I went out today to see if I could get some cool pictures around the area, and I was surprised to discover a gold mine. The recent typhoon had raised water levels in all the nearby rivers by at least 2 meters, which wasn’t surprising in and of itself. However, what I didn’t anticipate until I got there and saw it was that a golf course adjacent to one such river would have been partially flooded by this, despite being protected by a fairly significant berm between it and the river.
I spent at least two hours riding my bike through and around the golf course, taking all sorts of fun pictures. Golf courses are just about the most engineered and manicured landscape that exist, so the visual contrast of seeing one wrecked by nature offered lots of great opportunities. This was one case where I really made use of the fact that my bike is well-suited to off-road situations; I went through all sorts of terrain that one would expect to find in a golf bog, which would be completely impassible to a road bike. My favorite were the cases where a paved path meandered above and below the water level, so I could get a good head of steam on a dry section and zip through four inches of water at a rate which would have been impossible to achieve had I started in that water.
Eventually, I had finished all the exploring I wanted to do, and was ready to head back. I had wandered around, so retracing my route would have been a difficult challenge to my memory, as well as being unnecessarily circuitous. Instead, I elected to just attempt to head back by the most direct obvious route. At one point, my way was blocked by a ditch about a meter wide, and approximately as deep. Scouting around, I found an area which appeared to be a flat plain only a few inches deep through which I could bypass the ditch. Unfortunately, it turned out to be a startlingly steep dropoff to a plain about four feet deep.
Were the way dry, I could have handled the drop-off easily. As it is, it took me about 30 seconds to scramble back to the dryish ground over the water level, and a bit longer to recover my bike. I was fine. My bike was fine. My camera, however, was soaked–an extremely bad state for any piece of electronic equipment. I ended up jumping the ditch on foot, and wheeling my bike over it by hand. From there, the way was easy, but that didn’t help my camera.
On the way back, I passed a pair of girls on bikes, who laughed heartily at the sight of me. I’m sure I was an amusing sight: a gaijin, soaked up to his armpits, with bits of grass stuck all over him.
I’ve removed the battery and memory from my camera; I’m going to wait at least 48 hours to give it some time to dry off before I even attempt to power it on. My hope is that once it’s dried off, no scumwater-crud will have dried across any contacts, and it will work just fine. In the worst case, it’s just broken with no hope of recovery, in which case I’d feel like a moron for having broken an expensive new camera less than a month after it was given to me.
There’s not much I can do to help it at this point except wait and hope for the best, I guess.
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