escaping Bali
“Please help us,” I said, with tears in my eyes and a quivering voice to the man at the airline counter. “Please help us get home.”
The journey home had begun more than 36 hours earlier. We had been in Bali on vacation and our flight was scheduled to leave on a Saturday evening. The trip would have us on three planes and should have taken around 30 hours.
What actually happened was:
We got to the airport as planned for our flight on Saturday evening and went to our gate.
Our gate was changed randomly, which we learned was the norm — send everyone to one gate, then suddenly make them go to another gate.
As our departure time got closer, no plane arrived at the gate and no information was provided. Repeat this for hours. People started checking the airline’s website to get information.
Hours passed.
Sometime well after midnight, we were told our flight had been canceled.
Cue a mad scramble to the airline desk, which was understaffed.
We stood in line for hours while no information was provided, but news was shared among people standing in line.
We watched a few nasty Americans lose their shit with various airport staff.
We got to the front of the line near dawn, only to be told that the next flight was scheduled for 24 hours after the first (basically, only one flight per day from Bali to Singapore) and that we would be taken to a hotel by shuttle in the interim. This was information that could have been shared with all passengers via a general announcement hours earlier.
We asked the people at the front desk about our connecting flights and were assured repeatedly that they’d been taken care of.
[Narrator: These were lies.]
We got on the shuttle, got to the hotel, ate breakfast, then slept until the afternoon.
After dinner, we got back on the shuttle and went back to the airport.
We checked in, then went through the same inept security from the day before, only this time they confiscated random items that had successfully made it through security in the US, Tokyo, Singapore, and even Bali the night before.
Got to the gate to wait, then repeated the process of switching gates the night before, along with the added step of having another security station set up at the gate for visual searches of our carry-on bags.
Wait, wait, wait.
Finally, we boarded our flight to Singapore hours after it was supposed to depart, then spent the entire flight worrying about making our connecting flight.
We landed in Singapore in the middle of the night, when all airline desks were closed and attempted to get our boarding passes for our flight to Tokyo. It is important to know that at the time Singapore’s airport consisted of three massive terminals that were all nearly identical in design and layout.
Spent hours in the first terminal talking to various people and explaining the situation, only to eventually be sent to a second terminal.
Went through passport control in order to leave the first terminal and scrambled for the shuttle.
Got to the appointed place in the second terminal and talked extensively to an airline staff member there, were given many smooth assurances, along with a piece of paper that supposedly would be helpful, and were sent to the third terminal to catch our flight.
[Narrator: Those smooth assurances were lies, oh so many lies.]
We got on another shuttle to the third terminal and stood in line at another airline desk to get our boarding passes for our flight, which would be boarding in a little over an hour.
Got to the front of the line, only to learn that the piece of paper given to us by the smooth-talking lying shithead was worthless, that we would have to purchase new tickets since we had forfeited our tickets the day before by not showing up, and that it was now too late to make the next flight.
This is when I started crying.
For whatever reason, we were finally talking with an airline employee who was compassionate and didn’t just brush us off. He listened carefully, called the lying shit in the second terminal, spoke angrily with him for several minutes, and then slammed the phone down. He said that he needed to go talk with some people and would be gone for a while. He told us to sit down and rest; he would find us as soon as he had answers.
We sat down. My teenagers dozed a little. My husband and I couldn’t even talk about our options, we were so stressed and exhausted.
Almost an hour later, the airline employee was back and beckoned us to the desk. He explained that he had worked it out and we would be on the same flight the next day. He told us to arrive at the same desk at o’dark thirty and he himself would print our boarding passes.
So there we were in the Singapore airport a little after dawn with 22 hours to kill. The airport is considered the best in the world. It has everything imaginable to entertain people in between flights. It also has short-term hotel room rentals for weary passengers to catch a nap in between flights. Unfortunately, those rooms were on the other side of security and we didn’t have boarding passes that would allow us to go through security.
The only hotel available to us inside the airport cost more than $300/night. We could have taken the train into the city to find a hotel room there, but we were too exhausted and overwhelmed to manage even that. So we dragged ourselves to the hotel and booked a room, only to be told that one would not be available for another four or five hours. We explained the situation, gestured towards our exhausted daughters who were practically falling asleep standing up, and finally, a room was found.
We went to the room and collapsed in the beds and slept until almost dinner time. We took gloriously hot and soapy showers put on the last of our clean clothes, hand-washed enough laundry to get us through another day, and went off in search of food.
After a damn delicious dinner — our first proper meal in almost 24 hours — we wandered around a bit and then went back to our room to get more sleep. We set our alarms and went to sleep hoping that the next morning would be the day we would be able to continue our journey home.
The next morning before dawn we were the first people at the airline desk. Our friend was there waiting for us and smiled as we approached. He printed our boarding passes and sent us on to security. On the other side, we got breakfast, then waited nervously at the gate.
We boarded our flight on time and landed in Tokyo on time. And from there it was smooth sailing all the way to Dulles, then on to our front door, four days after we originally were supposed to get home.
We escaped Bali.