Travel: South East Asia

The night we waited for our son at Jakarta Airport was a sober awakening. As the passengers exited through the glass sliding doors, I waited, anxiously looking out for my tall handsome son to emerge, I was only slightly anxious as we had been waiting for him for four days but he had kept me updated and I knew he had made it onto the Doha Jakarta plane.

So after almost two hours of waiting I noticed that the Qatar Airways flight passengers were replaced by Singapore Airlines passengers, and then we started to panic. We tried to speak to officials but got shooed away. At this point we were desperate to find someone who could tell us where our son was but all we got was dirty looks and physical shoves, eventually my husband went to investigate.

While trying to pass a piece of paper with my son's name written on it to a porter, I saw my son emerging it was after 2am and over two hours after the plane has landed. He was as white as a ghost as he ran to me and threw his arms around my neck saying, "You won't believe what happened to me"

The story he told us was unbelievable and totally unacceptable. My eighteen year old son Dominic, who was deported from Doha to Johannesburg just four days before was picked out of the line at immigrations in Jakarta, put in a small interrogation room and told that he had insulted the Indonesian government and was to be sent back to Johannesburg on the next available plane.

He was kept the for over an hour, when two Senegalese guys, who were also kept in a cubicle next to his approached him and asked him what he was doing there, when he explained to them why he was being held there, they said, "Have they not spoken to you about their gift yet?" Dominic said that they hadn't so they advised him to put all the cash he had on him in his passport and hand it to the immigration officer, so that is what he did. Five minutes later he was out.

So this is how our "Family Travels" adventure in Indonesia started. We ran very fast out of the airport, and that night while my boy slept soundly in his bed I wept, realising that Indonesia for me had lost its magic, but this was just the beginning.

The next morning we left our luxury Four Season's suite and headed for the harbour to catch a boat to the Thousand Islands, or Kepulauan Seribu. Our limo taxi delivered us to the Disneyesque resort Marina harbour in Jakarta. As soon as we arrived, we were approached by a boatman who offered to take us to the islands for a measly 6 000 000 Rupiah (R6000) for a 30min boat ride.

Needless to say we declined and headed to the information centre where we found a sweet young Indonesian guy who was willing to help us finally get to the islands, but there was a problem. The tourist boats leave very early in the morning, the cost is from R450 per person one way and each island has an entry fee from R250-R550 per person, as they are private islands.

We were crushed, our Javanese island hopping adventure was slowly starting to slip out of sight and very slowly we realised that we were just not going to come right with our plan, so with a quick decision and an about turn we headed back to Jakarta airport and bought the last four seats on an Air Asia Flight to Denpasar. We had had enough of Jakarta and the island of Java and as we ran to catch our flight we reminisced on the times when we last visited the magical island of Bali and its beautiful friendly people.

I guess we did not anticipate to come head on with 250 000 Aussie revellers and 750 000 Indonesian thrill seekers descending on the same piece of paradise all at the same time. Well you can just imagine what we found, but that's a story for next week.