The day we were grounded

Indonesia consists of thousands of island and to go from one to another used to require a long ferryboat journey until the cheaper airline companies took over the market. Today there are over 20 Indonesian economy airline companies who carry people within the archipelago. However none of them, even the national Garuda Airlines, are not permitted to fly to the West due to their weak security and history of accidents.

One strange thing about these flights is that, as oppose to buying in advance to make it cheaper, in Indonesia if you want to pay less you have to buy your ticket at the latest minute. Of course you take the risk of not finding a last minute ticket and that’s why we also played the auction game of booking flight tickets at the latest time they are available.

We were in Bali and wanted to fly to Indonesian side of Borneo and cross to the Malaysian side the day before our visas ended. For this we had to fly from Bali to Jakarta and from there to Pontianak on Indonesian Borneo. Although we were checking the internet everyday, suddenly it seemed like all the flights were getting booked. We wanted to fly with Adam Air which was offering the most reasonable prices but we missed the last tickets for the Jakarta – Pontianak flight. So instead we booked Adam Air from Bali to Jakarta and Lion Air from Jakarta to Pontianak.

8th of March 2008, early in the morning we went to Denpasar International Airport, checked our luggage in and went to the gate to wait for our flight. While waiting I read on the newspaper from the day before that Adam Air would reduce the number of it’s flights next week. From the waiting hall we watched our orange colored plane be taxied to the gate and our luggage get loaded onto it. Then the newspaper of the present day arrived and on the cover was the news that Adam Air is unable to pay the insurance fees due to the big number of crushes it had and was going to freeze operations within a week. Then we watched our luggage be unloaded and the plane be taxied away from the gate. “Please wait” was the only answer we received from the gate crew even after the flight seemed to be delayed an hour. Strange enough on the airport screens it was still written that the flight was on time. When we started to push for some more answers we realized we were not the only people getting anxious about their connecting flight from Jakarta. There was a Taiwanese couple bound for Taipei and a German guy with a long chain of connecting flights he was afraid to miss.

When we were taken to the office downstairs the personnel there were already in a hard situation trying to answer so many demands at the same time and quickly. I fixed all my attention on one person and became her shadow whichever corner she went to hide until I managed to make her buy for us tickets by Garuda Air to Jakarta, leaving now. We ended up literally running together with another guy to the ticket and check-in counters. Just when I started to run towards the gate for the new flight I was stopped by the same guy telling me that I had to go down with him to the baggage claim and fish our stuff from a large pile of stranded Adam Air luggage there.

Somehow this exercise took my anxiety a bit and we enjoyed the non-economy class flight with the big Garuda airliner. But there was a little problem. Because of this delay, we seemed to have only 40 minutes left between our arrival to and departure from Jakarta, which was a very risky amount of time considering that the check-out counters sometimes close half an hour before the flight. So we made a plan. As soon as we landed we would split and I would go down to pick our luggage while Maya would run to the Lion Air check-in counter and stop them from closing. This we did. The 10 minutes waiting in front of the carrier belt felt like an hour and but when I finally made it out of the gates I realized we still had 30 minutes. Then the information guy told me that this was the international terminal and the Lion Air was in the domestic terminal, few kilometers away and I had to take a taxi. I looked around to see if I could spot Maya in this crowds but of course it was impossible, she could have been even on a different floor. So I went ahead with our initial plan to meet at the check in counter and took a taxi. Surprisingly when I arrived at the Lion Air check in there were still a line of fellow passengers but no Maya.

Then I wanted to slow down the time, make it last longer so that Maya would arrive but she woudn’t. I sadly sat on my luggage trolley and watched the screen notification turn to “departed”. I had just missed my first flight.

I went to the Lion Air counter and told them that I had lost my wife. After the initial giggles one of them decided to be my assistant on this mission and took me to the first terminal where Maya was still waiting for me. She had thought that the plan would have changed because the terminals would have been far apart. It was the expensive taxi ride that had given her the idea that even if she took a taxi it wouldn’t arrive on time, although for me it didn’t take more than 5 minutes.

Sometimes, in times of crisis, accidents, or sudden loss of something, a weird sort of coolness takes over the emotions and tells one to stop. We didn’t talk. We knew it was very easy to start to argue and accuse each other for this situation. We sat and had a drink.

Now we had to find a way out of Indonesia before we ran out of visa within the next 2 days. Adam Air was fully grounded and all the stranded passengers have booked all the other tickets on other flights. It was practically impossible to find tickets to anywhere on the direction we wanted to go within 2 days. So we went back to the superstar of budget airlines and booked a flight by Air Asia back to Kuala Lumpur.

We wanted to travel all across Northern Borneo and Brunei and take a boat to Southern Philippines but it was not to happen. We ended up grounded in the heat of Kuala Lumpur and later flew to Philippines.