Business Class on Merpati Air?

Our guidebook mentioned that regular ferries ran between Lombok and Bali. Some take as long as 8 or 10 hours, others as little as an hour. We planned to just show up at the pier and catch one of the fast ones to Bali today, so imagine our surprise when we found out that the fast ferries no longer run. Good job we checked before trying to get one. Not fancying a day out on a slow rusty boat, we bought a couple of plane tickets instead. Here we are aboard a Merpati flight sitting in row 1. Row 1 is not business class, there is only one class: cattle. David is glad at least as he has free extra leg room. We were the first to check in which meant we got the good seats, but a very long wait in the departure lounge of Materam Airport. We entertained ourselves with reading all the tourist brochures about Bali and practicing our Japanese: there were hundreds of leaflets and all in Japanese! They mainly advertised spas, coach trips, Japanese restaurants and surf shops. What made us laugh was that in Japanese Bali becomes バリ(Barry).

Brief pause during take-off….

You should have seen the plane shake and rattle at take-off! The noise was pretty scary too. It couldn’t be worse than when we took a light aircraft into southern Patagonia in a storm could it? (http://jomynard.tripod.com/traveljournal/index.blog?start=1100723149). I tried not to think too much about it until we landed safely in Barry 30 minutes later.

There was a “whoop” from the flight deck. Perhaps they were celebrating landing safely against all odds. Perhaps one of the crew said “That rubber band did the trick after all!” As we were getting off the plane we noticed that the lockers were held together with tape. I wouldn't want to see the engine. Why oh why did we buy a return ticket? We could have tried the other company, Lion Air (Motto: “We make people fly”) http://www.lionair.co.id/.