Bamboozled in Bali

My first and only fully paid flight

This is what happens when I don’t fly Qantas. The first (and only) time I flew to Europe not using my frequent flyer points. I booked the cheapest flight I could find flying Garuda to London from Brisbane via Bali, Jakarta and Amsterdam. I wasn’t paying so I shouldn’t complain at all. I found out later it was the very first flight on this route which may explain what happened at Bali.

The toilets

Where do I begin? Let’s start on a positive note. The airport toilets are immaculately clean; the reason being there’s a poor woman on her hands and knees cleaning the floors with a rag. How do I know this, you ask? While I was sitting there regaining my breath after an ongoing nightmare, I espied a thin brown hand coming under the wall. At first, I thought it was a child, but alas, it was the cleaning woman. And that’s the only good thing I have to say about Bali Airport aka Denpasar.

The paperwork

To start at the beginning, we were handed two forms on the plane, a customs declaration and an arrival/departure card.

My customs declaration was in Indonesian, but fortunately, my partner’s was in English so we filled those out. Then I filled out the Arrival/ Departure form only to be told by the air hostess that I didn’t need to fill out that one because we were in transit, so I ripped it up.

When we landed, we walked across the tarmac to a bus that took us to the terminal and that’s when the “fun” started!

We were told to go to the first transit desk, which we did, and we were then told to go to the Visa counter to purchase a Visa for 35 US dollars each. That was straightforward.

Then we had to fill out the arrival/departure forms, and line up in an extremely long line. We asked since we were in transit could we go to the front of the line as we thought we only had 2 hours total here. The answer was an emphatic “No, you must line up.” OK.

Another person when questioned told us we had to go to the transit desk (where we had just been!). Everyone seems to have a different story. At this stage, I was very forgiving as they only started this route last week.

At immigration where we were classified as “Foreigners”, my partner got through, but my immigration guy said I had to go back and get a refund on the Visa. I was completely bamboozled! He then asked the guy who had let me partner pass who then went to ask someone else, and then I had to go back to the counter to get my passport stamped or whatever. The last official told us we had to go get our suitcases from carousel 4.

My partner, very fortunately as it turned out, grabbed a luggage trolley and loaded all our bags onto it. As we had been told, we turned right after the luggage sign and ran into a blank wall! That wasn’t right.

Then we backtracked to find where we had to hand in our customs declaration. There was a big x-ray scanner with no signs on it so I walked straight past and handed both our forms to one of the customs guys, then my partner was pulled up by another customs guy and had to put all of our luggage through the scanner.

I lost sight of the customs guy to whom I had handed the forms, but managed to point to one and say “him”.

The airport

Next, we had to go through a narrow door with no signs to the domestic area to try to find where to drop off our suitcases. This was like a maze.

We finally found the check-in area and located a check-in for Garuda Indonesia. Unfortunately, it was Business Class only. My partner cheekily asks “Can you make us Business?” No, the economy desk (we gathered that was what she was trying to say) was round the corner down past Lion Airways.

Well, we finally found where to check in our bags except they had flight numbers that didn’t correspond with ours, but I stayed in the line nonetheless. As I reached the front of the line, the check-in girl came out from around the counter and took down the flight numbers. (They were slot-in cardboard or plastic!)

I thought I’m just going to put our bags on here and see what happens. We are doubtful our bags will ever get to London!

Then we decide to make a quick trip to the toilet (the whereabouts of which we had to enquire as there were NO signs!)

After my fun trip to the toilet, we can see where we have to go (gate 20) but can’t see how to get there, so we ask a person just sitting there who tells us we go through beside her, but we have to leave the luggage trolley behind, which we did.

We managed to make it to gate 20. (Of course, the VERY last one in the terminal) I have just had the worst coffee in the history of man (I only drank half of it, it was so bad!) and am waiting for the flight to Jakarta. My partner reckons he’s never coming here again until I reminded him our flight comes back from London in the reverse order. He’s not happy. He says not being on his own is the only thing that makes the whole shebang bearable.