First let me begin by explaining why we have been unable to blog for three days. I feel sure many of you have missed your daily blog fix! Although we are in a lovely hotel in Lombok their Internet provision is very poor and whilst we have been able to pick up mail we have not been able to access any websites due to the paucity of the signal available.

So back to our travels. We left Bali and were escorted to the airport by a rep from Tour East who was extremely concerned that our flight back fro Lombok did not give us time to connect with our flight to Perth and so she started to change our arrangements whilst we were in the car. This involved phoning the rep in Lombok and several assurances that we didn't need to worry as they would sort it out.
She left us at the entrance to the domestic flight terminal and we then entered what can only be described as mayhem. There is no understanding of the notion of orderly queuing in Indonesia, we joined a queue and were moved by a porter, then a woman in the line next to us pushed in front of us , Rosemarie told her in no uncertain terms that this was not on. To be fair to her she eventually suggested that Rosemarie could go in front of her. The when we did reach check in our bags were overweight so we had to take a bill to the airline office to pay the excess. The airline office was somewhere to our right, but we were given no clear indication of exactly where it was. We joined a queue to find we were in the wrong place, this did not go down well with Rosemarie and eventually a  pleasant employee of another airline took pity on us and showed us where we should go. We did feel it would have been helpful of the airline had they put their name above the door in large letters.
Having paid the bill we had to return to our original queue but his time we went straight to the front of the line and pushed our papers forward. We were then assured our bags would be put on the plane which was good news as we could see them at the end of the conveyor belt waiting patiently.
Just to prove that the Indonesians love a good melee we then had to queue again to pay, our tax to leave the airport.
Having done this we made our way to our gate to find, yes you have guessed it, a large queue waiting for another flight to Jakarta. As there were no seats we had to stand until that plane had boarded. As soon as the last passenger had gone through they announced our flight and we were almost at the start of the scrum. We were checked in, ushered down some stairs, taken outside and told to wait. Eventually a bus came to take us to the plane.
We arrived in Lombok and were entertained by yet another queue as we had to wait for our baggage on the only belt in the airport which was also dealing with the arrival of another flight 2 minutes before ours.
By now we had had enough of queues but no, we were greeted by our rep who took us straight to the airline office where we had to get in line again to change our flight back. To add insult to injury the rep had no money and we had to pay the excess due although to be fair we were assured that we would get the money back.
This took about 30 minutes, we were then treated to an interesting drive to the hotel which included stopping at a village famed for its spinning, and yes Rosemarie did buy a scarf, and then to a stop at a roadside cafe to try Bakso a famous Indonesian soup, of meatballs and garlic which our guide treated us to, although we had to pay for the drinks, which seemed fair enough. The soup was delicious.