This side of things

Somehow, this day went from a great start to an unexpected disaster.

I began with a very nice morning. I woke late, it was my day off from the hostel, and I decided to take myself for breakfast. I had 'French toast' but it was a little more than that. It came with a load of fresh fruit, bacon and yogurt. I took an excellent photo of it but alas, I no long have it.

Back at the hostel, we made a plan to go kayaking. Seven of us decided to go, and Axel offered to drive us down to the hiring station. After a bit of logistics, we made it down there and hired three kayaks. Louisa and Alyssa had one, Paulo and Seb in another and myself, Alex and Nathan in a third.

We started off well. The water was clean, clear and shallow. We did some races and hopped into the water where it was most shallow. Unfortunately, it was after this point we became unstuck.

We were kayaking around an island down the river and back up again. The bottom of the island is open to the sea and thus has a lot of waves. At first we were having a great time. The waves were small and quite fun when they were rocking the boat. But they were persistent and slowly began to cause more problems for us. In the end Nathan got out and half dragged us to shore on the island. Without him we definitely would have capsised. The boys, did in fact, capsise. And the girls had to turn around. It was a little before the waves began that Alyssa lost her phone. They went back to try and find it but there was no chance.

We took a break on the island for a bit to relax. It got very cold as we were all soaking wet and scared from the waves.

Getting back in the boats was harder than we had expected. The area at the bottom of the island that we were resting on was surrounded by very expensive boats. We had to navigate our way through them while fighting the waves. Tha mfully we made it and set off back up the river to the baot place.

It was somewhere along here that the waves began again. One of them knocked my phone out of Alex's care and into the river. It was almost funny watching it sail over our heads and into the water behind us. It sank quickly.

Nathan offered to jump out but at this point it was a lot deeper than before. He might have managed to find it but getting back into the boat would have probably been impossible. So we kept going.

Back on shore we were all a little shocked. One capsise and 2 lost phones. Not a great afternoon!

Back in the hostel, we all changed out of our wet clothes and Alyssa and I tried to solve out problems. Alyssa managed to get an old iPhone from Facebook marketplace that she used to reconnect to her laptop. She works online so a lack of phone is far from ideal for her.

Me on the other hand, I didn't mind so much. My phone was very old and I wanted to buy a new one anyways. But I would have liked to do it in a little better way, under my own choices. Thankfully most of my stuff was backed up to the cloud and my email so I was able to get a lot back. Overall I only lost some of my contacts and my photos. But I have contacts on other social media sites, so that isn't an issue. And thanks to the hours of work I have put into writing these blogs, I have all of my photos here. Friends have duplicates of photos so it really isn't much of an issue in the end.

I like my new phone. Its better than my last and is a lot cheaper than I was expecting. The photos seem to be nicer and it's definitely faster than my old one. Alex went with me to the tech shop. She knows samsungs really well and so was able to find one that gave me what I wanted within my budget. It is fascinating how little I know about these things!Read more