beach ahoy!

It is 4:37am and the sun is rising, wind is softly blowing as we slept the night under the stars on a remote beach of Samar Island. Our camp spot was the front yard of some locals 2 meters from the water.

The raw beauty of this country is mind blowing, the island of Samar has not failed to impress, every turn is postcard material.  Rice fields sitting next to jungle is something I have only ever seen in the movies.  The houses are all made from local sticks and bamboo.  Westerners have not got their dirty hands on this amazing country,  we have been so lucky to see it in this natural state.

We set up camp last night around sun down,  team A sourced the wood for the fire while team B went on a mission to find warm beer & food.  Each team succeed in their tasks, leaving us with a bounty of odd food for dinner. If anyone is interested in buying a giant loop bag, I think it's important to know that you can fit about 19 1 litre bottles of beer in one. The feast started with an icy pole each,  then moved on to pineapple in a can.  We ended with uncooked Maggie noodles,  this was the best we could do in our situation. We put all the food down with 2 warm beers each!!  Yum yum

Unfortunately through the night we encountered rain around 1am in the morning,  this was a problem as we didn't have a lot of shelter.  We can't say it was the nicest feeling but with sweet fuck all options to get dry at this time we tried to keep sleeping while our sleeping bags and ourselves got very wet. 1am was not a happy time for some of the team.

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The last couple of days have been a challenge,  yesterday we stayed the night at the epicentre of the typhoon damaged town of Tacloban.  The town had been destroyed,  every roof has been ripped off and buildings look like slums,  locals in the town informed us over 10,000 locals had died through the surge of water that had made it in town.  Even a freighter ship was washed up on the main street.

Early in the morning our sweep rider crashed hard on our way through to our camp site.  Old mate  smashed up his bike and himself like cheese in a cheese grater,  he pushed onto camp but is in a bad way.  Looks like a broken hip,  he can't raise his leg or walk.  We carried the old bloke to the camp site and dumped him on the ground,  that was where he stayed all night long. Old mate will not continue the ride with us for the rest of the ride. This puts the team in a predicament as this is the support we need to ride for the rest of the trip.

Team talks will be discussed as to the game plan after our sweep rider leaves us.