Day 29: The next country!

Today was finally the day we left Indonesia - we had to make it today, as our 30 day visa was expiring the following day! Although our flight wasn't until 5:30pm, it was obviously an international flight so we needed to leave plenty of time, along with time for getting to the airport in Jakarta's fickle traffic (anywhere between 50 minutes and 2 hours apparently!).

As usual we just hung around the hotel doing a bit of internet stuff until after lunch when we headed for the airport just before 2pm. Sad to be checking out of Alila as it had been a super comfortable place to spend the week. It almost felt like being at home. But I definitely won't miss Jakarta, it's noisy, dirty and polluted, the traffic sucks and there is surprisingly little to do for a city of 30 million. If I hadn't been sick those few days early on I'm not sure what we would have done!

Got to the airport in record time, about 45 minutes, so we were pretty early especially since we didn't have to check in having done so online, and with only carry-on luggage we didn't need to stand in a bag drop queue. Shandos's phone beeped just as we were getting out of the taxi, AirAsia informing us that our flight was delayed by 60 minutes to 6:30pm. So we were early, and it was late. Awesome. At least the airport has a few shops and things, so we bought some Indonesian food at a cafe downstairs and ate it very slowly.

Moved upstairs to Starbucks where again we bought drinks and drank them very slowly. The departure boards still hadn't been changed from saying 5:30pm, and when I checked with an AirAsia person she said oh yeah it's definitely still 6:30pm, or maybe about 7pm now. Great! Eventually we got bored of leeching Starbucks's wifi signal and headed to the gate where there was a fairly sizable crowd. Two flights were shown on the departure board, one at 6:30 and ours below it ("Running On Time Departing 5:30pm" despite it being 6pm). We couldn't see the actual destinations for these as the screen had a Windows XP "Install New Hardware Or Printer Wizard" dialog box covering this useful area.

The ground staff handed out hot meals and water which was nice, I had a sort of chicken stir fry thing and Shandos got fried chicken strips with rice. A couple of garbled announcements in Indonesian and a general stampede to the boarding area prompted us to move as well, only to discover our boarding passes weren't valid - because that flight was going to Kuala Lumpur. Back down we sat, assured that the plane was definitely ready for about 7:15pm (about 20 minutes away).

Around 7:15pm there was another garbled announcement and about 1/3rd of the people at the boarding gate moved over and went through. Since nobody else seemed to move we didn't worry about it, but decided to head over once there was a lull in the queue. Turns out there was another (unmarked) flight elsewhere after hours that everyone else was waiting for, and we were basically the last people on the plane! Thankfully it was only about half full, with lots of empty seats dotted around. Because we were running so late we'd lost our departure slot (Jakarta is a pretty busy airport), so we waited probably another 20-25 minutes on the ground and various taxiways before finally taking off around 8:15pm.

Only thing of note on the flight was that we'd apparently pre-bought meals and neither of us recalled! So we had our airport late lunch, courtesy AirAsia food and then a plane meal of chicken satay sticks & rice within the space of about 5 hours! Whoops.

Landed in Singapore, off the plane and straight through customs & immigration we went, and almost directly into a waiting taxi to our hotel at Clarke Quay. Although we'd gone slightly westward on the flight, Singapore is actually an hour ahead of Jakarta, so we also lost an hour in the process. The 3 hour delay plus time zone change meant that it was nearly midnight by the time we arrived at the hotel.

So if that was Indonesia, we'd done it. I'd enjoyed my time there; the people are very nice and friendly, there's been some great scenery and some great experiences. And it's unbelievably cheap - Singapore will be a huge adjustment!Read more