then and now

It isn’t often that I capture an image that reveals a radical transformation of the location where the image was taken compared with an earlier image, but I’ve come up with two recently where the contrast is quite startling.

A few weeks ago, I was cycling along a quiet road in my neighbourhood when I caught up with a concrete mixer truck that was being trailed by a caravan of four or five cars. Like most of the back roads in the area, it was single-track, so the cars wouldn’t have been able to overtake the truck—there are few designated passing places—and the result of any motor vehicle coming in the opposite direction would have been total chaos.

No problem, I thought. I can take panty park path and thereby get ahead. This path is a narrow alleyway through a squatter area on a hillside, and following it is shorter than following the road, but since describing it, I haven’t done it very often because it doesn’t link to any of my established bike rides:

And I was in for a surprise:

I assume that this part of the path was damaged by heavy rain during the destructive passage of Typhoon Mangkhut back in September, and it looks as though a chain-link fence is being built to protect what is probably a big drop off the side of the path. I don’t usually mind cycling close to such a drop, but not when the surface I’m riding on is sloping towards that drop. So I turned back. And guess what: the predicted chaos did come to pass, so I simply sneaked through the gaps between the participating vehicles.

The second pair of images definitely reflects typhoon damage. Both are video stills of a section of the iron bridge path, which is part of the long and winding road:

The first video, which features Paula, was shot earlier this year, while the second image shows me in front and is taken from a video shot a couple of weeks ago. Given that bamboo has very shallow roots, I wonder why the second clump survived the wind when the larger one did not. Size is clearly not an advantage in all circumstances.