike where I almost toppled over my handlebars trying to brake.