The End

Well, we're back!
It's 11AM and I've been out of bed for an hour after spending 12 hours in bed. I don't think I've slept that long for aaaaaaaaages! Actually, I had better check what DAY it is too, just in case I've spent even longer than I thought. Phew, it's Tuesday. All day yesterday I thought it was Sunday, so why is it Tuesday? Because yesterday went for longer than 24 hours, that's why!

We were up at 5AM Sunday morning and it was dark and raining outside! First time there's been real rain in the morning since we arrived. Of course, it's still hot and humid, but it still was just a touch of remembering home in Melbourne =)

We tried as best we could to even out the suitcases and we left a ton of stuff behind. My satchel was over 8kg, Tari's laptop bag was over 5kg and our suitcases, well, they were heavy but more on that later. (Oooooh, suspense!)

We left behind a few books (which was hard for us, you know what we're like about books) and some old clothing and the extension cord and some toiletry stuff and... Nothing that won't be easily replaced, and I'm sure that the books and extension cord will get some use by other people staying there!

Shinta arrived at about 6 sans Wulan. We felt terrible that we hadn't said a proper goodbye, but totally understood her not coming so early on a Sunday morning. (They mostly work 6 day weeks, so Sundays are often referred to as Holiday.) Turned out that her alarm hadn't gone off, but she still wanted to say farewell, so we just waited a couple minutes for her to show. In that five minutes, after having checked out, one of the club staff came running up to the car looking very stressed and urgent.

My first thought was - uh oh, they found the damage when we trashed the room on our way out. Then I remembered that we didn't trash the room. Actually, he was concerned because we'd left our novels behind. We had to explain that we didn't want them. Really. Seriously. Leave them there. Throw them out. We don't want them. Thank you for checking but we DON'T WANT THEM!

The trip to the airport was super fast, there was almost no traffic (which means there was almost as much traffic as peak hour here). We said a fond farewell to our favorite intrepid looker afterers with culturally appropriate handshakes. It seems so pov to just handshake where over here you'd do a big hug and cheek kiss. Anyway, we promised that if they were ever in Melbourne to look us up and we'd return some of the favours that they'd shown us.

In the terminal we went to check in our bags. You're allowed 20 kg. My bag was 18kg, Tari's was close to 24kg. The nice lady asked if we were together. What, the two, tall, white people that stood out like two, tall, white, sore thumbs? Yes. We were together. We put both bags on at once and combined they were only a little over, so she waved it through.

Then it was just a matter of paying 100,000 Rp each for the exit fee and we were on our way. The Singapore-Jogjakarta route is always really turbulent. Well, apparently not always, because we had a really smooth flight. Actually, it ended up being the smoothest of all the flights.

In Singapore (where we had 10 hours to kill) we picked up our luggage and headed to the Jetstar check in people. It was (not too surprisingly) too early at this stage. So we took our bags down to the sub-basement level where you can leave them locked up. We learned that people are stupid-lazy in Singapore too. There is a smallish elevator for people with luggage, wheelchairs etc. Of course, what you actually get is people who cut in, crowd in, after waiting a few minutes for the elevator, then they get off one floor down. Grr.

Anyway, before I talk any more about Singapore. Man can this country do things right. Everything worked. Whenever we're in Singapore we're amazed. The taxi queues work, the baggage all works, the transportation works, everything just seems to work.

We had plenty of time to waste, so we set to work straight away! Slowly and calmly straight away. Firstly some food (surprised you there huh!). The tables were fairly crowded, but it was about 11ish I guess so it wasn't as busy as later at proper lunchtime. We had a salad for the first time in I don't know how long. Lettuce never tasted so good. Well, the dressing that you put on lettuce never tasted so good.

While sitting munching on vegetables we noticed that the majority of the other people were actually young people. And were they laughing, joking, making a huge rowdy noise? No. Most of them were studying. Yes. You read that right. There were math textbooks, languages, all sorts. Some were solo, headphones in, head down, pen going flat out. Others were laptopping away busily. Some were in small groups trying to solve problems together. Crazy youth, always disobeying the rules. Seriously. There were signs up saying: "No studying. No boardgames." And a sign like a no-smoking sign, but with zzZ" on it instead of a cigarette. No sleeping. What sort of country says "No studying". I think it's secretly a reverse psychology thing. "No alcohol" over here just gets you a train station full of drunk young-uns. No studying seems to get them a crowd of scholars.

Well, Singapore airport is split into three main terminals (T1, T2 and T3) resisting the urge to call T2 "Judgment Terminal" we decided to do the grand tour. The terminals are also split into two halves, an exterior and interior. The interior is for after you've checked in your luggage and are actually an official traveller. We had to be on the exterior for at least 4-6 hours. Each terminal has lots of shopping, the better shops are on the interior, but to kill time we visited them all. It takes about three hours to do the whole loop. Unlike other times (like the trip to the summit of Mt. Merapi) I can tell you this as experienced fact rather than passed on information.

My feet can attest to the full three hours. We walked really slowly and had a trolley for our satchel/laptop bags so I had something to use as a walking frame the whole time. To get between terminals you get to take the Skytrain!

You can also see how lush the greenery is. Each terminal also has one or two garden areas, big, spacious, green areas with seating and restaurants. (One of them is a cactus garden!) The Skytrain runs on about a 4minute round trip, so you never have to wait long. They split it in segments too, so there's two trains at each terminal and you never have to go past a station. A bit like how it's best to organise your trips in SimCity. Much more efficient this way.

The train station was the only time I could be bothered getting out my camera, but all around the complex, you'll see these odd holes:

I took this, because to make my odd comment above make more sense to some of you, T2: Judgment Day was the second of the Terminator movies. Skynet was the computer system that took over the world. Hence I found it amusing that there was a T2 Skytrain. The holes above may be for the air conditioning, but I think they have camera systems and guns in them for when the Singapore Airport system becomes self actuating. It's just a matter of time, people, wake up!

They also have paintings, sculptures, it's really a nice place to be. Some of the modern art was just a little too obtuse for me though.

After the three hour exterior tour and some lunch, we had killed enough time that the Jetstar peeps were open. They were there for a Perth flight, but were nice enough to check us in anyway. The people before us had been troublesome and the people next to us were also being pushy and unfair to the check in people. We put on our happy, friendly faces and went into "most polite and friendly tourists of the year" mode. Although our bags were technically over the limit, we had been nice while other people hadn't and we were waved through by the supervisor. The people next to us who were being pushy etc. were 1kg over, but were made to shuffle their stuff around to reduce the load.

I really REALLY feel sorry for a lot of the people we saw working in the airlines on our trip. I really hope that it's just tiredness and stress etc. but some people are just so SO rude. I just don't get it. We saw just plain bad manners a fair bit and also a lot of "I'm so much better than you are, so do what I say woman!" sort of attitudes. Also the good old fashioned, complain to the person you see, rather than the manager/company regulation that is actually the source of whatever problem you are having. The poor flight attendants/desk jockeys were without fail polite and personable even when being derided and yelled at. I would snap in about five minutes and send their baggage to Coonabarabran.

Anyway, after checking in our bags we then had about five hours left. So we found that it also takes about three hours to do the interiour tour of the three terminals. The train system is so cleverly designed, one carriage opens doors on the left, one carriage (separated physically from the other) opens doors on the right. So one train can carry people from both the interior and exterior sections on the same trip.

After three more hours, we managed to find a quiet, out of the way seating area. Big open space, there were a few clever people with sleeping bags, but mostly it was quiet and empty. We zoned out for about an hour, had a little bite to eat and stretched etc. before heading over to board the plane.

I already talked about people who are rude on planes, so I won't do it again except to say: 20kg luggage, 1 item of hand luggage of x kg (depends on carrier - we had some Qantas and some Jetstar). Now we all know that you can take 2 items of hand luggage really, a laptop bag and handbag for example. But there were people who had "hand luggage" that their own could fill an entire overhead compartment. And, get this, when they couldn't fit all their stuff in, who complained, the other passengers? No. They complained about the lack of space! Don't get me started.

Flight to Darwin was okay, 4 1/4 hours. It was a little delayed, but that was fine, it just meant we'd have to spend less time in Darwin airport really. We got to Darwin at about 3AM or so, I can't honestly remember. We had to get our bags and then sit around for about an hour before we could check them in. Lots of people just sleeping on the hard floor or on hard chairs. Our flight wasn't scheduled until 7:30AM so we had plenty of time to kill again. So tired by now though. Once checked in the upstairs terminal chairs were actually quite comfy. We both managed to doze for about half an hour, but with bright lights, lots of movement and the coffee person yelling out orders it wasn't possible to sleep really.

The "fun" started at about 7AM when announcements came over saying that the Darwin-Sydney flight had been cancelled and the Darwin-Melbourne flight would be delayed by an hour - hour and a half. Lots of people less than happy about that. We had already been sitting around for ages, the Sydney flight included people that had to transit to other flights leaving from Sydney. Some of them ended up getting spare seats on the Melbourne flight, so they'd be doing Darwin-Melbourne-Sydney. Others though were going to have to wait until mid-afternoon for theirs.

We were dead tired, and annoyed at the tardy plane, but at least were entertained. Front page news in Darwin was a pygmy hippo that had been shot. A local lad had been out shooting for pig. When he pulled up next to his most recent effort he saw that it was a little hippo. He rang his mate, who essentially told him to sleep off the booze and in the morning it'll be just a pig. Well, he did and it wasn't. Apparently it escaped from a wildlife park some time ago.

So our flight was late, but at least it came eventually! Then we had the poor hostess trying to get people from three different flights onto her plane, they'd had to process a lot of it by hand and some people were being fussy about where they got to sit, hand luggage etc. Again with the whole taking it out on the person in front of you thing. Anyway, by the time we actually got to Melbourne, about 3PM and by the time we got our baggage (getting close to 4PM - don't get me started on the stupid, inefficient method by which airlines make you collect your luggage, I mean, come on now, can you think of a worse... sorry, I'll stop before I get stuck right in!)... now I don't know where I was going to begin with with that one.

Anyway, we were home about 5ish after an, um, interesting taxi ride. The puppies got LOTS of hugs, so did Juni. She'd done a great job of making the house clean for us. She'd washed our doona covers, done the dishes etc. AND cut and groomed the dogs! (Cut as in hair cut of course!) We had Safeway BBQ chicken (for me), mashed potato (for TJ) and well cooked broccoli (for Juni) before watching another West Wing and heading to bed. Where, as I already mentioned, we spent a good 12 hours!

So we left our room at about 5:30AM Sunday morning and were home by about 5:30PM Monday evening. We managed to sleep for about 2 hours worth of 15 minute naps and walked umpteen kilometers to fill in time. Oh, and I read a novel that I think will end up where the others were. Clive Cussler. Airport novelist.

Any more info than that and you can ask me direct =)

Thanks once again for all your comments, emails etc. It really did mean a lot to me, every time there was something from back here it just really, really helped. You know I'm not great at expressions of stuff, so just a really big thanks to you all - even getting just a one line email would make an entire day so much brighter and more bearable!

Until next time,
Take care,
Sim.