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Today is our last full day here, and we decide that we will spend it doing as little as possible.
Every day at breakfast we've seen a man standing in the corner of the dining room holding a tennis racquet. The resort doesn’t have a tennis court, and he isn’t wearing sports clothes. He looks like he’s probably a member of the hotel staff, but we wonder why the hotel would employ someone just to stand in the corner of the dining room holding a tennis racquet. Eventually we realise that the object that he’s holding is not actually a tennis racquet at all, but rather a bug zapper in the shape of a tennis racquet. We’ve read about these things. We’re pretty sure that you need to swing them at bugs to kill them, but we’ve never seen our man swing his racquet at anything. I hope someone has told him that he needs to swing it. He looks a bit bored. Maybe he’s scared that if he swings it he might knock someone over while they’re carrying a bowl of Corn Flakes.
We take up our positions in a sun shelter next to the pool. We read,
fall asleep, order a poolside lunch, and have the occasional dip.
I notice a girl in a black bikini moving around the pool posing for photos. I look around for her photographer, but then realise that there isn’t one. I decide that she must be a model, and that she is practising for her next photo shoot. I hope that’s the case, and that she hasn’t ingested some hallucinogenic substance that makes her believe that she really does have a photographer. It hadn’t occurred to me that models needed to practise posing, but then how would anybody become good at anything if they didn’t practise. I wonder whether I should help her by offering to be her photographer, but I’m not entirely sure that Issy would think that this was such a wonderful idea.
Brian comes to meet us and we catch a taxi into Senggigi. Issy and Brian have massages while I go wandering.
We’re getting a bit short of cash, and we haven’t been able to get any of the ATMs near the resort to accept our cards. We wonder whether we might have more luck here in the big smoke of Senggigi. I see
an Australian Commonwealth Bank ATM. This is my bank, and I rejoice that we will finally have cash again. I go into the ATM, and insert my card. It seems that my celebrations may have been a tad premature. The Commonwealth Bank is clearly not at all keen on parting with its money. Its engineers have done a masterful job of positioning the screen on the ATM such that the afternoon sun shines directly on it, making it impossible to read. I try to stand between the sun and the screen with my nose nearly touching it, but I still have no idea what it is asking me to do. I give up, and go looking for another ATM, with the main criterion now being that it is on the shady side of the street.
We settle in at a restaurant on the sand at Senggigi Beach, and watch as the sun sets spectacularly behind Bali’s Mount Agung. Apart from the call to prayer from the mosque next door competing with the band, it is extremely pleasant.
Bali’s volcano looks nice across the water, but other than that it has been a great disappointment. It is still showing
no signs of erupting, and if it doesn’t get its act together in the next eighteen hours or so, our flight won’t be cancelled and we will have to go home.
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