Unbelievable fly all the way and then back
| Tue - We left at 3pm flew all the way in clear weather over Sumatra began to land and then suddenly 2 minutes before we hit a storm suddenly zero visibility . It was as if the pilot panicked Whoomph we went into a steep climb. I guess we didn't have instrument landing so the pilot wanted to get high enough to see. We circled again we could see the city of Padang and this time I could see the runway 2Km away before doing the same as before : hit the storm and climbed. This time the plane couldn't land. Again unbelievable I had never been expecting to be back in Singapore at 5pm | At 7pm we left again arriving OK. taxi driver chaos and trying to calculate money.. eventually hotel.
Met Paul an interesting story of how his family moved from Bukittingi to the US
| Dirty, noisey ..(hotel next to market and load motorcycle parking) .. Cheap Wed- Museum, walk etc
Going to Bukittingi - bus is cheap 50p for 2 hours, but hassle |
Bus fart around cos the new terminal is too far out of town, but the police were out in force to stop buses picking up in the street ..to Bukittingi, bus breakdown.
Hotel search, walk around, | internet café wiped my memory card
| img src="mouseover.gif" alt="Two words
Back up !..
After 28 mins in the Indonesian internet café no problem, but I decided I was going to stop at 30 minutes because the computer was so slow it must have a virus on or something. So I decided to copy 2 emails to my memory stick ; a complete disaster. This should have taken 10s, but after 2 minutes I pulled the stick out and found a virus had renamed all my directories as filenames, which when you try to click on then starts a virus Visual Basic program. Thankfully my pocket PC doesn't run Visual Basic. The guy at the café wasn't surprised with his antivirus program he was able to recover most of my files (music from adelaide and videos of concerts I had made, my only copies), but he couldn't put then back on my memory stick as his PC was infected with the virus. He put them on a CD which he made me pay for. Crazy since when I checked the antivirus program on their PC had expired and had not been updated for one year.
So just make sure you don't risk losing your data the same way. You can set the tab on your memory card to Read Only, so viruses can't write, or check the antivirus program is upto date. And back up your data every month by doing a file search on files changed in the last month and then copying them to a memory stick.
Actually my 1Gb SD memory card now costs $8 in Singapore.
You can also disable vb files by renaming the vbscripting files in windows system
Back up !
| ..
| Thursday
|
Thu - meet up with Paul (his place was near hotel) - Crappy Military Museum, Panorama, Jap tunnels, Fort of nothing, | 
|
| Manijau - Volcano Lake | ||
| 2pm bus 90 minutes and down 38 hairpin road into steep sided volcano crator Manijau - villages around a lake a travellers hangout , OK but a bit disappointing. Not so quaint or atmospheric
Fri - bike around lake - market etc Sat - Hakim Museum - an islamic cleric Manijau - Volcano Lake |
Sun- tried to see waterfall - too many leeches | Mon -rain rain  Tues - went back to hike thru the waterfall ... I think we were a bit ripped off by the kid, on the way it wa a tremendous jungle trek for an hour .. On the way back after 15 minutes we switched to a good path much easier.. Why didn't we go up that way ? Next tea with villagers and up to Anas Hostel. Then hiked all the way to the top of the volcano ridge 1 hour - good photos view down to lake and sea. I met Wen who took me by motorbike and showed me a couple of places where people were using bullto crush sugar cane and boiling the juice to make sugar blocks. |