IT woes

I apologise in advance for this, but I need to tell you about one of the drawbacks of going on a long voyage on a ship - apart from the outbreaks of gastroenteritis (which to their credit has been well contained by the staff on this ship) and chest infections (which have prevailed for the entire journey and which I contracted).

I am afraid that I continue to be totally frustrated with my iPhone. I have just spent more time down at the ship’s internet centre, this time with their chief expert, trying to sort out why I still cannot access Skype. Even he is puzzled by it, which is some consolation as otherwise I would feel like a complete fool, and I have to go back tonight for more time with him, since he had to race off to give a lecture. 

Meanwhile, please do not text me as I will not receive your text. My phone stopped sending and receiving them at least 4 weeks ago. Clearly my iPhone and/or Vodaphone is at fault. I have not dared try to try to make a phone call from the ship. It looks like I will have buy a cheap phone in Italy with a Sim card, if I can. This will not be easy when I am on tour on almost all the time. 

I have lost a huge amount of my WiFi time trying to sort out the Skype issue, so all in all, in addition to the initial cost of purchasing the latest iPhone available in Australia and my Apple laptop especially for the trip, for which devices Australians are charged far more than Americans, I have had to pay out around $2000 AUD in communications (WiFi and global roaming) in just 7 weeks! Can you believe that?  Clearly I cannot keep that up. I only hope I can access some free WiFi once I get off the ship. (Already I draft up almost all emails and all my blog posts - other than photo captions which cannot be done beforehand - on my laptop before I turn on WiFi to save time on WiFi. The main reason for the long time it takes is the very slow satellite coverage.) 

 Additionally, it looks like I need to cancel my global roaming contract altogether. I turned off global roaming on my phone some weeks ago after receiving bills that were way above what I was quoted by Vodaphone. To make matters worse, they told my brother they will only change the arrangement if I personally ring their call centre. As if I would be prepared to spend ages on a phone to a call centre from the ship! So for what it is worth, my advice to everyone is - be very wary of Vodaphone as a phone provider for international communication, and do not trust Apple either, as apparently even if you switch off global roaming on your iPhone, they still have it doing some global roaming. Apparently there have been complaints made over the internet about that.

Anyhow, once again my apologies for venting. I had hoped to upload the remaining photos of the Suez Canal to compensate, but, guess what, they were way too slow. It would have taken over 5 minutes to add even one. I will try again later.