Day 9 (June 17, 2022 – Ubud, Bali, Indonesia): “Getting Adjusted To Bali”

It was about 3am when I awoke without an alarm, which allowed me some time to get caught up on the blogging as well as some photo organizing.

About an hour later, Julie got up and we took some time to get our belongings all organized and packed up so we could go to the Darwin Airport and catch our 9:30am flight to Bali.

This was a flight where we kept getting emails saying that our flight had changed, but it kept changing from the harder-to-stomach 10pm flight to a more manageable 9:30am flight.

I wasn’t sure why we kept getting the same emails over and over again saying the itinerary had changed when in fact it didn’t.

Regardless, we left the Darwin Resort at 6:05am, and we proceeded to drive in the pre-dawn darkness which was already bustling with some auto traffic this early in the morning.

We got to the Darwin Airport at 6:25am, where we then looked for where we were supposed to park the rental vehicle for the Enterprise Rent-a-car, which wasn’t nearly as well signed as say Hertz, Avis, Europcar, and other well-known rental car dealers.

It wasn’t until after making a few rounds within the parking lot that we saw an Enterprise sign against a fence in the rear of the car park, and that was where we emptied out the car, locked the car, and then kept the keys and proceeded with our luggage into the terminal.

Once inside, my job wasn’t done yet because I then had to hike all the way to the other side of the terminal where the arrivals were, and that was where I put the key into the drop box.

Then, we were able to go through the health screening line before checking in our luggage at the check-in line.

From there, we went through security, then had a breakfast at 7:10am at the Dome within the terminal.

We took our sweet time at this place before we went over to yet another screening area for the international gates, of which our one that was going to Bali was also within.

So that took a few more minutes, and we managed to get to the waiting area by around 8:45am, which was just in time for the 8:50am boarding call for our Jetstar flight to Bali.

Once our rows were called (since we were sitting towards the back of the plane), we managed to get onto the plane and proceeded to get comfortable.

Actually, plane boarding went on without a hitch, and even this flight took off on time at 9:30am, which was probably the first time that any of our flights and connections were on time on this trip so far.

I don’t know if that said anything about how Qantas runs their schedules or if they also happened to be at the busiest airports while Darwin was a small airport so it wasn’t exactly rocket science to get people on and taking off for Denpasar, Bali.

And so started the next leg of our Australia and Bali journey, where we expected to be shifting gears and getting into the hot and muggy climate of Indonesia and saying goodbye momentarily to Australia…