bush walk disaster :(

Yesterday morning I had a shocker. I had headed out to Binna Burra (Lamington National Park), where we did the 16.6km Illinbah circuit. It was pretty challenging (according to the visitor's guide it requires a high degree of fitness and experience, which kinda scared me a bit) and we managed to do it in about 5 and a half hours despite getting momentarily lost (the guide recommended we allowed 8 hours).

Anyway it would've been a good (and tiring) day, if it weren't for one little mishap during the trip.

I was crossing one of the many creeks along the way, when, as I jumped between some rocks to avoid getting my feet wet (which I didn't find out until a bit later would've been unavoidable anyway) when I heard a big splash beside me. Wondering how the hell a rock came out of nowhere and landed beside me, I looked down to see, in my horror, a familiar sight - the strap of my camera.

Yes, that's right. My freakin' Canon 40D SLR camera fell into a rocky creek, with water about half a metre or so deep.

Somehow it fell out of my zipped bag. I blame momentum - the (heavyish) camera was in the top of my bag, with the zippers both at the top. Jumping and then coming to an abrupt halt must've pushed the camera up with enough force to pull the zippers apart enough for the darned thing to escape.

Anyway, after overcoming the shock of it all and staring at the camera for a couple of seconds, I fished it out of the creek and got to the other side of the creek. In my stupidity, I turned it on to see if it was still working (a better move would've been to pull out the batteries and try to dry the thing out as much as possible). It did switch on, but did some weird stuff, like randomly taking a flurry of photos and turning on the flash. I quickly turned it off, wrapped it in my jacket and tried to forget about it. At this point, I couldn't help but laugh, it was just one of those things.

The reality soon set in when I got home and hit hard - my camera was ruined. Even if I did manage to "fix" it in the short term, I most probably will stumble across problems somewhere down the track...

So I did my best to dry it out last night (I am sick of the sound of hairdryer), and today I called around to some camera repair places. Unfortunately, they didn't want anything to do with water damage because of the probability of more issues occurring later on. Plus, with the costs involved I was better off getting a new one. One of the frustrating things is that I only got two months use out of it. Wouldn't have been so hard to take if I had gotten several year's usage out of it.

It looks like it is down to me trying to dry it out myself and seeing what happens, otherwise it is $2k down the drain (or down shit creek... c'mon, you gotta turn to humour at times like this). I think I'll give it a week to totally dry out before the battery goes back in and I give it another shot.

Will keep you posted - wish me luck. Looks like I'll need it...