Fifth Time is a Charm

The last couple of days I have had a very Balinese experience.  We decided to go to Sumatra for spring break to see the orangutans and Pulau Weh, an island off the northern most tip of Sumatra.  I have been researching flights and narrowed it down to flying on Lion Air through Jakarta into Medan and out of Banda Aceh.

I went to book the flights online and 'verified by visa' would not accept my credit cards, any of them.  I called all the credit card companies before going to notify them that I would be in Bali, but I never thought to notify 'verified by visa' so I presume this was the challenge.  

I decided to go to a travel agency that was recommended, but they were unable to book tickets in their Ubud office and said I would have to go to Denpasar, the capital, which I try to avoid.  

Our driver Gede said, "no problem, just call the airline and book over the phone." "How will I pay?" I asked.  "When you get to the airport," he responded.  I questioned whether they would really hold a reservation without payment, but figured it was worth a try.  When I got home, I called the airline and after a long, comical phone call with me spelling in a mixture of Bahasa Indonesia and English all of our names and explaining that yes my last name really is Husband and that the boys' last name is Husband-Meyer not Meyer with Husband as a middle name, the reservation was complete, except payment.  She asked for my ATM card number, but it had to be from a specific list of only Indonesian banks.   Then she said, "no problem, you just have to go to the airport by 11pm tonight to pay."  This was not going to happen.  

I brainstormed for a bit and decided to call Paul, our very helpful Canadian neighbor who has an Indonesian bank account and a local ATM card.  He came over, I booked the flight and when we got to the payment portion it said we had 3 hours to get to an ATM machine to pay for the tickets.  You can pay for tons of things here via ATM; electrical bills, cell phone, who knows what else. He said, "no problem, I will take you on my motorbike to an ATM and you can pay for it."  Off we went, but at the ATM, I wasn't able to use my ATM card or his ATM card.  Neither of our issuing banks were on the list, but we didn't understand from the instructions that the ATM card had to be from the certain list and not that you had to use an ATM at a bank on the list.  This was explained to us by a security guard at the second bank we tried.  

The next day, I went to a different travel agent that advertised that they sold tickets on Lion Air.  After about 1.5 hours of sitting there while they entered all of our info, not really much besides our names, birth dates, the flight info we wanted and my cell number, I paid cash and walked out with 4 tickets for each leg of our flights.  It turned out that the boys' names were too long so they had to be manually entered into Jakarta, whatever that means.  Once the agent realized this, things sped up quite a bit. 

All in all, a pretty boring story, but I had to get it out and also I thought I would share some of the realities of living here. In the end, it took me about 6 hours to book our tickets, but I have them now.