I’m going to be starting this new thing called “Around Asia” where I will be recounting some of the adventures we’ve had, um, around Asia. Any proper account of our Asian adventures would be incomplete though without a mention of what directly preceded them at the airport in Australia.
Just a night before it all went terribly wrong, all was right in the world.
We had just arrived in Australia feeling like jetsetters ready for a one night fling with the Super Sexy Siren of the Southern Hemisphere.
People do call Sydney that, right?
The reason we were only in Sydney for a solitary night wasn’t really the type of thing that most jetsetters would get mixed up with, but we hadn’t let that spoil our spirits one bit. Unlike most jetsetters who just fly into places for a night or two at the drop of their golden hat, we were actually forced to buy a flight to Australia at gunpoint by an airport check-in desk employee in Fiji.
Okay, okay, maybe she didn’t have a gun and maybe it was more of a counter than a desk. But she did speak to us in a very stern manner.
Why had she treated us this way? Well, we had shown up at the airport in Fiji to fly to New Zealand with a one way ticket and it turns out that countries and airline check-in desk employees really hate that move. As it was explained to us, flying in to a country on a one way flight is essentially the same as walking around like a loose cannon yelling “I might just stay in your country forever because I’ve got no ticket out, baby!”
We weren’t planning on staying anywhere forever or anything like that, we just didn’t know where we wanted to go after New Zealand yet. So I suppose I can see where they could take our lack of planning the wrong way and want us to have a flight out before we boarded our flight in. Only maybe, because the elephant in the room of course being that just because you have a flight out of the country doesn’t mean you have to actually board it, so there’s just a tiny loophole in their policy.
We were forced to buy a ticket out of New Zealand to Australia on the spot at the aforementioned Fiji airport, and then a few weeks later bought our flight on to Asia from Sydney, thus leaving us with one random night in Sydney.
In addition to arriving in Sydney feeling like jetsetters, we were also riding high as the world’s newest booze barons because we had just bought one of those “big ‘ol” bottles of vodka they’re always selling at the airport Duty Free shops.
Not the one that’s as big as a fire extinguisher, the next one down.
The original plan was to open that Russian beauty up in Sydney and toast to the good life on the roof terrace of the joint we were staying, as it had a marvelous view of the Opera House (see image above). For reasons that probably involved something called fatigue after a long day of sightseeing in the sun, we never got around to toasting. We ended up spending a sober night in Sydney just gawking at that view, bothering a few people to take pictures of us while gawking at that view, chasing down a great burger, and safely packing the bottle away in preparation for the flight the next day.
As thus, we arrived at Sydney Airport the next night with plenty of time to spare for our flight to to Asia and on cloud nine. We couldn’t believe our luck to have been “forced” to stay in Sydney for a night and had bees buzzing in our belly for all the tasty Asian food that we would soon be devouring. We assumed our place in a slow moving check-in line, and waited our turn. Eventually, we approached the check-in desk as proud travelers about to set off another leg of an epic journey.
We lugged our backpacks on to the conveyor belt, exchanged pleasantries, and leaned up against the check-in counter. The airline check-in desk employee went down the familiar line of questioning regarding whether or not someone had asked us to smuggle an Australian bush ferret for them on the flight and even offered some advice to me to turn my cap around, because the Malaysians apparently don’t like backwards hats.
She closed her questioning with this beauty: “Do you have a flight out of Malaysia?”
We had assumed that an Asian nation wouldn’t be as hard on us as the Antipodean ones had been because, after all, free spirits fly their way into Asia every day with the goal of doing nothing but wandering around the continent wearing hippie pants and finding themselves, don’t they? And all those goofballs certainly don’t book return tickets, do they? Plus, everyone knows that lightning doesn’t strike twice, does it?
We explained that we did not have a flight out but had no plans on moving to Malaysia and then were subsequently told that we couldn’t board the plane unless we bought a flight in the next 20 minutes.
Again.
We were then politely shuffled off to a penned-in area in order to book our flights on the faintest of faint WiFi signals.
It was a race against time and the reload button and it was definitely touch-and-go there for a minute, but somehow we managed to pull it off. We bought a flight from Malaysia to Singapore for six weeks into the future and once we showed them the e-mail confirmation, we were whisked by a walkie-talkie wielding supervisor straight to the front of the security line.
We were in the clear, but our clear booze wasn’t going to be with us much longer. That’s right, I had dumbly decided to put the bottle of vodka in my carry on bag thinking that since it was purchased at the airport it could be carried on the plane. Total bonehead move, I know, I know.
It all happened so fast that we didn’t have time to muster any tears or even attempt to put the whole bottle down in one fell swill like you see in the movies. We were forced to simply just wave it goodbye. From what I heard though, that bottle of vodka was the life of a raucous airport Christmas party later that year and was even blamed for one man using the boarding pass printing machine for, well, let’s not worry about what he did to that poor machine.
We still had to sprint through the terminal to make the flight and made it we did, just in the nick of time and a little sweatier for wear.
It was time to move on to Asia, a place like nowhere.