Blown away at Milford Sound

 All I could remember of Milford Sound when I was young was a journey to reach it that made me very car sick and being persecuted by sandflies. One of those still held true 60 years after the first visit.

My recent visit was a bit different; I was making it as an adult and the weather was different too - much more windy. I was expecting to be assaulted by sandflies so I smothered myself in repellent. No need. It was too windy for the pests to fly.

I took a cruise. My advice, if you can arrange it, is that it is best to visit just after a significant downpour or during one. You need water to have waterfalls so this day, having had several dry days, there were only about two waterfalls operating rather than 30+ - so that was disappointing. We did see seals and seabirds but no dolphins. It was a cold and windy cruise but still enjoyable. Milford Sound feels a bit different to what I had previously remembered. Less wild, more commercial.

To get to Milford I took a bus trip from Te Anau rather than have to negotiate all the bendy bits by car. I could just focus on the scenery. The bus was full of tourists, mostly Chinese. I never saw any other nationalities visiting during my South Island wanders. We stopped off at a valley where all the passengers got off like lemmings and photographed an empty valley. Then we stopped by a mirror lake except it was nothing like a mirror (too many water weeds). Bussing through the bush was nice and the tunnel was a bit 'hairy'. It is one-way so travellers from each end have to queue to get through. Once through the tunnel the scenery is very much rugged rock and not that interesting when it isn't covered in snow. 

On arrival at Milford Sound there is a lot of waiting for the boat in whatever weather conditions are happening. This part was long and unpleasant, standing in cold high winds. Once on the boat I went inside to warm up a bit but you really need to be on deck to feel the place so I went outside and was grateful not to have  a 'comb-over' like some of the guys. The cruise lasted about 40 minutes and had a general commentary. We went out as far as the heads to where we could see the Tasman Sea.

At one point on the return home the captain asked if anyone would like to go under one of the waterfalls and get drenched. He stressed that whoever agreed WOULD get totally drenched. Three passengers agreed and were not disappointed. Soaking wet in the wind? Not fun afterwards but they were warned.

There are adequate toilets at Milford but not much choice in anything to eat - it is very remote. Some folks had pre-ordered a lunchbox but it didn't seem all that appetising or value for money so I simply had to do without lunch. There is only one option for accommodation and that would set you back around $1000 per night.

 

 

 

 

After a tiring windswept time at beautiful Milford Sound we boarded the bus for the return journey. Unfortunately, this is where my experience of the travelling in my childhood revisited me. The bus driver was running behind schedule as several passengers had been late back to the bus. He tried to make up time after the tunnel wait which meant the cornerings were much faster going back to Te Anau. I rapidly became seriously bus sick and it took all my willpower not to throw up in the bus (which didn't have sick bags). Positively green, I stumbled out of the bus at Te Anau but walking against a headwind on my skakey legs towards the motel proved to be a challenge. I had hoped I might have developed more tolerance to travelsickness but, alas, not so. It's probably an ear problem since I was born. My mother had remarked that as an 18 month infant I was already showing signs of car sickness. 

If you don't have this travel infirmity you'll probably enjoy the changing scenery - from alpine to bush to meadows to lakes.

 I didn't see any special cruises to look for the famed black coral though they may exist and boat staff had limited knowledge about it. Despite unpleasant winds and travel sickness this place is definitely worth a visit a couple of times in a lifetime.

Milford Sound runs 15 kilometres inland from the Tasman Sea and is surrounded by sheer rock faces that rise 1,200 metres (3,900 ft) or more on either side. Among the peaks are The Elephant at 1,517 metres (4,977 ft), and The Lion, 1,302 metres (4,272 ft).

Milford Sound sports two permanent waterfalls Lady Bowen Falls and Stirling Falls. After heavy rain temporary waterfalls can be seen running down the steep sided rock faces that line the fiord. They are fed by rainwater-drenched moss and will last only a few days once the rain stops.

With a mean annual rainfall of 6,412 mm (252 in) each year, a high level even for the West Coast, Milford Sound is known as the wettest inhabited place in New Zealand and one of the wettest in the world. Rainfall can reach 250 mm (10 in) during 24 hours.  

If you are sporty you can book to walk the Milford Track but you need to be very fit and prepared to tramp for several days.

 

Help! I'm being erased.

It has been a very distressing 7 months. I had received an email from the publishing arm of Amazon , now called Kindle Direct Publishing, to say my US/IRS tax documents for my book published in 2014 would soon be out of date and that I must renew them. OK, it's not that simple understanding these tax forms which are renewed every three years, but I've done it several times in the past. However, this platform for authors is proving to be a thoughtless horror.

Things worked well for a few years when it was originally Createspace. Then they changed it to KDP. I found the security clunky and things got worse once they insisted on two-step verification. I can see the logic but when the technology doesn't work and the huge corporate is based in the US - it's a recipe for major stress. It is also a salutory warning of how technology can destroy lives and those lives can do NOTHING about it - beware AI, I am thinking, even if you do nothing wrong you cannot argue with a powerful corporate that does not care. 

I think we can all agree that Facebook doesn't really give a shit about us - our timelines are clogged with stuff we absolutely don't want and not the activities of our friends. It is just a channel for push marketing and it just gets worse.

We can also agree (if you have a lot of exerience like me) that the dating sites don't give a shit either. They don't work and they don't care.

I did, however, hope that Amazon KDP might care a bit because they get a commission whenever the site sells one of my books, though it is a rare occurence these days. I pop onto the KDP site to update my tax docs, amend my author page, see if I have sold anything.

Seven months ago I tried to get into the back end of my KDP account to update my tax docs. If I don't do that I will get very little commission in future as the IRS will keep most of it. So I was pretty motivated to sort things out when I noticed mysef in a security loop to nowhere. I tried to explain this to them:

"I have a serious problem with Amazon &  KDP. For almost 5 months both have given me the copy paste and run-around. I am an author and need to access my KDP account. I can use username and password but to access and update my tax docs for the IRS I need to get into the deep parts of my account. It wants to send me a code but now it doesn’t even send it to my phone, only my email account, and when I enter it it then wants my phone number, which I try to enter and it says internal error. 

I have wasted weeks of my life trying to get someone at AmazonKDP to fix this bug. They said they would take off the two-step verification so I would need to send official ID to them. This I have done three times. They say it is disactivated but it isn’t. I get the same bad errors. Any phone number I have been given does not work/go through. Whenever I request a callback the screen usually tells me the service is not available. As a result of all this I no longer get the royalties I am owed and will never be able to publish another book. I despair. Can anyone advise me (I am currently in NZ)?"

All I got was standard/stock replies which never did anything because they expect the user to solve the IT problem instead of the IT supplier fixing their own mistakes. Literally for months I would go on Chat with either Amazon or Amazon KDP and each tried to off-load me to the other. It was clear from the standard of English that the customer service chats were not native speakers. IF you can find a customer service contact number (see end of post) you are offered two choices: a Chat or a Phonecall. Most of the time a phonecall service was not available and when it was I got shunted from pillar to post, constantly repeating my issues, waiting to be fobbed off and eventually told a technical team would get back to me within 24 hours. They stopped even bothering with that much.

Yes, I was reminded of stuff I could try myself but none of that could work because there was a bug/internal error on my two-step verification. Eventually things deteriorated and the OTP codes no longer came through on my phone but just a copy via email. Trouble was, the very last step never worked and I was stuck with an error.

Hours and hours of frustration every week, every month ensued for me. A software writer tried to reason with Amazon by phone but got fobbed off too. No one is accountable, no one actually fixes anything. What is a customer to do? I don't think I'd succeed in getting a call through to Jeff Bezos's successor Andy Jassy.

Now 7 months since I first tried to update my tax documents I am still locked out of the back end on my account. Oh, I can still log in to buy stuff from Amazon if I wanted to but I can't do the security stuff with my account. I can never publish another book and I can never get the royalities owed for any copies of my book I may sell. After the huge amount of work that went into writing, formatting, marketing etc my book Follow My Heart it seems very hard to accept. Maybe I could delete my entire account, which was a last resort suggested to me, and start again, but the IT stuff involved the first time in trying to get a book published on KDP was hideous and I would lose all my reviews etc. Beware: deleting any Amazon retail account deletes all other accounts too but retail seems to be the main account. I feel pretty depressed about this but more was to come.

When I launched my book in 2014 NZ publishers and marketers showed zero interest, probably because I was not currently in NZ so getting my book into stores and libraries was difficult. However, a few years ago I discovered a copy in the Lincoln library. It proved to be the only copy in Selwyn District. A few weeks ago, at the Rolleston (Selwyn) Library (the one that refuses to have the word Library on the outside) I could find no record of my book in the catalogue for the district. I enquired of the librarian and she confirmed it had been 'retired'. Why? I asked and she said it was more than 3 years old so they had no room for it. "Then how come I have a stack of books I'm taking out where most are nearly 10 years old?" I said. She had no explanation but was able to tell me my book had become available to borrow in 2016 and had been borrowed 37 times - while not a lot of borrowing it was reasonable, she said. I suggested that a bit more support for a local author would be nice and that I could supply a fresh copy. The librarian said the person who makes the decisions would call me. Of course, she never did!

It's an awful feeling - being erased. 

Amazon chat no longer bothers to speak to me/get back to me/ lie to me even. I am simply a boring problem to be non existent. A personal memoir/something that mattered, that had taken a huge effort, that had been well received by readers and also borrowed a bit was blocked from being borrowed or providing any recompense to the author.

In all cases no one gives a damn to make it right when it is their own systems at fault. What will AI and other systems do to our identities and lives once they start making mistakes about US?

For those of you who might wonder how Amazon and KDP interact on these issues or if you too need some 'help' to resolve a simple thing read the detailed blah blah below which is only part of the BS solutions that in many cases were just plain unworkable that I had to endure.

1. Thank you for contacting us about the Two-Step Verification on your Amazon account.
We have confirmed that the Two-Step Verification has been deactivated and your account access has been restored using the documents you provided. You should be able to sign in to your Amazon account.
You can manage Two-Step Verification and reactivate this setting. To do so, go to "Your Account" and click "Login & security."

2. Thank you for your patience while we work to solve this problem for you.
In this case, I was able to talk with the technical team, and they advised me to explain to you that you need to contact the Account Recovery team so they can help you disable the OTP on your account. Try signing in through a registered backup method or from a trusted device.
If you still can't sign in, kindly visit this link and follow the instructions provided:

US: https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/ref=hp_left_v4_sib?ie=UTF8&nodeId=202073840
BR: https://www.amazon.com.br/gp/help/customer/display.html/?&nodeId=202073840
DE: https://www.amazon.de/gp/help/customer/display.html/ref=hp_left_v4_sib?ie=UTF8&nodeId=202073840

You can try using the first link, and if the first one does not work, you can try using the other ones I provide you.
If you need more assistance, please don't hesitate and contact us again.http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/contact-us/general-questions.html
You may call us If you need additional assistance or have further questions.
We've provided the link below which will take you directly to our help pages:
We can be reached by phone 24 hours a day, seven days a week using the following link:

Contacting us through the website allows you to verify security before a call is placed and ensures we have your account information ready when we call you.

To contact us, visit https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/contact-us and follow the prompts.
To request a call from our customer service department, please follow the steps below:

1. Visit http://www.amazon.com/help
2. Click the "Contact Us" button in the Customer Service box on the right side of the page.
3. Click the "Skip sign in" button.
4. Click the "Phone" tab and enter your phone number in the window that pops up.
5. Choose a time frame ("Right Now" or "In 5 minutes") and click "Submit."
We'll call you right back!

3. Thank you for your inquiry about Kindle Direct Publishing. With Kindle Direct Publishing, you can self-publish Kindle and paperback books on Amazon.
You can find more information about getting started at:
https://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/help
If you need assistance with an existing account or have questions, go to the following link, login, then click contact us at the bottom of the page:

https://kdp.amazon.com/contact-us

4. I am very sorry that you are so desperate and seem to find no solution to login to your account. I would like to mention that this is a global problem and many authors can not get their OTP or when they do, they get the internal error message
Our last option in this type of cases is to suggest to our publishers to create a new account and afterwards, report back to us, so we can merge the old and new one.
I am sorry you have to go through it, but currently is our last measurement as well,

Blogger Warning: Note that one cannot just create a new account becuase they will pick up on the fact that your phone number or email are the same as the old account so you will be blocked from setting up another account. 

5. Please use your KDP credentials to log into amazon, follow the steps below to change the phone number or enable an authenticator app

An authenticator app is a software application that generates a one-time password (OTP), which you can use for two-step verification. You can download authenticator apps from the app store on your smartphone or mobile device (tablet, iPad). On desktop computers, you can download an authenticator as a browser extension (add-on).
There are many third-party authenticator apps, such as Google Authenticator and Microsoft Authenticator. You can use any app you want. These apps don’t have access to your Amazon account information.

To download an authenticator app:
1. Search for an authenticator app:
- Smartphones or mobile devices: Go to the app store and search for "authenticator app." Search results will show third-party apps such as Google Authenticator and Microsoft Authenticator. You can use any app.
- Desktop computers: Use a search engine to find an authenticator extension (add-on) that works with your browser. For example, if you use Firefox, search for "Firefox authenticator."
2. Download the authenticator app or extension of your choice.
3. Go to your Amazon customer account on Amazon.com.
4. Under "Account & Lists," click "Your Account"
5. Choose "Login & Security."
6. Click "Edit" next to "Two-Step Verification (2SV) Settings."
7. In the "Enrolled 2SV Authenticators" section, click "Add new phone or Authenticator App."
8. Enter the OTP number to proceed signing in
9. Choose "Authenticator App" and follow the instructions that appear.
To learn more about authenticator apps, check Help: https://kdp.amazon.com/help/topic/G6HTFZJLJ7AJQ56R

6. I understand the authenticator didn't work, but were you not able to update the phone number?
step 7 allows you to add an authenticator app or a new phone number, you do this at the amazon level and it will also affect the KDP level.:
7. In the "Enrolled 2SV Authenticators" section, click "Add new phone or Authenticator App."
Once verification is enabled you will be able to receive your OTP also for your KDP login
Thanks for using Amazon KDP,

7.Can I ask yo please to attach an image of your identity document or drivers license so we can open a case to temporarily de-activate your account security 

8. Thank you for bringing this to our attention.
We need a little time to look into the problem with your two step verification
We’ll reply and send you more information within 2-3 business days. Thanks for your patience.
Thanks for using Amazon KDP,

9. We recommend you work with the Amazon Retail Customer Service department, as they are best equipped to help you with this issue.
You can contact the Amazon Retail Customer Service department directly at:

https://www.amazon.com.au/gp/help/contact-us/general-questions.html

10. We understand you wish to close your account and delete your data.
Protecting your privacy and the security of your data is and has always been a top priority for us. The most secure and straight-forward way to submit the request is to follow these steps:

1. Go to Close Your Amazon Account: https://www.amazon.com/privacy/data-deletion

2. Sign into the account you want to close.

3. Review the products and services associated with your account.

4. If you still wish to proceed, select a reason in the drop-down menu. Tick the box next to "Yes, I want to permanently close my Amazon account and delete its data" and select "Close My Account."

Please note that the closure is permanent and afterwards the account will no longer be available to you. We will not be able to restore the account.

If you decide later that you want to start ordering from us again, or if you would like to use products and services that require an account, you will need to create a new account.

By requesting the closure of your Amazon account on any Amazon site, you'll also lose access to all the products and services offered across all Amazon sites globally where you use the same login credentials (email, mobile phone number, and password).This includes, among others, international Amazon sites (for example amazon.ca, amazon.fr, amazon.com.mx), and Audible, etc.

If you have multiple accounts, follow the provided steps for each of them to ensure that we have the correct authority to take action on each account you wish to close. A confirmation notification will be sent to the email address associated to your account or via text message. You'll need to reply within 5 days to verify your request. If you are experiencing issues with logging into the account you wish to close, visit the following Help page: https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=GAM5QWMWMTFCHEQT