Last day in Indonesia.
We’re being picked up for our trip to the airport at 7.30pm, flight leaves about 10pm. With the horrible queues at the airport here, this should be just enough time to get through and run to the plane before it takes off.
Got up for breakfast, couldn’t help myself but load up on bacon, pancakes, and croisants.
Back to the room to lounge around on the bed and watch weird TV, relax, and catch up on the journal. But today is really a nothing day, just rest, pack, and have a really tiring flight.
At about 1pm, Claire came into the room and said "hey, isn’t today your birthday?", we’d both completely forgotten, we’ve been so busy, travelling around and having a good time… Hah. Does it mean I’m old if I start forgetting my birthday?
This is the first time I’ve had no cake, and no candles. Well, maybe pancakes are close enough to cake, I certainly did smother them with maple syrup and brown sugar.
Took a quick walk, then got a lift to the Galleria in Nusa Due for lunch, I wasn’t very hungry (after my big breakfast), and didn’t want to change any more real money into rupiah, so I just had a (really really) nice icecream sundae drenched with grand marnier. Just about perfect, I thought.
We packed, worried about all the DVDs, then went to wait for our ride in the bar.
The queues at the airport weren’t as bad going out as coming in, probably only took about 25-30 minutes to clear the check-in, and the departure desk.
The flight was very painful, leaving a late, about 10.30pm (Bali time), and arriving in Auckland at about 2.30pm (NZ time), there wasn’t really any way to get the sleep right, we tried to sleep as much as possible, and Claire managed to get a bit more than me, but by the time we made it back to Auckland (after a stop at Brisbane, where they were extremely efficient checking us again, and where Claire had a lovely croisant with strawberry jam) we were pretty stuffed.
I was falling asleep on the sofa, but felt like it wasn’t time for bed, flying east suxxx0rs, the west is the best.
It’s really weird when two days sort of get mushed together into one, and not very nice.