Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/12/11/woman-searches-for-her-drone-on-a-tiny-inhospitable-island-in-thailand.html
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Funny, we just bought a DJI drone and were pondering what we’d do if it got stuck somewhere difficult. Closer to home, just the roof of the nearby towering YMCA would be a challenge.
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She’s an idiot. She assumed that GPS is accurate to the nearest foot. She thought the locator beep would work after three days when the battery is dead. She assumed there wouldn’t be underbrush and that the island would be smooth on top. Did not bring any safety gear. Didn’t even bring water, or a backpack to carry the drone in so she could climb down.
Lucky she didn’t kill herself, and amazing she’s survived traveling the world solo since January 2020.
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Remind me of what Jack handy would say:
If you lost your drone on a tiny inhospitable island in Thailand, let it go, because man, it’s gone.
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There may be Darwin Award in her future.
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When she got near the top, sticking her hands in all sorts of tiny crevices, all I could think was snakesnakesnakesnakesnakesnakesnakesnakesnakesnakesnakesnakesnakesnake!
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I didn’t even listen 'till the end… the music… the music.
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My rock-climbing training on the Mojave Desert included instructions to always carry a stick. Before placing hand in unseen place or on unknown rock ledge, swipe or tap the stick there first, and listen for a disturbed rattlesnake’s signature buzz. Probably won’t work quite as well in other circumstances, but it would be worth a try.
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This is the kind of video they show on the news after someone kills themself while scuba diving/rock climbing/riding a motorcycle while drunk/boat crash…
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All hornets are wasps. Clearly what she needed was a slightly bigger drone with a claw to fetch the first drone.
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She says she had to free-solo. Why? Why not ask a professional climber to do it with safety equipment? Surely there’s significant Venn overlap between “climbers” and “Europeans and Americans in Thailand.”
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Just curious. Why wouldn’t you wear gloves? Seems obvious but maybe it’s a tactile thing while climbing? Hell, I wear gloves when raking leaves.
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I took a look at few of her other videos – like the one where she’s snorkeling in a thong bikini, since i’m a big fan of snorkeling – and apparently she’s stuck on a small tropical island due to covid with very few travelers, and no one has been allowed to arrive there in a long time. So climbers might really be in short supply in that exact area.
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All that’s fair. (In which case, in my view, the correct answer is not “I need to put my life in danger to rescue a drone” but rather “well, sucks that I lost that drone.”)
I’m a big fan of backpacking trips and crazy adventures. This need to do it with high quality AV equipment and non-shaky cam production values so others can see/like/envy you is something else.
Boo hoo, did you lose your absurdly pricy gizmo while living like a god in a poor country and enjoying currency differences? Did you have to defy death to get your gizmo while enjoying a no work long-term holiday in a country where people still die of starvation sometimes?
I get the appeal of travel and spent most of my 20s doing it. I still do it when I can, but sheesh. We all need to have a good look in the mirror a bit more often. Videos like this will be evidence historians point to for why our so-called civilization declined and collapsed.
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I apologize if this sounds a bit harsh, but watching the video made me ill in the same way I imagine I’d feel ill if I watched a mentally challenged person bite the head off a chicken.
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I was thinking while watching how amazing it is that all that technology is available to the consumer.
But if I were an economist, I’d be thinking,
- she rescued her damaged $1500 drone
- she trashed her $400 GoPro
- her $800 iPhone and her rescued drone went for a plunge into the ocean.
What value does she put on her life?
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I came here to say this - cliimbing rough rock without gloves or footwear unless she put some on after the kayak, no water…dumb.
Also it might be deep water with sandy bottom if she falls…but what if she hits her head on the way down?
And no water? WTF? She had three days to plan this?
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I’m definitely on the side of this was crazy. But…
I learned to scuba dive in Thailand and got to know the UK expat instructor who had settled there and shacked up with a Thai woman. His life was amazingly different there from what it was like in the west. Pay is incredibly low so every dollar counts. The last I saw of him was when I went to the bathroom at the end of a restaurant meal and came back to find that he had put a pack of cigarettes on my tab and vanished into the night. His one prized possession was a digital underwater camera (back when the setup cost perhaps $1000). He had a business plan of creating guidebooks of the local fish for the tourists to buy. I got the sense that he was really struggling financially and the investment wouldn’t pay off. He didn’t seem to be able to afford a plane ticket back to the UK. He seemed very grim about his opportunities.
So TLDR $1500 can be a lot of money for a person living in Thailand long term, like months or even years of discretional spending money. Add in the much lower economic value allocated to preserving life in such countries and I can see how this could make sense to an adventurous traveller stuck there.
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