THE FLIP FLOP LIFE

Yesterday, Cristina and I got a tour around the neighboring land, which is a small forest. The owner plans to use it for night frog-watching tours, so it has some paths. It was awesome! A tiny rainforest in the back of our garden! Compared to Corcovado and Piro station it is nothing much, but for us it is a gift from the gods. We can now still do a little hiking and bird watching while under lockdown from Corona.

After the tour, when we were back in the house enjoying some cold water, I realized that my phone was not in my pocket. … wait, what? … my phone was not in my pocket … A small panic took over.

First I started searching the house. Nothing. Cristina had already started calling my phone. Nothing. Bigger panic. It is in the forest. Nothing much of a forest, but muuuuuch bigger than my phone. And with loooots of big leaves on many of the paths. And we did some tracking through a bushy area where there were no paths. And …. so on.

While searching, I was very much busy suppressing all the thoughts about the consequences of suddenly being without a phone on one of the edges of a world shut down because of a virus. It would even be difficult to blog about it, since my phone is the only one that can get our laptops online. Cristina’s Fairphone 3 has a glitch in the hotspot function. Okay, but let’s not really panic until we have retraced all our steps.

My phone – also a Fairphone but second generation – has a bright red cover, which is a plus in situations like this. Fortunately, I had the phone charged over the night before, so Cristina could ring it and we could hear it from under the leaves, if we were near it. That was another plus. I was glad I had not yet installed the sound of a bird as a ringtone yet, as I have been planning for a long time. Another plus. Even better, it was with coverage because it was reported as ringing.

We first tried to retrace our steps through the bushes without paths where our tour had begun. It isn’t big, and we found our way to a landmark dung-pile from leaf-cutter ants, but after that we couldn’t remember how we continued. Imagine that. Getting lost after three minutes in a 70 by 70 meters bush… We backtracked and went into the forest at the place where we had gotten out, right behind our house. That was a lot easier, what with the paths and all.

Our next target was a little bridge where during the tour, we had to do some limbo-dancing under a fallen tree. And there it was. With the cover pointing down. It was ringing, but we couldn’t hear it because it was in the water, five to ten centimeters deep. Still ringing. I wish we had taken a picture of it, but I am not going to put it back in the stream for the sake of a picture. Duh.

It turned out that water had entered into the casing but apparently not enough for the phone to shut down. That was a close call – if you pardon the cheap pun. What was the lesson to be learned here? That you should get a Fairphone? Yes you should, but not because of this. No, the lesson is, when visiting the forest, make sure that you use pants with zips. On all pockets.

In my defense, I was already aware for some time, that one of my newly bought outdoor pants has pockets that are not deep (is that a shallow pocket?) and only one with a zip. The phone had fallen out a couple of times. That is why I started using it for in-house use only. However, yesterday we kind of had to leave in a hurry, and I forgot to change pants. This is not going to happen to me again. I sewed the zip-less pockets closed.