Mimi Dejene: Cathedral of Water

 

On a trip for international students, Unitec took a group of about 30 students to Coromandal, and this is where I realized I was turning into a Kiwi. We all took our cameras and phones, and went to Cathedral Cove to lounge around at the beach.  After the 20 minutes hike down, we decided to cross the Cathedral and go to the other side for a nicer, quieter beach with more sun. The waves were filling up the cove, but we crossed to the other side anyways. After a few hours, one of our guides explained that we should start heading back before the tide gets too high and fills the area we had crossed earlier, because that was the only way back.
We all gathered our things and when we walked to the crossing point. The water was up to my waste, and waves were coming in that would made the water seem higher than my chest. I was scared—everyone was. But our guide insured us that we would make it; we just had to wait till the tide went out then as quickly as we could, run to the other side.

I took a deep breath and went for it, with a few others. I was third in line, and when I got to the middle point, I saw a wave coming towards me, so I braced myself with one arm against the rock wall. The wave crashed on top of me, pushing me down into the water and drenching my whole backpack, which held my DSlr, IPhone 4 and my other cheap phone I bought locally.  After getting up, I made my way through to the others, shivering from the cold. Besides the little scrap on my elbow, I was fine. I knew my phones were gone without even looking at them, but luckily my camera was okay (thank goodness I put it in two different bags within my backpack).

 
After this happened, I wasn’t angry or really sad that I lost my phone. It no longer mattered to me. If I was back home, and this happened, I would have been so choked that I lost my IPhone, and my initial reaction would have been to go out and buy a new IPhone to replace it—I thought I couldn’t live without it. Then, I realized that I haven’t even been going on the internet that much anymore, I only really used it to take photos, and I have a camera still, so it wasn’t a big loss. I’ve been going out and experiencing New Zealand more than I’ve been telling people about it and that’s a good feeling.