I wrote of my difficulties getting out of the airport onto Tonkin Highway. Above is the map. I invite you to try to figure out which way is the right way.

Here’s the map in the newspaper last week:

I challenge you to work out which is the correct path to take from this. I know now, but until I did this research, I could NOT tell from that.

Yesterday I got the microSD card out of my Navman GPS and found I’d recorded the whole trip. I found the section in question and reviewed my path. (Bloody marvellous technology! At the same time that I’m seeing what the camera saw in High Def video, the Google map is alongside the vision, showing my path on the map as the car moves along.) I wish I could post the video but the file is 722MB. Could be done, but I don’t have time.

So this is the path:

What I learned is that I was on the right road all along. I was just thrown by that crazy tight loop to get back onto Tonkin Hwy. I lost my sense of north-south when I went around there and couldn’t work out which way I was travelling. I was actually going OK, but thought I was going the wrong way. If I hadn’t taken an exit onto Gt Eastern Hwy at the top of the map here, I would have been fine.

I still think the road design is very poor and the signage is inadequate. I think any driver could be confused, and having to slow to 40Km/h on that tight left loop is crazy for a major intersection. Bad design. Seems to be the norm for WA – bad airport design, bad roads, bad signage.

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I’ve said before that I have a low opinion of the level of intelligence in WA. I find the letters to the editor in the West Australian newspaper are mostly idiotic. But one writer took us to new lows on Tuesday.

He thinks the weather forecasts put out by the Bureau of Meteorology are no good, and he used the cancellation of the Xmas Pageant due to the forecast of bad weather, when it turned out to be fine, as an example. OK, so a storm didn’t eventuate, but it was still cool and windy.

His solution? We should boycott the weather forecasts by switching the TV off at the end of the sports section and refusing to watch the TV weather.

Bloody hell. This guy should be turned into a weather reporting station in Antarctica for five years, I reckon.

Postscript: today’s letter section carries another four letters supporting the guy above’s view, that the weather forecasts are useless. Well, I’ve spoken to a friend and we agree, the forecasts are excellent. Sure, sometimes they’re wrong, but it’s the weather, innit?

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I watched episode 9 of Fargo last night on SBS. Holy smoke, what a gore-fest. It showed a massacre between police and crime gangs in Sioux Falls, N. Dakota in 1979. They reckon it’s a true story. Good ol’ USA. Guns are the answer to everything. When it finished I noticed my pulse was raised.

I say again, what a double standard. TV stations can show this extreme violence, admittedly with an MA 15+ rating, but there are strict limits on anything of a sexual nature being shown. It’s not as strict as 20 years or more ago, but there’s still subtle censorship and it’s much tighter than for gun violence and the like.

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I’ve caught Channel 7 in another case of showing the same episode of Big Bang Theory almost consecutively. It was two nights separated by one night, on different digital channels, but even so.

I must admit Seven and Nine are showing a wide range of episodes, more than I thought, but when they’re showing up to six episodes a night between them, and I’ve been watching the show for five years or more, repeat episodes crop up all the time, even if they’re spaced a couple of months apart. I’m writing down the episode names and it will soon become clear how many repeats are being shown and when. I won’t keep this up for much longer. It’s easy to do, but it is a time waster.

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I’ve also watched two episodes of Bangkok Airport on Nine, and what a showcase of the difference between Thais and Europeans.

The Thais are unfailingly polite, fun loving, friendly and absolutely free of swearing and rudeness (unless they’re doing it in their own language, but I don’t think so).

In contrast, the Europeans, Poms and Aussies, are slobs. Foul mouthed, bad mannered, temper tantrum throwing, low intelligence idiots. They get robbed, lose their passports, lose their luggage, run out of money and come to the airport with injuries and expect the Thai staff to solve their problems. Which they mainly do. But when, sometimes, they can’t help, they get scowls and bad tempered remarks.

I realise that we’re only seeing the low life people and that there are thousands of nice Europeans (like me), but I don’t believe there would be any badly behaved Thais as passengers at other world airports, throwing tantrums, swearing and treating airport staff badly.

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Lake Batur, Kintamani © PJ Croft 1985, 2015

I made another hotel booking in Bali yesterday, for a hotel on the crater rim at Kintamani. It would be somewhere in the left foreground in the shot above, I think. It’s just for two nights, hoping to get some dawn shots over the lake, maybe. I still have the two night booking in Ubud on the way back. I just need to organise transport to get there and back, now. A friend has given me contact details of a guy he uses. He’s incredibly enthusiastic about this Bali driver so I’d better use him or have a good excuse why I didn’t. Apparently his parents live in the Ubud area so he can make it a visiting thing while transporting me.

Crater Lake Storm © PJ Croft 1985, 2015

These two shots were only about half an hour apart.

Speaking of transport, I’ve found the Kura-Kura mini-bus service which I wasn’t aware of before. It not only covers the Kuta and Sanur sides, it also goes to Ubud. Not only that, its routes go right past my hotels. And, and, it has an Android app showing all the routes and timetables and telling how long until the next bus. How about that?

I’ve installed the app on both my phone and my Samsung tablet. I wasn’t too fussed about using this tablet, but I’m swinging around to using it. I think I’ll take it, with my laptop too. Crumbs, laptop, tablet and phone, all doing similar things. And, two full sized cameras, plus the cameras in the tablet and the phone. How crazy is this?

I initially thought I might take my GPS as it has maps for Bali, but Google maps really does all I need and it’s on my phone. So the GPS will stay home.