Today a few people from work decided to try their luck and go up to 宇老 (Yu lao) starting from 內灣 (Nei wan), which is about a 1,200 meter climb on a little more than 20 km. I'm glad to report that everybody made it to the top (and safely down), which is not bad given that many of us - including me - considered this trip quite a challenge.

As always the track log is on GPSies but you can also check out the map here:

Photo-wise, for now I only have a bunch of rather boring Panoramio photos but more will follow soon.

Update (2009-11-09): Thanks to everybody's picture sharing efforts I was able to put together a few nice group photos. Enjoy!

Before the start at the 內灣 (Neiwan) train station.

This photo gives you a good impression of how steep it is. Some areas are easily more than 15%.

The view at the top of the pass is really nice. All the hills make you want to climb more of them. :-)

If you liked these pictures there are a few more in my Bike trip to 宇老 album.

In preparation for an upcoming bike trip to 宇老 (Yu lao) I went biking today and decided to go to 顯伯公 (Xian bo gong temple).

Because I didn't know the name of the place before I left (ha ha ...) I had a hard time finding the small entrance road, so I decided to take a bunch of photos on the way and add them to Panoramio, so that they will eventually show up in Google Earth. Taiwan's road signs leave lots of room for improvement - this is my small contribution.

I had been told it was pretty steep, so when the road stayed fairly flat I was doubting my navigation skills for a while. But I was not to be disappointed. The road kept getting steeper and steeper forcing me to take a few breaks. Luckily the view is so good though (on a clear day you can see Taipei 101 from there!), that you forget your sore legs for a while:

A fellow biker even went to the trouble to measure the slope at various points. I should have thought of that first. What better excuse for breaks than collecting photos and numbers for your blog? :-)

At the top of the hill is a tiny temple:

This is what it looks like inside:

The map is below and if you're curious to see some more details about the trip you can check out the GPSies track I uploaded.

By now you probably all now that I'm a big fan of everything to do with photos, GPS, and maps. I recently started experimenting with some new tools and services.

For starters I found that Oliver Lau has written a few great GPS tools, in particular gpsplot, which prints nice altitude/speed charts for GPS tracks. Here's what my last bike trip to 八五山 (Eighty-Five Mountain) looks like (admittedly after a little tweaking and playing with gpsplot and gnuplot):

Since my GPS logger went a little crazy while I was in the convenience store buying refreshments I had to remove a bunch of completely-off-the-track points from the GPX file. For this I found GPX Editor to be a very convenient tool. It has nice functions to visually remove individual points or trip entire sections (say the first few minutes of a track because the points are erratic).

Luckily I don't normally need to spend any extra time editing my tracks. (Solar flares last weekend?!) But if I do I probably want to have a good place to put my nicely edited route. And until my website system has functionality to do that I'm resorting to services like GPSies.com, which contains a huge selection of all kinds of tracks. I've only just started, but you can find mine here:

Martin's track(s) on GPSies

I'll be uploading more of my own in the future. And I hope I can draw some inspiration for biking from the existing ones as well. You've got to love the combination of high-tech and sport. :-)