For Sheeny to fly from Jakarta to Perth he had to be up at 4am to catch his 6:45am flight home.  In a way it would have been better as it gets all the boring customs stuff done early in the day and then you’re heading home when you’re feeling good.  Unfortunately Sheeny woke me up when he got up and I only had to be awake at 7am and I couldn’t get back to sleep.

One of the most annoying things I have is the inability to sleep.  Once I was woken at 4am I couldn’t get back to sleep.  I always watch Simpsons or South Park on my laptop so I can tune out and go back to sleep, but this time it didn’t work.  I just laid in bed until Clinton banged on the door like a little drummer boy until I opened it up.  Dammit.  What a crappy nights sleep!  I just knew that was the start of a crappy day.

It went from bad to worse when we checked in for our first Lion Air flight from Jakarta to Denpasar.  It was a single flight, not a connecting flight which made things interesting when we were sitting in the terminal and were told in Indonesian that our flight was delayed.  Awesome, just what we needed as I knew it was going to be tight even if we were on time to get from Denpasar domestic to international terminal to catch our Virgin Blue flight home.  I can’t understand much Indonesian language, but I do understand the simultaneous collective groan of the other passengers when the transmission came over the speakers.  Crud!  We’re sitting in Jakarta for an extra hour and I knew we were going to miss our Virgin Blue flight home.

I rang Yudhi, or should I say James Bond to try and sort our flight out in Bali.  If he could at least check us in, we could still arrive an hour late and just slip our bags in and run through customs and get onto the plane.  That was our only choice as we were more than ready to be back home in Australia.

We landed in Denpasar, Bali with only one and a half hours left until the Virgin blue flight to Brisbane departed.  And on the itinerary it says you have to check in at minimum 90 minutes before your flight.  Well we were already late for that, and we hadn’t even got off the plane.  When the doors finally opened Clinton and I had to do the Harold Holt and bolt across the tarmac and get into the terminal to pick up our heavy suspension laden bags.  If I hadn’t jinxed it enough, I said ‘I bet our bags are either lost or we’re last’.  Well I was right, we were the last people to get our bags off the carousel and it was now only one hour and 10 minutes before the Virgin Blue flight would depart.  I rang ‘007’ again to see if he had checked us in, but Virgin wouldn’t take the phone booking from him on the international flight but he told them that we were going to be late and it would be ‘ok ok ok’.  Haha, Oh man we could only hope. 

We legged it from the domestic terminal to the international with 70kgs of baggage and I can tell you that gets real heavy when you’re running.  And when we thought we had a chance of getting on our plane our hopes were dashed again!  Man, can the day get any worse??  It was really looking like we were spending a night in Bali, which might sound nice to some, it wasn’t on our agenda.  We want to get home.  We walked inside the international terminal to the biggest line of passengers who haven’t even got through the first security check point.  We were at the back and with 5 minutes remaining to absolute close of check in we were goners.

I bailed up an Indonesian security guard and explained our circumstance and I was actually surprised to see him jump into action and got us through to the Virgin Blue check in.  Whoa, it’s actually hard to get them moving as they work on ‘Bali time’ and nothing really stresses them.  Awesome in one way, but sucks when we’re in a rush. We were told we literally had one minute left before we were going to miss check in for our flight.  Hooray we thought.

Nope, then the next problem arose.  One of the main reasons I fly Virgin Blue everywhere and especially international is their awesome Excess Baggage rules that allows me with a 32kg bag of sporting equipment to be classed as only 5kgs of the 20kgs free baggage.  Now this works all the time in Australia as they understand the rules.  Not so good in Indonesia where their sentence structure is very different to ours and they didn’t understand what I was explaining to them.  I had a perfect record of not paying any excess baggage for the 3 other international flights to Indonesia, but this time was looking like I was going to have to pay because they couldn’t understand.

After 20 minutes of arguing and their managers being called up, me underlining the rules on their rule book and explaining how their system worked we finally got through without the excess baggage which was sitting at roughly 30 kilograms overweight.  That definitely would have cost an arm and a leg.  Because of this delay we had only 30 minutes to get through customs and get onto the plane.  Customs aren’t exactly the speediest of processes in any country but with the awesome security guard who managed to slip us past the 300-odd passengers to check in on time, he came up trumps again and slipped us through into immigration faster than expected and we had finally made it. 

The biggest sigh of relief is when you’re sitting on your plane and heading home.  Clinton and I were looking at each other in disbelief that we actually got on the plane.  We both had almost all but given up and thought we were getting a hotel in Bali for at least another night, buying another international flight which would have been a pretty penny and would have just been over the whole experience.  Haha, although I’m sure in the end it was Yudhi 007’s calls that had Virgin expecting us, it was only through luck we made it. 

When we touched down on Australian soil we were almost cheering, but that would be shortlived.  We had to wait another 30 minutes on the plane before we could get off so quarantine officers could come aboard to talk to a passenger and then when we went through the really quick Customs process with the security chip we were pulled to the side before we left the terminal.

Well, they mustn't have liked the look of Clinton and I because they thought we had bought our suspension from Indonesia and wanted us to pay an Import Duty tax on our own bloody equipment.  After explaining to them they were being stupid about it, they then checked our bags which is fine, but they carried on a lot compared to normal.  Apparently my boots weren't absolutely pristine clean even though they were pretty spotless.  The woman who was there had absolutely no personality or sense of humour and couldn't handle a joke and I almost had to pay a $150 fine.  After getting past that hurdle Clinton was getting the 3rd degree which proved nothing... but it just shows sometimes you get the good customs officers, then sometimes you get the ones who have had a crap day and plan on making yours even worse. 

So what a trip, we finally got out and off to my home to finally sleep at 1am!  The is as I write this I'm drinking a good 8year old Bundaberg Rum and coke and know that it's all over.

So that wraps up the end of the 2 months of having my mind on Indonesia and performing, holidaying and having fun.  I have a few things in the pipeline and it looks like I’ll be back in Indo again by either March or April, and possibly at the end of the year for the next Powercross series after the huge success of this one.  I will just make sure we get better connecting flights and not have that drama again.