I've experienced my fair share of bad luck when traveling, but none of those trip horrors compares to the past week of travel.

Escape

I’ve missed flights, I’ve unwittingly slept overnight at an airport (Bangkok 1998), I’ve taken my 18-month-old baby into the Outback on a small plane in 51-degree heat, and as a mate reminded me on Instagram this week, I’ve even chased a French river cruise boat downstream in a taxi after a missed departure. But none of these trip horrors compares to the past week of travel.

Admittedly, I chose what could be the worst possible time to fly to Bali (and that’s saying something given its recent history of terrorist attacks and volcano eruptions). On the very same week we packed up our house, loaded our belongings into seven suitcases, and moved our entire life overseas, Indonesia went into its toughest lockdown yet, the kind that puts even Melbourne to shame.

I’d been dreaming about this adventure of a lifetime for at least five years. We’d enrol the kids at the well-known Green School and enjoy the spoils of a year living sarong-clad on the Island of the Gods. But it was Melbourne’s epic lockdown number two last year (with lowlights including two hours of daily outdoor activity, an 8pm curfew and near-on six months of home-schooling) that pushed my partner and I into action.

It would be the perfect antidote to 2020: a school with a huge socially distanced jungle campus, an outdoorsy curriculum, a focus on sustainability. My seven- and ten-year-old would go barefoot in the wall-less classrooms, learn to climb coconut palms and engineer a water recycling system all the while learning their ABCs. That my partner, having worked from home during Melbourne’s lockdown, could now work from anywhere sealed the deal.

Last week, just short of an hour into our adventure, this dream looked to be unravelling rather rapidly. In the four months leading up to our departure I’d read the small print on every email from the airline, I’d pored over government websites, I’d crossed t’s, dotted i’s and ticked all the boxes.

But little things can hamper big plans. Last week, at the Qantas desk on our departure day I was able to produce printouts of our negative Covid test results but not printouts that included passport numbers and birthdates, as required by the Indonesian Government. Who knew? No, we could not fly without one. Yes, we would miss our flight to Sydney and therefore our connecting flight to Jakarta. Yes we would lose the fortune forked out for five days of quarantine. Might as well say goodbye to the deposit on our villa in Canggu.

That Anna at Melbourne Pathology answered my call at 6.50 that morning, and that Charlie at Qantas (God bless you both) had faith that Anna would get that email through to me before boarding at 7.40am put some seriously good travel karma into play. That it only came through minutes before the gates closed for check-in to Indonesia is a thought that still tweaks me. When we finally boarded the plane, I cried.

Two days later, immersed in our five-day quarantine, tensions in Indonesia were running high. Reports of a shortfall in hospital beds and a dramatic increase in Covid cases was making me a little jumpy. Word from our man on the ground in Bali was that adults with at least one Covid vaccine were good to travel. But on the morning of our Jakarta-Denpasar flight, we were stumped by the news that kids could not travel with Garuda unless vaccinated. Keeping in mind there is no vaccination currently approved in Indonesia for children (under the age of 12) we were incredulous.

We scrambled for more information, not knowing what was true or false. Faced with an interminable long-term lockdown in Jakarta we had one last hope – last-minute seats on Citilink, a cheap airline that was inexplicably still allowing unvaccinated kids to board. We ran for that plane.

Landing on a tropical island has never felt so good.