Apart from this highlight the guided tour was profoundly depressing. When we told our guide that we didn’t want to go to all the tourist places he took us instead to the places where they take tourists who say that they don’t want to go to tourist places. These places are, of course, full of tourists. Which is not to say that we weren’t tourists every bit as much as the others, but it does highlight the irony that everything you go to see is changed by the very action of going to see it, which is the sort of problem which physicists have been wrestling with for most of this century. I’m not going to bang on about Bali being turned into a Bali Theme Park, in which Bali itself is gradually destroyed to make way for a tatty artificial version of what used to be there, because it is too familiar a process to come as news to anybody. I just want to let out a squeak of frustrated rage. I’m afraid I couldn’t wait to leave the most beautiful place on earth.
The following day we finally succeeded in leaving Denpasar airport for Bima. Everyone knew us from the ructions of the day before and this time the narrow man who had peered at us through wreaths of smoke was wreathed in smiles and terribly helpful.
This, though, was only softening us up.
At Bima we were told that there was no flight at all to Labuan Bajo till the following morning. Perhaps we would like to come back then? At that point we started to get into a bit of a frenzy, and then suddenly we were unexpectedly seized and pushed through the crowds and shoved on to a dilapidated little plane that was sitting fully loaded on the Tarmac, waiting to take off for Labuan Bajo.
On the way to the plane we couldn’t help noticing that we passed our pile of intrepid baggage sitting on a small unregarded baggage cart out in the middle of the Tarmac. Once we were on the plane we sat and debated nervously with each other about whether we thought they might be thinking of loading it.
Eventually my nerve broke and I got off the plane and started running back across the Tarmac. I was quickly intercepted by airline staff who demanded to know what I thought I was doing. I said `baggage’ a lot and pointed. They insisted that everything was OK, there was no problem and everything was under control. I persuaded them at last to come with me to the baggage cart standing in the middle of the Tarmac. With hardly a change of beat they moved smoothly from assuring me that all our luggage was on board the plane to helping me actually get it on board.
That done we could finally relax about the baggage and start seriously to worry about the state of the plane, which was terrifying.
The door to the pilot’s cockpit remained open for the duration of the flight and might actually have been missing entirely. Mark told me that Air Merpati bought their planes second-hand from Air Uganda, but I think he was joking.
I have a cheerfully reckless view of this kind of air travel. It rarely bothers me at all. I don’t think this is bravery, because I am frequently scared stiff in cars, particularly if I’m driving. But once you’re in an aeroplane everything is completely out of your hands, so you may as well just sit back and grin manically about the grinding and rattling noises the old wreck of a plane makes as the turbulence throws it round the sky. There’s nothing you can do.
Mark was watching the instruments in the cockpit with curious intensity, and after a while said that half of them simply weren’t working. I laughed, a little hectically, I admit, and said that it was probably just as well. If the instruments were working they would probably distract and worry the pilots and I’d rather they just got on with what they were doing. Mark thought that this was not at all an amusing observation, and he was clearly right, but nevertheless I laughed again, really rather a lot, and carried on laughing wildly for most of the rest of the flight. Mark turned and asked a passenger behind us if these planes ever crashed. Oh yes, he was told, but not to worry – there hadn’t been a serious crash now in months.