It's taken a while for spring to come around, but today, it was finally both sunny and (slightly) warm.  Having sat in my "storage room" for the past couple months, my bike has been collecting nothing but dust.  So, I decided to take it for a ride to Fairmount Park along the Schuylkill River.

To kill two birds with one stone, I took my new camera along to finally put it to a test drive.  Unfortunately, it wasn't until I got there that I realized I still don't have any memory cards, and so the number of pictures I could take was limited by the internal storage of the camera.  Ay.  That didn't turned out to be too bad as it gave me enough shots to experiment with the various options.  I didn't bother testing out the drop- crush- water-proofness of it though.  I'll leave that to chance.  The real test, of course, is whether it'll make it through my upcoming trip in one piece and with great pictures in tow. 

Below are some of the pictures (slightly modified with Picasa) and specs on the camera.

Pentax Optio WG-2 - Full Specs

The Ride

The next morning, a couple of us sent the host's son to our sleeping hut to wake up the rest of the crew. While he doesn't speak English, he does know how to say "Good morning!" With a bamboo shoot in hand, we ushered him towards the hut to carry out the wake up call. He was more effective than an alarm.

While we sat around the fire and ate our breakfast (toast with jam), our host was busy making us our rafts for the day. The rafts consisted of 14-16 bamboos tied together and can carry ~7-8 folks at a time. As I said previously, bamboos are a very versatile resource!

As you can probably tell from the images, the water level in the river isn't that high as it's the dry season. Normally, the river runs a couple meters higher. As a result, we had to stop several times so that Doh could gather up fallen trees, plant debris, etc to create a dam to redirect the water flow and raise the water level along our path. Other than that, the float down the river was rather calm. Here are a few images from the ~2 hour ride.

Dam construction #1

Dam construction #2

Rocks

We hit rocks.

Dam construction #3

Finally, we made it out. The drive back to Eagle House, with a short stopover (see below).

Doh taking an unexpected shower in the falls!

See the rest of my travel posts here.