Thursday, March 30, 2017

Asia Mega Tour II - In Transit...Bali High!

Yesterday was spent primarily in transit. No not primarily...singularly and exclusively in transit.

We had a 10 AM flight out of Taipei Tanyuan Airport to get to Denpasar, Bali, Indonesia. It is 5:15 hour flight. There was little traffic on the highway but the airport was a zoo. The check in lines for EVA Airlines were incredibly long. Thankfully they are a Star Alliance partner and I, as an exulted  Star Alliance Gold Member for Life (all the wars with the Magical Unicorn Pony God of Travel paid off!), get all kinds of privileges. In fact the privileges are better on the partner airlines than they are on my home airline, United. One is a separate check-in line that was probably only 10% the length of the other line.

Then we went and went through the longest line waiting for security I've ever encountered. It wound all through the terminal. A guy ahead of us flew a lot on EVA and said he'd never seen anything like. Despite the long line, it ended up only taking 40 minutes to get through and we had plenty of time to got to the EVA Lounge (another perk of Star Alliance Gold) where they had an amazing buffet.

A note on carry-on luggage. More and more airlines are getting extremely tough on the amount of carry on and are doing it in the form of weight restrictions. EVA is one. They also had a 7 kilo limit. But after our experience with JetStar Asia we had a plan. We move cameras and computers around temporarily, and then we move them back as soon as we have the 'you've passed the weigh in tag' successfully on the bags.

The flight was delayed because of a computer issue (once we were in the plane and pushed back) and then we were in a long line to actually take off, so the flight was almost 6 and a half hours long from time we boarded. We were close to the front of the plane and there was no one else arriving so we breezed through immigration and customs. We had a nasty surprise when we found we could not change our Taiwan Dollars into Indonesian Rupiah but there was an ATM.

Next followed a 3 hour drive with Bob of Bob's Tours, self-proclaimed best driver in Indonesia until we got to the villa we're renting. It was 8 PM. They had a meal ready for us. It is a beautiful place and I will have a more vivid description and pictures in the next post.

1 comment:

alexis said...

sounds like you made the best of a tricky situation! I guess it's still better than sitting in a boat for a few months like a couple hundred years ago.