Stephendann.com

Lessons Learnt the Soft, Medium and Hardway

• Prepaid mobile beats monthly broadband for quota.
  • When you’re going to be travelling for an extended period and depending heavily on your mobile internet to keep you operational, connected and functional, Prepaid quotas are more practical than post-paid monthly accounts.   Switching from a 2gig monthly to 6gig monthly to  12 gig prepaid mid-tour was a complicated process that actually cost me 48 hours of connectivity.
  • Three’s staff in Melbourne at the Elizabeth St store were extremely helpful and useful.
  • Three’s call centre were moderately useful
  • Three’s website was a bloody disaster which caused me to give up on the post-paid service entirely as they managed to cancel my ongoing contract as I attempted to upgrade quota through their site.

• Apartment living: Staying in a serviced apartment has a huge advantage over the hotel rooms – as long as you’ve picked a decent apartment.
  • Brisbane was great with the  Oaks Festival Towers having a good kitchen (gas stove, fridge+freezer, good basic equipment, dryer+washing machine), slightly off central location (five minutes to the Myer centre, 20 minutes to the train station). Downsides were the bizarre Foxtel channel choices, and the fairly cramped quarters.
  • Melbourne’s Plum Apartments remain a poor choice for facilities (bar fridge, no useful basic gear, no dryer, no Foxtel, no desk, and weird kitchen gear). Mind you, I picked the Plum for location – 325 Collins street is a casual stroll to the Coles, Victoria Uni, trainstations, tram stops and other resources.
  • Sydney
  • Perth

• BYO basic equipment. Spending part of my luggage allowance on cooking equipment was a good decision.
  • Rice cooker, portable grill and a wok for Brisbane
  • Grill pan, small frying pan replaced the wok in Melbourne.
  • Other frying pans were acquired at Sydney and Perth.
  • Rice cooker was abandoned in Perth to make room in the luggage for excess baggage.
• Uniform Rations
  • Three t-shirts (custom printed roadshow t-shirts delivered to my first destination)
  • One pair of jeans (bought on tour) with matching jacket
  • Suit (bought on tour)
  • Converse All Star leather boots that doubled as the suit shoes and the casual wear
• Room Service is weird
  • Brisbane: Everything went in the dishwasher, including my wok.  My cleaned, dried and oiled to avoiding rusting wok went into the dishwasher.  This room service team confiscated my draining board and hid it in various places in the kitchen.  They also took to rewashing anything found on the draining board by putting it into the dishwasher.  Problem was – they didn’t actually empty the dishwasher at any point, so at least one time they loaded clean dishes into the dishwasher containing other clean dishes and put the lot on.   Plus there was the weird bedding array of several sheets, several doona covers, and some serious origami.
  • Melbourne: Serviced Apartment with the emphasis on Apartment.  Room service was thin on the ground, didn’t come on weekends, and as far as I could tell, tried to ignore the 15th floor as much as possible.  They did do a supply drop of fresh towels on the day they didn’t actually come into the room. Otherwise, mostly like some form of Dr Who statue – they could only move when you couldn’t see them.  They had the cutest of the vacuum cleaners though.
  • Sydney: Consistently inconsistent – there was no discernible pattern to how the bed/towels/washing up would take place, if it would take place, and whether they’d show up at all.
  • Perth: The apartment will be serviced once a week (whether it needeth it or not). It needeth it.
• Bad Assumptions:
  • Abandoning good cheap gear in Brisbane with the assumption I could pick up replacements cheaply in Melbourne. Turns out that the ‘cheap’ option for my casual wear was way more expensive than I’d expected – and didn’t give me the option to abandon it again during the tour.
  • Room service would service rooms in predictable or sensible manners
  • Lifts go to the floors that have apartments. Plum on Collins has a lift that stops on the 12 and 14th floor. Floors 13, 14 and 15 are accessed by Floor 14.  That was an unexpected surprise on the arrival day.
  • Prepaid Mobile coverage would work after dark.  3′s prepaid broadband dries up around 10pm most nights, and tries to claim that I can’t access pages because I’m out of quota. It does indicate that the 3 mobile server does dynamic/real time quota checks which must slow the service, and absolutely hammer the server during peak times.

• Things not to do
  • Set fire to a potato on the 15th floor on the apartment complex.