Friendly visitor outside my hotel room, Kintamani. It’s a wild bird, not a chicken. Just pecking around. Olympus OM-D E-M1  Panasonic 14-42mm lens at 42mm.

Grrr. Shame. At 6am this morning I was awake and some local or Indonesian kids were already playing in the pool. They were just splashing around and talking among themselves. They weren’t yelling and screaming.

But suddenly I heard a loud Australian male voice just near my room say loudly, “Hey, cut the fu … cken noise! People are tryin’ ta sleep around here.”

I was angered. The kids weren’t making a lot of noise. They weren’t bothering me. But the Aussie slob factor was on display. This is what makes me ashamed to be Australian at times. Apart from Poms, no other country produces arrogance and rudeness like this. Shame!

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Another bad night. Asleep easily at 10pm but awoke at 2.30am and that was it. Just can’t slip off that shelf into sleep. Cramps started at 5am and I had to get up and take one of those Cramp-Eze tablets. No more cramps, but how can you say? Was it the tablet that stopped them, or did they just stop anyway? Can’t say.

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I watched a movie, Everest, on DVD last night. It’s the true story of the deaths of 13 climbers in one expedition on Everest in 1996. I know why these climbers want to do it, but I still think it’s stupid and wrong to put yourself in such danger and at so much risk, with such awful stress and pain, for such a relatively small reward.

Add to that, at least one of the guys who froze to death was an experienced NZ guy who went back up to try to help a stuck climber. In other words, good people lose their lives helping inexperienced climbers who shouldn’t be there. It’s wrong.

Actually, I was gunna climb Everest next week, but … nah. Some other time. 🙂

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I did phone that hotel where the friend of my friend is staying and left a message asking her to call me back. She did so, and we had a preliminary chat. I left it to her to call me again if she wants to meet up. So now I wait.

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 I never normally see satellite or cable TV but I’m seeing it now at the hotel. The Discovery Channel is running programs called How It’s Done and things like that, showing how things are made. I love this! I’ve always thought programs about manufacturing would make good TV for the geeks among us. I love seeing the complex machines and how they do it. This is called Production Engineering and the ingenious ideas and complex processes are brilliantly designed and solved. This is a vastly underrated field of engineering, I reckon. Good stuff.

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 I’ve spent the day stuck in the room. I was feeling groggy from the bad night last night, so I tried to sleep, with mixed success. Plus I was hoping for a call from Kristy. Nothing so far.

But I’ve just walked out to go to the ATM. What nice weather. Cool, maybe 28ºC but low humidity. No sweat, man. A taxi was trying to get down the narrow laneway to the hotel entrance. I’ve seen another car do it so I showed him the gap distance, but he wisely decided against it.

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Uh oh. I’ve found a break in the skin on my left leg, oozing a little bit. This is danger. If it gets infected, I’ll be in trouble. I’ve just swabbed it with Dettol tissues and I have Betadine swabs as well. Then I’ve applied Dermeze cream. I hope that’ll hold it. I have a course of antibiotic in my meds pack that I can use if I have to.

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