Tourist photos found on Aussie beach lead to remarkable moment 450kms away
A traveller on a remote Western Australian beach was handed a lost drone and made it her mission to find the owner.
A tourist chucking “a lap” around Australia in her van was admiring a picturesque secluded beach last week when she was suddenly confronted with a puzzling problem.
Ester Dobrotvorski, who is spending the last few months of her visa travelling the country, told Yahoo News she recently stopped off at East Bay Road Campground near Albany, Western Australia, to take some aerial footage of Two People Bay with her drone.
After spending a while standing on the sand, the 29-year-old Netherlands native said she was walking back to her campsite when she was approached by a man who noted her use of the flying camera.
“He’s like ‘Oh you have a drone there… I found one the other day and I don’t know what to do with it — I don’t know anything about technology’,” she recalled, adding that he simply offered to give it to her instead of throwing it out.
Imagining the despair the owner of the lost drone must have felt when it went missing, Ester told Yahoo she quickly offered to take it off his hands. “I just thought I would have been devastated and so happy if someone had found my drone and tried to find me.”
So she wrapped it in a towel and committed to doing just that.
Tourist's search for owner of drone
Because her solar power was not working at the time, she was unable to immediately charge the damaged drone, but got it working again a few days later.
“I finally pulled the SD card out and tried it on my computer, but it was not showing anything so [I thought] maybe it’s not working. Then I tried it on my own controller and then it showed pictures. So it's like, whoa, okay.”
The images she pulled up showed a couple posing together in bushland and three friends with their 4WDs on an idyllic beach.
With the hope of finding the owner, Ester posted the pictures in several Facebook groups, including Australia Backpackers 2024, and asked if anyone perhaps recognised the people in the photos.
“I thought I may as well give it a shot you know, and within 45 minutes he was found,” she said, revealing the drone belonged to a UK man living in Perth, Roberto, and his girlfriend.
“The crazy thing was that he is also in Perth so that was really easy to meet up with [him].“
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Pair meet up to return lost drone
On Wednesday, 450kms from where the lost item was found, the pair met up at a car park in the city.
“He had been using the drone near that area where I was camping and at some point he lost connection with it,” Ester said. “They went to look for it, but couldn’t find it and they just gave up and they were kind of devastated, he said because the drone belonged to his girlfriend’s uncle who had passed away… they never thought they would get it back.”
To thank her for her kind deed, the 29-year-old said Roberto gifted her with several bottles of different kombucha flavours.
Now that's good karma.
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