Tuesday December 17, 2013
Day 41 Typhoon Yolanda

 

– Got on my bike and set off with my camera; intended to go to the coast road on the way out to the MacArthur memorial; on the way, I ran into the firefighters and Amy; I stopped and hung out for a little while as they did their work; the main site was a grassy, swampy, marshy, muddy place where cadaver dogs had marked ten bodies; the Americans dug at a couple of sites but then made their opinion known that it was really a waste of time at this point to spend hours digging up each body when there might not even be a body there; it was over forty days after the typhoon, and if the body was a few feet under the ground, it was already buried and there was little to be gained from digging it up just to move it to another big hole in the ground and rebury it; so they moved on.
– – I didn’t feel like spending the whole day just standing around and roaming around with them, so I got back on my bike and ended up cycling all the way to Tanauan; it was about a 50-km round trip and the bike did well; the rear wheel warped a bit and I need to true it again, but I made it there and back; Tanauan looked interesting, but I didn’t have enough time or energy to do any photography; it would be nice to go back; the traffic island where the town’s sign was located had been turned into a grave site;
– – hung out with the firefighters a bit when I got back and had dinner with them; then Dave and I sat down in air-conditioned comfort in the BFP main office to transfer pictures from my memory card to his first-generation iPad; that was also a very slow process; he knew of no commands to select a big group of photos and had to physically select each picture by touching the screen; we chatted about technology while we did this; he brought up some facts about the iPad and Apple products that made me doubt it they were right for me.

 

Tags: BFP, bike, Philippines Bike Trip 2013, Super Typhoon Yolanda, typhoon