Last Chance to See

told that serenity was the best frame of mind with which to tackle Indonesia and we decided to try it. We tried serenely to point out that it actually said “Confirmed” on our tickets, but he explained that “Confirmed” didn’t actually mean
confirmed
, as such, it was merely something that they wrote on tickets when people asked them to because it saved a lot of bother and made them go away.
    He went away.
    We stood waggling our tickets serenely at thin air. Behind the check-in desk was a window, and behind this a thin airline official with a thin moustache, a thin tie, and a white shirt with thin epaulets sat smoking cigarettes and staring at us impassively through narrow wreaths of smoke. We waved our tickets at him, but he just shook his head very, very slightly.
    We marched serenely over to the ticket office, where they said it was nothing to do with them, we should talk to the travel agent. A number of decreasingly serene phone calls to the travel agent in Bali simply told us that the tickets were definitely confirmed, and that’s all there was to it. The ticket office told us that they definitely weren’t, and that’s all there was to it.
    “What about another flight?” we asked. Maybe, they said. Maybe in a week or two.
    “A week or two?” exclaimed Gaynor, who had a proper job at the BBC to get back to.
    “Moment,” said one of the men, took our tickets and went away with them. About ten minutes later he returned and gave them to a second man who said, “Moment,” and wentaway with them in turn. He returned fifteen minutes later, looked at us, and said, “Yes? What do you want to know?” We explained the situation all over again, whereupon he nodded, said, “Moment,” and disappeared again. When, after a longish while had passed, we asked where he was, we were told that he had gone to visit his mother in Jakarta because he hadn’t seen her in three years.
    Had he taken our tickets with him? we enquired.
    No, they were here somewhere, we were told. Did we want them?
    Yes, we did, we explained. We were trying to get to Labuan Bajo.
    This news seemed to cause considerable consternation, and within minutes everyone in the office had gone to lunch.
    It became clear that the plane was going to leave without us. We had the option of doing the first part of the flight, as far as Bima and then being stranded there, but decided instead to stay in Bali and go and deal with the travel agent. No more Mr. Serene Guys.
    A minibus took us back to the travel agency, where we stormed slowly up the stairs with all our baggage and angrily refused to sit and have coffee and listen to a machine which played “Greensleeves” whenever the phone rang. There was a sense of muted horror in the air as if one of us had died, but no one actually paid any attention to us for nearly an hour, so in the end we started to get angry again and were immediately shown into the office of the director of the agency, who sat us down and told us that the Indonesians were a proud race and that furthermore it was all the fault of the airline.
    He then soothed at us a great deal, told us that he was a very powerful man in Bali, and explained that it did not help the situation that we got angry about it.
    This was a point of view with which I had some natural sympathy, being something of a smiler and nodder myself,who generally registers anger and frustration by frowning a lot and going to sleep.
    On the other hand, I couldn’t help noticing that all the time we had merely smiled and nodded and laughed pleasantly when we had been laughed pleasantly at, nothing had happened and people had merely said “Moment, moment” a lot and gone to Jakarta or peered at us impassively through narrow wreaths of smoke. As soon as we had geared ourselves up to get angry and stamp our feet a bit, we had been instantly whisked to the office of the director of the travel agency, who was busy telling us that there was no point in us getting angry, and that he would arrange an extra flight specially for us to Labuan Bajo.
    He tried to demonstrate the uselessness of stamping our feet to us with maps. “In these areas,” he said, pointing to a large wall map of half of Asia, “it works. East of this line here it doesn’t work.”
    He explained that if you are traveling in Indonesia, you should allow four or five days for anything urgent to happen. As far as our missing plane seats were concerned, he said that this sort of thing happened all the