Rhonda Bracey: At Random

Just another day in paradise! Up early and down to pool area about 6:30 am. Went for a long walk along the beach path with my Mum and sister (Mum and Dad were up before us and had already been for their walk before 6:30 am!). Breakfast again, then a swim or two in the pool.

I wandered over to change my massage appointment to an earlier time as we’re going to the Bali Collection (shopping area?) later this afternoon then having a meal there. Possibly also getting a fish pedicure! I also bought a couple of 6 litre containers of water (AU$1.80 each) to top up our supplies. It seems every restaurant and bar in this area (at least) cooks with and uses bottled water for ice and in the kitchens, and we clean our teeth with bottled water, as well as drink it of course.

Then I found the business centre at the resort where I’m typing up these blog posts (free). Once I connect to the internet to upload them, they’ll charge me a small internet connection fee, but just typing up the blog posts costs me nothing.

So here it is, about 11:30 Sunday morning, and I think I like Bali 😉 It’s far more ‘civilised’ than I expected it to be, but then we’re not staying in a Australian yobbo tourist area, which has been my major reason for never coming to Bali until now. I really don’t want to go overseas to see Australians misbehaving or behaving badly and disrespecting the local people and culture. I’ve seen NO evidence of that as yet, which has been a lovely surprise.

I probably won’t get a chance to write another blog post until Tuesday as we’re off on a day trip tomorrow to Ubud, hopefully to the lizard park, and to Denpasar for me to find some fabric 😉 We’ll be gone all day, I expect. The van and driver from the resort is going to cost us about AU$40 for the entire day — not bad for four people!

More from Sunday…

Had a lovely massage this afternoon (though painful in spots where Inda had worked on me heavily the day before). Came back to shower and get ready to go out to Bali Collection (a group of shops in Nusa Dua). Noticed that my phone, which I’d put on the charger just before my shower, was going crazy! It was flickering so I picked it up to read a message that there was one more attempt at login before it would delete all data on the phone! I had no chance to stop it as it was randomly entering letters/numbers into the password field then all of a sudden it stopped and EVERYTHING on my phone was deleted!!!! The screen was locked so I have no idea why it tried to log in. The same thing was about to happen the day before but I caught it in time and was able to enter the correct password. This time I had about 5 secs and just didn’t have time to delete what had already been entered (and was still being entered) before it wiped ALL the data. All my contacts, calendar appointments, ebooks, audiobooks, photos, apps — everything. Just GONE in a matter of seconds. I was FURIOUS — I didn’t know whether to be angry at Telstra or Android for this, but I knew it wasn’t me as I was in the shower and the rest of my family was by the pool!

Then, when I restarted the phone it wanted to set up from scratch and asked me to select a WiFi spot before doing anything else, and it wouldn’t read my SIM card. I tried to go into the APN area for mobile, but the phone said it didn’t recognise my SIM card. I removed the battery and the SIM and tried again — same thing. SIM not recognised so my phone is USELESS until I can get to a Telstra Shop back in Australia. NOT HAPPY! (Update: reason SIM wasn’t recognised is that I still had the phone in Airplane mode… Silly me!)

I was being so good with my phone to avoid any charges — I’d turned off data roaming, had altered the APN details, had it on Airplane mode so it didn’t try to connect to anything, and had all location services turned off. I only wanted to use it to play word games, sudokos, listen to audiobooks and read ebooks! It’s now turned off completely and my first job when I get back home is to contact Telstra about the SIM card and why my phone went crazy trying to log in — and why it DELETED ALL MY DATA!!! The phone had been doing some strange intermittent things the past few weeks (long before I went to Bali) and I wonder if they are related to what happened — for example, I’d have it sitting next to me on the Home page and it would randomly try to do a Google search (different page), or try to send a blank SMS to no-one (it would ask for the cell tower to use to send the SMS!). I hadn’t really thought that anything more sinister might be going on and just thought that maybe I should do a full power down and reboot of the phone at some point.

I’ll also have to download all my apps again, and audiobooks and ebooks, and reconnect with Exchange Server for my contacts and calendar (thank goodness I have Exchange Server!), and set up all my settings again. This could easily take a day…. so I am NOT happy at all.

The only positive was that I’d spent part of the morning on the internet uploading the photos on my phone to Flickr, so they were safe. The other photos I’ve been taking with my camera, not my phone.

Back to Bali…

We went to Bali Collection in Nusa Dua this afternoon. It’s quite big, not many people around, and except for shop workers, the only customers were ‘Europeans’. Shopping is hard when nothing fits, but I ended up buying some track shoes as mine are starting to get holes in them. I got a pair of New Balance women’s running shoes — retail ~AU$100 but with the 90% discount I got them for AU$16.70!! I also picked up some little goodies for some friends.

We had dinner at Frangipani’s Restaurant in Bali Collection. It was OK, but not as good as some of the other food we’ve had. Best bit? AU$45 for 4 people (2 starters, 3 mains, one dessert, 4 fresh fruit drinks), plus free transport back to our resort (quite some distance).