Don’t click here.

I appear to have over two gigabytes of photos and videos from India and Indonesia.

I’m sure there is a little duplication of files in there. I’m also sure that quite a lot of the photos aren’t that good. Also, many of the photos are at 2048 by 1536 pixels. Need to automate photoshop to reduce these all to 640 by 480.

Also, a lot of the video was taken with the camera on its end. Can someone recommend software that can rotate the footage, please? I’d hope for freeware but I’m not platform-bound: I can dirty my hands on my dad’s XP box.

How do I know I’m back in England?

• I’m using my beloved Pismo.
• I’m wary of wearing my lunghi.
• People piss in the street while walking into Cheltenham station. I think the lout in question was a Birmingham city fan. So he didn’t have much to be proud of.

Moments of Panic 1
My ecosse.net mailbox has been full for the past few days. (Yes I know I’m a magpie!) So one of my first ‘sorting-out’ tasks yesterday was to try to boot up the Pismo. I can’t express the horror I felt when she wouldn’t start up, despite being plugged into a known-good socket.

Some panic later, rational thought set in:

• The Pismo had been left unplugged for 6 months.
• So the main battery would be completely discharged, as would be the PRAM battery. (I found that there wasn’t enough charge on the main battery to even work its charge indicator.)
• So leaving the Pismo plugged into the mains should start to charge the main battery. (I think the PRAM battery isn’t rechargeable. We’ll see when I disconnect her from the mains, de-boot and remove the main battery, replace it and then reboot.)
• So while I endured Moment of Panic 2, the Pismo charged and eventually rebooted about 2am this morning.

Moment of Panic 2
While looking for the spare Pismo battery I now appear not to have, I noticed that my Palm wasn’t where I’d left it in February. I knew the data wasn’t lost – it’s backed up on my Pismo’s hard disk! (The Pismo is also backed up to two external hard disks.) However, I felt comprehensively electronically buggered!

Much searching later, I found the Palm in one of my brother’s drawers. I think it had been put there when I asked my dad to look up something on it in March. It didn’t boot at first. Some charging later, it booted at factory state: it had discharged enough to lose all my data from the charge-dependent memory.

By now, the Pismo had booted so I could synchronise the Palm with the data stored on the Pismo. I think this happened about 3am.

Serendipity
I’m not sure why my dad had reverted from using my router to using his USB ADSL modem to connect his PC to the internet. However it’s probably a good thing: I would have sat up even later filing the emails I’d received while I was away. I got to sleep around 4 this morning.

I’m now as awake as I’ll ever get, wireless internet has been restored and all the email has been filed. Most of the laundry has been tackled: I’ve even washed the lunghi!

Work Of Heart – Roy Harper

‘Crapula’ is latin for ‘headache’ or ‘hangover’.

The sun is in the east, even though the day is done
Well I read a lot and finally got to board my flight around 9pm. Take-off wasn’t too late and the Singapore Airlines flight was everything it should have been. I even got a window seat. Also, someone was sat in ‘my’ aisle seat when I got onto the plane. He disappeared before take-off. I wonder if it was my lunghi or my BO that vaporised him.

Despite taking off at 9pm and being in the air for maybe an hour (maybe two), I arrived in Kolkatta’s NSC Bose International Ear Port earlier than I departed Singapore. Gotta love this time-zone business!

Arrival at Kolkatta provided the change I’d been expecting. It’s warm, dirty and (probably) smelly. The tiny luggage carousel was crowded by the time I got there. I really distrust about this form of luggage reclaim. What’s to stop the bozo who gets through immigration before you buggering off with your luggage? This is one of the benefits of carrying a massive and heavy rucsac: no-one wants the hassle of picking it up.

Outside the terminal, I was, of course, set upon by rickshaw and taxi-drivers before I could draw breath, much less retrieve my guidebook and find directions to the airport hotel. I walked away from them but they all followed me, despite me saying clearly “I do not need a taxi. I will walk to my hotel”. I escaped to a phone-stall to book a room in the airport hotel but still they crowded me and I lost my rag. “Bugger off! Don’t hang around me like flies around shit!” The airport hotel seemed to try to tell me that it was full.

Eventually I walked through the cloud of annoyances to a taxi-person who hadn’t been bothering me and got him to take me to the official airport hotel. I’m sure he didn’t, unless it’s changed name in the past 5 years but the room I got in the place he took me was acceptable for 500 rupees and no further than the official airport hotel would have been. What wasn’t fun was the staff repeatedly showing me how to use the TV, despite me unplugging it and telling them “I want sleep, NOT TV”.

I spent a while this morning getting as much as I could within my hold luggage. (I’m very pleased that I could pack birthday presents for my siblets: it’s their birthday tomorrow.) All I had to post home was three books I read yesterday and the presents I had been given by the Tangkeran Utara folk. These were still nicely wrapped and I didn’t want to open them and find out what they were until I got home. With hindsight, I’d have been better off posting home my laundry. I should have learnt my lesson at Mumbai.

I had spent quite a while, used the last of my plastic bags and almost all of my sellotape creating a neat parcel: being told to unpack it and show all the contents to the postal staff was disheartening. I told them that the individual parcels contained presents: I was delighted that they did their duties and they were very welcome to open them themselves and check that they were acceptable but I did not want to know the contents yet. No chance: despite the aid of a number of other people who were posting parcels I had to open each sub-parcel myself. Bah!

However, I am very pleased that there was a post-office on the airport approach-road. Schlepping my rucsac et al to the centre of Kolkatta has no appeal. I also got talking with one of the postal staff who wants English conversations: we’ll meet this evening for continued chat and a walk around the Dum Dum area.

I’m even more pleased that there is a 24-hour-service luggage depository. So I just have with me my cabin-baggage: a camera bag and a cuddly pig. In total volume they’re smaller than the current limits so I should be OK. The contents are three more books, a comb and a change of shirt and grunties. I’m goign to try Kolkatta’s metro system. There’s no sign yet of the promised extension to the airport, so I have to go 10 km to the nearest metro station. There is a ‘western train’ station but there’s only two services each day, going I-don’t-know-where. Apparently it’s only been open six weeks. I’ll try to report to all the Starlink folk out there.

OK, time for lunch and a final meander in India…

See you even sooner, space-cats!

Just to say that I’ve had a really good final day: more details as and when I’m not about to be kicked out of a cybercafe that’s shutting for the night but this goodness was unexpected and so much more enjoyable than if I had been expecting it.

Goodnight, India, and thank ou!

The lunghi and I are currently in Singapore’s Changi airport. What a change from Sumatra! I take back what I said about Sumatra being a bit organised in comparison to India, at least as far as Medan airport is concerned.

Medan Moanings

• Motorbike rickshaws (becak, where the passengers are carried in a two-person sidecar, with an optional third passenger on the bike’s pillion seat) aren’t allowed into the airport, so I was deposited (admittedly having been warned before the journey started) about 200 metres from the entrance to the terminal building.
• Even though I was heading towards the terminal, other becak drivers tried to get my custom.
• At the terminal, baggage is X-rayed before you can get too far in. However the X-rayers didn’t put the right sticker on my bag, so (instead of rechecking them), a baggage hauler just put a new sticker on my bag at the check-in desk.
• At check-in, I was told that because I hadn’t used the Singapore to Medan part of my ticket, Singapore Airlines’ system had dumped my reservation for the Medan to Singapore flight. It took twenty minutes, a lot of discussion and the intervention of a supervisor to allow me to re-exist: my vegan food for that journey (admittedly only an hour) could not be provided.
• After checking in, I was told to go to ‘fiscal control’. I did but was then told first to go to pay my airport tax (75,000 rupiah).
• Then I could do go to the first part of fiscal control, hand in a bit of paper with my name and other details and be pointed in the direction of fiscal control part 2.
• After that I could go through immigrasi, be questioned further and only after that could I go to the departure lounge.

I’m sure they have the space to funnel travellers so that they go to the right steps in the proper sequence without having to be sent from place to place. I don’t mind extra security precautions but I can’t stand inefficiency in these people-handling systems. It leads to more problems and delays as confused people who don’t speak the local language do incorrect things and jam the place up. And surely to goodness tax can be collected with the cost of the ticket. (Just checked – I did pay a tax as part of my ticket cost. GRRRR. However, everyone [Indonesians and others, flying internally or internationally] had to pay it.) It felt as if they wanted to detain me past my visa’s expiry so that they could then detain me even longer. Maybe I’m just paranoid but that doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get me.

By contrast, Changi is wonderful. I know it’s a monument to capitalism, but it’s a clean, organised, low-stress, polite and efficient one.

• They provide free-to-use (for 15-minute slots – and it’s no problem to click and get another 15 minutes) PCs with FAST connections so I can, for example, moan at you all and check whether the UK hand luggage restrictions are still in place. (They are, so I’m going to have more adventures with speedpost in Calcutta.)
• They also have a voice-over-internet-protocol phone system so you can make really cheap international calls. I used this facility to try to find out why my cellphone’s been playing silly buggers. Oops: my fault – my bill for August is already too large so Poseurphone have blocked all out-going transmissions until I pay them.) So I won’t be buying that Palm-enabled cellphone just yet, even though it comes with a free basic Palm PDA.
• They have a large and clean food court with all sorts of cuisines, even Subway!
• They even have employees who clean the dust from plant leaves.
• It has a bookshop.

The lunghi and I love it. I used the PCs to check up on my phone account and was told that my account had been ‘closed’. I swore and was then guided by a couple of friendly and helpful technicians to the nearly free phones (a five-minute call to the UK cost under S$3, so less than 1 pound).

The technicians are X-ray machine technicians. They don’t have much to do but when there is a fault, they MUST fix it within 15 minutes – or install the spare while they fix the original one. Again, I like this.

OK, vastly overdue time to stop waffling, delve into a book and wait for another few hours.

Whatever time-zone we might be in right now, see you even sooner, spacecats!

Hooray
In the men’s toilets in the food court here at Changi, there is a baby-change table. Hoorah for the recognition that men are involved in reproduction too.

Boo Hiss
The baby-change table is branded MOTHER’S HELPER!

I can’t decide whether to sigh or piss myself laughing at this incongruity.

I suppose it doesn’t matter what I do. The presence of the table in the men’s toilet is probably a large leap forward. Not needing them anywhere would be a much bigger one.

Back in Medan overnight. Tomorrow I fly to Calcutta via Singapore. I have two nights there to make my luggage meet whatever the latest UK-bound-flight requirements might be, then fly to Heathrow via Mumbai.

more ramblings
I’m sad to be leaving Sumatra. Obviously, I’ve only just been able to infinitesimally scratch the surface but it’s been fun and pretty in places. It’s also more organised and cleaner than India in some ways.

However, vegetarian food can be a bit harder to obtain. For instance, I ordered what I was told was fried noodles and vegetables: It arrived with fried egg mixed in. Since when is an egg a vegetable?

Similarly, watch out that your nasi goreng (fried rice) doesn’t contain anything you don’t want. To make up for this, a dish of tempeh and tahu (tofu) stir-fried in sambal with some freshly-steamed vegetables and rice makes me a very happy Bruce.

Sumatra’s sungais and beaches can be beautiful, Bukit Lawang and Danau Toba ARE beautiful and the people here can be a lot of fun. So I want to visit again.

Meanwhile, the lunghi and I hope to see Scotland-based near and dear ones in September and England-based near and dear ones a bit before that (simply because I’ll be arriving (and initially living) in England.

See you soon, space cats!

On behalf of one of the staff here. He had some important photos on one of the PCs here but somehow they ended up in the recycle bin – which then got emptied.

With a bit of luck, the files are still on the hard disk. He doesn’t have Norton SystemWorks or any similar tool for retrieving ‘erased’ files. He could download a trial version of NSW and install it on the PC’s other hard disk then use this to try to retrieve them. However, this would involve a 56MB download over a 4.8kbps connection.

Can anyone out there suggest anything better, please? The PC is a Pentium 4 beast, running Win XP Professional Version 2002, Service Pack 2.

Thanks indeedly!

Just now my lunghi and I are in Merlyn guesthouse-cum-restaurant on Samosir Island in the middle of Lake Toba (Samosir’s not quite an island but Indonesians call it Pulau Samosir so who am I to argue?) I have a cute-looking bungalow with ensuite mandi and slightly patchy hot water. The restaurant/bar is big but currently deserted apart from me, the staff and some up-beat but relaxing Latin guitar music. The place is briefly mentioned here.

Plans include hiring a bike and/or a canoe and having a trundle or paddle around the island’s coast for as much as I want, swimming in the lake and generally making the most of my last few days away. All very touristy but I know I don’t have a chance to even begin to get into local life in Indonesia this time. Maybe next time?

OK, some fried bananas are calling me. Time to munch them before they get bored and walk away!