06-Mar-2015 -- This is the last out of 5 reports, describing confluence visits in the Philippines. The story begins at 14°N 121°E and continues from 12°N 125°E.
We spent the last days of our trip to the Philippines in Sorsogon City, where our niece was teaching English to primary school kids.
It is quite a coincidence that a confluence point is located only 2.8 km from the house of our niece. The chance that a random point on the Earth surface is within 2.8 km distance to a confluence is about 1:300. My rough calculation can be retraced as follows: The area of a circle with the radius of 2.8 km is 300 times smaller than a 100 km by 100 km square surrounding a confluence.
On the second day, I got up at 5:30 AM and left our house silently while everybody else was still sleeping. First I ran to the northern outskirts of Sorsogon. At a distance of 300 m, I left the concrete road and took a footpath that was used by school children commuting to their school. The footpath took me to a distance of 16 m. These last meters I had to balance between tiny rice paddies. There were coloured flags scattered around the rice fields – probably to scare the birds away.
The confluence point is located at an edge of one of these terraced rice paddies. Due to the relative large inclination, the rice terraces have to be kept small. There are houses within 20 m of the confluence point. People were all around, but nobody was taking notice of me.
I returned home at 6:55 AM when the others were just about to get up. This was probably the easiest confluence visit possible in the Philippines.
CP Visit Details:
- Distance to a road: 300 m
- Distance to a track: 300 m
- Distance to a footpath: 16 m
- Time to reach the confluence from home: 40 minutes
- Time at the confluence: 6:10 AM
- Measured height: 66 m
- Minimal distance according to GPS: 2 m
- Position accuracy: 3 m
- Topography: mountainous to the north, flat to the south, CP at an inclination
- Vegetation: rice, palm trees nearby.
- Weather: sunny, 23° C (felt temperature)
- Given Name: The Easy Sorsogon Confluence
The story ends here.