Philippines Trip Ends
The last day of the festival I entered the individual TT. It was only a 4km, completely flat race, but a few straights had some headwinds that definitely made it harder. Not exactly sure where I ended up, but I think I did pretty good because with only maybe 20 racers left I was still holding the fastest time of 4:06.
Monday we flew to Mt. Mayon for our volcano adventure. We spent the day resting, getting our bikes built, organizing our stuff for the next day, & doing some photo's with Bill our photographer.
Tues. we were up early & on our way to the volcano. The ride started out early and the trail was OK, but after only about 20 min of pedaling up the hiking began. The trail quickly became over grown and the terrain became tougher. Hiking through the jungle like that is not easy, especially when it's hot and humid out. After a couple hours we made it to base camp 1. It was a bit frustrating because there was so very little riding. After some lunch we decided to drop some of our stuff off and continue on to get an idea of what the rest would be like. It quickly became tougher and after an hour or more of real tough hike a biking, we ditched the bikes and did the next hour up on our feet. Thank god we ditched the bikes, because it was even hard to just hike up from there. After an hour or more we made the decision that it was not going to be manageable to make. Disappointing, but reality.
At that time it started to rain, which made it hard to even walk down. We made it back to camp 1 just before it got dark where we were to spend the night before making the trek down the next morning. This night was a tough one. Hans and I shared a tent that was leaking water in from the storm we had, I had no sleeping back or pillow, we were sleeping on concrete with NO padding, and to top it off we had a guy snoring as loud as a chainsaw. I think I got about 2 hours sleep that night.
The next morning we made the trek down the volcano and finally near the end Hans and I actually got to ride for about 15min, but that was it. Definitely not a biking trail by any means, but we tried and now we know.
Back home now which will only last a couple days before heading back out on my way to the sea otter.
Lopes
Photo's by Bill Freeman
Posted by Brian on April 8, 2009 9:34 PM