Parting

My final day in Bali wasn’t in Bali all that much. I’d organised to get on the resort’s airport shuttle at 8am to give myself plenty of time to catch my 11.40am flight; Balinese traffic can waylay even the most forgiving plans. But the traffic was obliging, and I was at the airport before 9am.

While passing into the check-in area, I noticed that the Jetstar staff were weighing carry on luggage as well as checked luggage, so I quickly weighed my bags to make sure that my off-brand Japanese Lego hadn’t pushed me over my 7kg limit.

7.16kg. Bugger.

However my laptop’s power supply was sitting near the top of my tech bag, and it was weighty but small enough to stuff into my pants pocket. When I re-weighed my bags, they’d dropped down to 6.8kg. Ha! Take that, you conniving Jetstar bastards!

Naturally when I reached the front of the check-in queue, the agent asked me if I was checking any bags, I said no, she printed my boarding pass and sent me on my way, all without weighing my bags. Sigh.

Once I got on my flight, it was the usual spread of barely tolerable Jetstar discomfort. I was on an aisle seat (that I’d paid $12 extra for), next to a sleepy young man who was over 5’5” and therefore too large for his cramped middle seat, whose gangly arms and legs tended to spill over into the neighboring seats. I leaned away from him, into the narrow aisle, but then I tended to get a faceful of arse fat every time some old woman who’d let herself go tried to squeeze past to get to the toilets. Of course Jetstar flights don’t have entertainment systems, and it wasn’t possible for me to hold my laptop far enough away from my face to watch something on it, so I read a book for a while, then watched sections of ‘The Gentlemen’ and ‘Extraction’ that someone was watching on a hired iPad two rows ahead on the other side of the aisle. I was quite enjoying the latter, right up until a set piece climax, when the screen was blocked by the vast beer belly of an old man in cargo shorts who joined the back of the toilet queue.

Our departure from Bali had been delayed by half an hour, as some unnamed bogan had checked his luggage then vanished, (he’d probably hit one of the airport bars and fallen into a drunken stupor), meaning that his luggage needed to be identified and removed from the plane’s hold. However, the pilot managed to catch up 15 minutes during the flight so we were only slightly late into Perth. Once there, we learned that apparently there’s an outbreak of foot and mouth disease in Bali, so all passengers entering from Bali needed to undergo extra security screening, disinfecting the soles of their shoes and being interrogated over whether they’d walked within 500m of a cow. I tiredly told the agent that I hadn’t left Seminyak the entire time I was there – the closest thing I’d seen to a farm animal was the horse on the Ralph Lauren Polo logo - which seems to have been exactly the right answer as he instantly bypassed the screening areas and sent me back out into the real world.

Once home, I could finally sink into the peace of duty-free gin and building my off-brand Japanese Lego. Home is indeed sweet.