John Mee – Some programmer in Sydney

Kuta, Bali

Ok, so the Melbourne Cup should be tomorrow and the US elections the same day I’m told. I can buy one paper instead of two! Oops my morning banana jaffle has arrived. Banana jaffle? Yes I must be back in Kuta. Got the overnight bus from Jogja the night before last, and it was terrible. It was full, so no lounging and the air-con was either too hot or too cold. The road was like a mad one lane version of George St the whole way – there’s no such thing as the “open road”. I lost count of the number of bridges under repair – which is no surprise, their construction methods are a primitive attempt to copy ours – only they use wooden scafolding, no power tools and try to stretch each bag of cement too far by diluting it with 10 or 20 times the recommended amount of sand.

This all might have been ok, but for the throat infection I have. Very irritating since I had one before on Lembongan. That one I kicked by consuming copious amounts of water. This one is not being quite so co-operative. I’ve been on Strepsils and water 4 or 5 days now and am sick of it. It might’ve worked but for the bus trip, when I had to go 12 hours without water – it was agony. A sore throat is bad enough, but a dry sore throat…

I decided last night that if it wasn’t better this morning I’d start the antibiotics – I’m pretty sure thats the right thing to take. All I can remember is that last time I had this, the doctor put me on erithromycin, which I reacted to, so he gave me something else. I think the something else was what I have with me, but can’t be certain. Anyway its a little better this morning so I’ll soldier on – but if it gets any worse I’ll pull out the pills.

Yesterday, 1/11/92 I slept most of the day (and drank water and sucked strpsils and went to the toilet often) recovering from the bus trip (left at 3pm, arriving Denpassar 8am).

The day before, 31/10/92 I bought a batic painting for 35,000rp. Problem is it will cost double that to frame. The idea was to give it to Phil and Gail for Christmas, but (a) I’m not sure they’ll like it and (b) not sure they can afford to frame (c) it probably won’t match the paintwork. They wanted 50,000 for the monkey art one that I liked most but I couldn’t find someone to haggle with and what am I going to do with a painting anyway?

In the afternoon I caught the bus.

The day before, 30/10/92. I met an english guy and we climbed up to the Mt Merapi lookout point. Needless to say it was clouded over – we knew it would be so why did we do it? He desperately wanted to get close to some lava, and I wanted to see Merapi – a really active volcano – and maybe some lava. As it was all we saw was a cloud. On the way back it rained very heavily for about 2 hours – like a particularly heavy summer storm in Sydney – but not so windy. It did the same the next day. Is this start of the wet? I’ll never know.