At first I’m breaking this journal into daily or diary mode, but the stories would be too scattered so I’m going for formatting by topic. Thanks for the suggestion sometime ago from a great friend of us (I always remember and appreciate suggestions. Long time no hear, I wish you health and happiness, hoping we can cross path again sometimes in the future regardless how far you are now).
Here is a bit of boring detail:
22 Oct: Fly Singapore-Denpasar
23 Oct: Fly Denpasar-Kupang
Fly Kupang-Alor
24 Oct – 3 Nov: DIVES
4 Nov: No flight day
5 Nov: Fly Alor-Kupang
Fly Kupang-Denpasar
6 Nov: Fly Denpasar-Singapore
We had two humongous gigantic trolley bags filled with our equipments, batteries, chargers, clothes, camera arms, two super heavy backpacks with strobe, camera and its casing and ports for the lens, we brought five lenses and therefore five ports for different usage. Normally our luggage will hit 45-48 kg, but this time it came up reaching almost 53kg.
Luckily we bought supersized allowance for the first flight, Singapore-Denpasar by Air Asia and pre-assigned seats. (Lucky because unknown to us, now they are applying counter check-in fee. If you don’t have pre-assigned seats, you’ll have to pay extra to do manual check-in unless you want to be randomly seated with strangers through automated check-in. Air Asia certainly know how to do business, but I hate the billion items of hidden charges that they have. Why don’t they just *&@#%& put nett freaking price?! No frill my butt, it’s getting ridiculous. Next time just add fee for sitting, or toilet usage. Borrowing the argument, not everyone need toilet. Nobody should pay what they don’t need rite? Huh!)
To avoid carrying more than one bag in the cabin, we stuffed everything else into the trolley except backpacks. For the domestic flights, we took out our charger box and the luggages were reduced to 45kg. We escaped the excess baggage charge on Denpasar-Kupang flight by Batavia, to our surprise, they accepted scuba as sport equipment. However, for Trans Nusa route Kupang-Alor, we needed to pay 15kg excess as each person was only allowed 15kg.
For Saturday, we would fly to Denpasar and spend one night there. The flight was delayed but it’s fine, we were busy trying the Osim foot massage they had near the waiting room. Upon reaching Bali, it was already dark, we got a bit of delay in the custom area because the officers wanted to check out bags. When they saw our underwater casings, they insisted they were new.(New=tax) We told them that’s because we took care of it well. They still insisted, and said that those brought by angmohs were all rusty etc. I snapped, that’s probably because they don’t freaking take care of it. We were having a lot of hiccup and crossing our fingers we didn’t spoilt the casing because we cleaned them, thanks to unintelligent advice, and now we were being accused because the casing were too clean? Get out of town! Yeah I know I shouldn’t be impatient in the immigration but I feel like stuffing someone's face into the casing already.
They were actually polite and were probably half joking and testing us, but it’s getting a bit too long now. I was on the way of opening my big bags to show them the lots of logbook that we had as a prove that we were not new divers but hubby found a better way. After trying to find some rusty spots, he noticed white speckles inside the casing, opened it and showed the officer. “ This is salt. It’s there because it had been used. Feel free to lick it if you don’t believe us.” They believed us and then created small talks about where we were going to dive etc while letting us pass. Lesson here, if you appreciate the stuffs that you buy with your hard-earned money and take care of them well, don’t forget to leave one damn rusty spot to prove that it’s not new!
I thought we were going to have slow traffic; luckily the driver was knowledgeable and able to find roads that were free from traffic jam. We checked into Puri Tanah Lot hotel, located in Legian area.
Eventhough we are familiar with Bali, we let the operator to arrange for hotel room as one packet and as soon as we reached, I already regretted it. The room looked kind of run down, especially the bed and blanket. The toilet was actually quite nice and clean, but somehow the sewer smell was quite strong eventhough it had mechanical ventilation. If only this trip was planned later, I would have known much better hotel with similar or even better price range. Nevermind, we went out to look for dinner, I was craving for local food, too bad it was western food area, finally we did find local Padang restaurant next to a very noisy bar, had quite a good dinner, stopped by convenient shop to buy bottled water and went back to hotel. We slept without using the blanket that night and it was a mediocre sleep. However, in the morning we were all ready to go.
The morning after, we had quick breakfast in the hotel and reached the airport quite early. However, there was some problem with the check-in as the counters can’t be opened because of technical problem. We queued there for a good one hour plus (not moving) in very irregular shaped line. I felt like I was at the edge of yelling at the counter because I was quite nervous about the connecting flight, and the way the staffs handling the problem or addressing the issues and the swarm of aunties trying to cut queue. We only had less than two hour before the third flight, and any delays would mean disaster because we were travelling with luggages. Luggages mean a lot of processes needed like claims and check-ins. Luckily, the problem finally cleared up and it was delayed just for approximate 15-20 minutes.
The flight was not really smooth, as it had quite a lot of medium turbulence midway. I even had mild, very mild travel sickness because of the rough journey. I’m not the best person who can endure travel sickness as lousy as I am, but there are actually two modes, only two modes of modern transportation that I never feel sick, which are motorcycle and aeroplane. So as soon as the vibration was gone, my giddiness was gone too. Reaching Kupang, the airport looked like Labuan Bajo, one room with one baggage belt and visitors standing a door away. Since the flight continued to Waingapu, I couldn’t rest my mind until we finally saw both our bags. It would not be fun if they forgot to unload our bags and it flew to Waingapu, while we needed continue flying to Alor.
Waiting room in Kupang airport was full. There was no place to sit, we purchased something so we could sit in its corner shop, Cup Noodles (or Pop Mie in Indonesia), and bottled tea. The flight was delayed for significant one-two hours so after the light meal, we ended up sitting on the floor at the end of the room, facing people’s backsides.
Alor flight was using small propeller plane, the plane looked run down, but we had actual floatation device instead of ‘use cushion buttom for floatation purposes’ sign we saw on our last remote domestic flight to East Kalimantan back then. Just like previous flight, we had quite rough turbulence on the air, I read some article back then, this kind of turbulence is called medium turbulence, it should not be dangerous or fatal symptom but it’s more about discomfort. But what the real discomfort it was, I was also suspected that the landing would be rough as if the plane would be slapped to the ground. Magically, the landing was smooth after all those.
We reached Mali airport, and had to stand outside while waiting for the luggage to be unloaded because there was not enough room in the arrival area. I didn’t mind because it was more airy outside. While waiting, I messenged the person who was going to pick us up. He gave me the description of the car and it proved to be great because they almost missed us, since there were other passengers.
From airport to hotel, we were going to stay in Nulfitra hotel, we didn’t see too much civilization. There were a lot of fields, kampong house, small stalls far and between. We tried to get a glimpse about some warung or small shop nearby where we could buy some toiletries later on.
Upon reaching Nulfitra around 4pm, Thomas was already there. He was going to be our dive master for two weeks. We had to drag our bags from where we were dropped to our room, went through uneven earth, big pebble surface and steps. My flipping back..! Whew! I can lift a lot of things that a girl may not be able to lift, but this bag was really wearing me off, together with the heavy backpack and another bag for the port. Hubby’s bag was even more heavier and bulky.
They gave us the room at the very end, facing the bay. There was small outdoor living room/seating area in front of the room, and the scenery of the bay was gorgeous. We were at room number eight, the furthest away from everything and everyone. Thomas sat down with us for some briefing, liability sign off and making appointment for tomorrow. Three of us were apparently not good talker with strangers, and certainly we were not chatty. He spoke Indonesian and English with us, his Indonesian was not bad at all. So everyday we would have two dives further and out of the bay, third dive would be in the bay. He left us with two baskets to fill our equipments in and would pick us up 7.30 in the morning. We would meet him again for dinner in the restaurant later, which we had to order now.
When he left, I quickly used the mosquito spray because my nemeses are back! Worse, the aircon in the room didn’t seem to be working, so we would be subjected to being bitten. The quest of finding warung was even more urgent that before since I only brought a quarter of bottle mosquito repellent, left over from my Timor Leste journey. We never had problem with mosquito in our previous diving trips, luckily, but this one would be big one. We also didn’t have a drop of water left. So we quickly moved the diving equipments to the basket, and off we went out.
From our room to hotel gate, it was quite a distance because we needed to pass by another hotel block, the restaurant, and another older block of rooms, empty area and finally the gate. After asking for direction, we went to the left after the gate, walked a bit and already saw the sea. Next to the sea, was public transport terminal and before that, a small warung came to our rescue. I bought mosquito coil and was extremely happy to see mosquito repellent, lotion style. Whatever it was, having and not having it would make and break my trip. We also bought water, biscuit, shampoo and soap.
Having dinner in the restaurant that night, it was not so happy meals. There was quite a lot of ants and mosquitoes. That was the first time we met the Germans and Thomas’s family, he brought his local wife and his son. After dinner, we quickly excused ourselves as we were tired and there were many things to do especially seting-up the cameras.
