Leaving Lombok

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I wake in a cold sweat. I think I might have made some unflattering remarks about the safety and security record of the airline we came here on in an earlier post. I now realise that we will be travelling with them again today. I hope they’re not one of those companies that pays people to search the internet to see whether any of their passengers have said anything disparaging about them. I wonder how they might extract their revenge. Crashing the plane would seem to be a bit extreme, but maybe they might think that feeding me dodgy food was an appropriate punishment. I wonder if I can hold out all day and all night without eating.

We spend the morning lazing by the pool with Brian and then catch a taxi to the airport.

We arrive in Jakarta. We are now about two hours further from Melbourne than we were when we were in Lombok, and we still have a long wait for our flight home. The airport is massive. It looks very nice, but it seems that it is a bit dysfunctional. The flight information is very confusing. The screens say that our flight leaves at 9.15pm, but our tickets say it leaves at 7.55pm. We settle in for a long wait. At 7.30pm the screens suddenly change to say that our flight is in fact leaving at 7.55pm, and from a gate up the opposite end of the terminal. We pick up our bags and sprint. We then remember that we still need to change money. We decided to leave this until the last minute in case we wanted to buy dinner, and we thought we had plenty of time. I go to a money changer but they tell me that they've run out of Australian dollars. I go to another one with the same result. At the third one there's a note to say that they'll be back in five minutes, and there isn't a fourth one. We arrive breathless at the gate and ask the attendant whether I've got time to go back to the third money changer. She says that I haven't.

We are hurried down some stairs onto a bus, thinking the flight is about to leave. The bus then spends the next twenty minutes sitting on the tarmac going nowhere. I could have gone to the money changer and back ten times over by now. I am not happy. We get on the plane. All the overhead lockers are full, and my headphones don't work. I am now even less happy. I think that Issy may have picked up on this, and that maybe me walking the full length of the plane opening overhead lockers and then slamming them shut again while looking for somewhere to store our bags might have been the giveaway. I'm not sure that the flight attendant is too happy with me either. This is probably not good. She may well be the one who ultimately decides whether or not I get dodgy food. Issy says that I'm in a bad mood because my football team lost. This may be partly true. I did spend most of the time we sat in the terminal watching the scores from my beloved team's match on my iPad. We take off. The runway feels like a very badly corrugated road somewhere in outback Australia, and it feels like the plane's going break in half. I don't think I will have too many fond memories of Jakarta Airport.

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