Travel Indonesia

What would a trip be without the adventure and a little anxiety?

Well this time around we received our fair share of excitement. It started off as a cool journey. Our grown up sons Damian and Dominic kitted up with laptops and headphones and all the 21st century gadgets, Tomas and I as chilled as cucumbers we swore we would travel light and just enjoy our journey.

The catastrophe struck in Doha, with not much time to spare we ran for our connecting flight to Jakarta when one of the immigration officials spotted that Dominic's passport expired two weeks short of the six-month required by the Indonesian government.

We were not given many choices, we would either stay with Dominic in Doha and get deported with him to Johannesburg later that day or let him travel to South Africa and get our family to help him get his Polish passport, which is valid for ten years.

In tears I embraced my son and told him to be brave, he just grinned and assured me he would be fine, after all he was more than happy to go back to Johannesburg and spend some time with his mates and his love interest, "Its cool mom, don't stress," He told me, "I will see you in couple of days."

I knew he would be all right; he has been traveling since he was three years old. He is worldly wise and he looks more like a twenty four year old adult than an eighteen year old teen. As soon as we landed in Jakarta we booked into my favourite hotel group in the world, The Four Seasons Jakarta. And this really was the wisest decision we could make. They offered us a magnificent family suite with an office and free Wi-Fi so we could coordinate reuniting us with our son.

Thank God for family and friends. My mom was responsible for getting Dominic his passport, my friends picked Dominic from the airport and gave him a place to stay and fed him and we needed to reconfirm his flight schedule as for some unknown reason Qatar Airways used his ticket to deport him back to Johannesburg.

From the start we believed that it was Qatar Airways' fault that Dominic got shoved from the plane in Doha, firstly when booking our flight they should have seen that his passport was not sufficiently valid to allow him to travel in the first place, and secondly how was he allowed to leave Johannesburg with a faulty passport?

These are the issues I intend taking up with Qatar Airways as soon as the jetlag subsides and I catch up with my admin.

Sadly we had to buy another ticket for Dominic and needless to say we were furious about this unwanted expense. Anyway, what could we do, we needed to get our son to Jakarta so we just paid.

While waiting for Dominic to join us we enjoyed the luxury of the Four Seasons Hotel and did some sightseeing on Jakarta. Selamat Datang Monument(Selamat Datangis Indonesian for "Welcome"), also known as theMonumen Bunderan HI. It is a monument located inCentral Jakarta,Indonesia. Completed in 1962, Selamat Datang Monument is one of the historic landmarks of the sprawling metropolis of Jakarta.

The design of the statue was sketched by Henk Ngantung, at that time the vice governor of Jakarta. Indonesian sculptor Edhi Sunarso constructed the statue, which depicts two bronze figures of a man and a woman, waving in a welcoming gesture. The woman is shown holding aflower bouquetin her left hand. The height of the figures are five metres from head to toe, or seven metres from the tip of the raised arm to toe. The two figures stand atop a pedestal. In total, the monument is about thirty meters above the ground. Selamat Datang Monument symbolizes the openness of the Indonesian nation welcoming the visitors of the Asian Games IV.

Here you will find the five star hotels and all the shopping you could ever dream off. No visit to Jakarta is complete without a stop at the Selamat Datang. The best way to get there is in a taxi. Please note that even though taxi's are cheap here, we have failed to find one honest one and a short drive will cost you anything between 15 000 - 150 000 Indonesian Rupia (R15 to R150). To be honest, I got totally incensed and if catching a taxi to a far off place I would switch my Google maps on my iPhone and show my taxi driver the circles he was making around the centre, just to charge us more money.

But I guess this little scam is nothing compare with the shenanigans that continued to haunt us as we tried to have a fabulous time in Indonesia. Catch part three of our Indonesian adventure next week when Dominic has to pay his way to enter Jakarta.