Day 13 - Homeward Bound

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The start of the final day in Bali today. We’re looking forward to getting home to see Sasha but there is plenty of Bali that we haven’t seen so we’ll be sorry to see that opportunity disappear for now.

Pamela and Emily started the day with a quick swim. Emily is very proud of the fact that she swam every day while on holidays – even those days that she was sick. They didn’t spend long however as we had to have breakfast, finalise our packing, check out and head to the airport all before 10:30.

Sadly, for my tastebuds (but perhaps not for my waistline), today heralded the last time in the foreseeable future that we will have our vanilla crème donuts as part of breakfast. We savoured today’s sugar bombs just that little bit more.

Because we had dropped so much off at the orphanage, packing bags was a doddle. For the first time in years, we headed home with lighter bags than we left with and so much more room. No real care taken with the packing – just throw things into the suitcase and we still had room left over.

To be honest, from here it was all pretty much as you’d expect. Catch the taxi to airport, pass through immigration and customs, quick snack and scour duty free. We managed to judge our expenditure to the point we had about 5000 rupiah left (about .50c) so we won’t have to worry about changing currencies back when we get home.

The plane was full of all the people who had their flights to either Adelaide or Perth interrupted. I started out sitting next to a couple from Perth who explained that the normal flight from Bali to Perth is 3½ hours. With the disruptions to Tiger Air, they now had to fly from Bali to Brisbane (6 hours) and then Brisbane to Perth (5 hours) plus add in an overnight stopover. They were clearly not happy with that situation.

Just before take-off the cabin crew decided to re-organise passengers and we suddenly found ourselves in business class in some very comfortable seats. I was particularly pleased because my Perth mate was of solid stature and we would have had a very uncomfortable flight in the original setup.

The flight was otherwise uneventful but the senior cabin crew went way off script when we landed. He apologised for the inconvenience and said things along the lines of “I wish I could have you all around my place for a beer and a BBQ for being such a good group”, etc. I know it was not serious with his offer but, after the stuffing around that we had been put through, it felt genuine and he got a big round of applause from the passengers.

Being up in the front row meant that Tom was the first person off the plane (I think he could get used to the rock-star treatment pretty easily actually). We all were walking down the air-bridge and into customs before the rest of the passengers disembarked so we were through customs etc very quickly. We found a waiting Tiger Air staff member who pointed us to the shuttle and we were in the first group to depart for the IBIS in Brisbane.

We landed at 9:55 or thereabouts and, by the time we had disembarked, traversed customs, arrived at hotel and had a bite to eat, it was close to midnight when we finally got to go to bed. With the alarm set for 4:10am it was going to be a very short night.

The irony is that we chose Tiger because they offered a daytime flight from Bali to Adelaide and we wanted to avoid the overnight nonsense that all the other carriers did. Ah. The best laid plans...

We managed to wake at the appropriate time and, after suffering through another red-eye special, eventually found ourselves home at last.

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