Last Chance to See - Douglas Adams [10]
The following day we finally succeeded in leaving Denpasar airport for Bima. Everyone knew us from the ructions of the day before, and this time the narrow man who had peered at us through wreaths of smoke was wreathed in smiles and terribly helpful.
This, though, was only softening us up.
At Bima we were told that there was no flight at all to Labuan Bajo till the following morning. Perhaps we would like to come back then? At that point we started to get into a bit of a frenzy, and then suddenly we were unexpectedly seized and pushed through the crowds and shoved on to a dilapidated little plane that was sitting fully loaded on the tarmac, waiting to take off for Labuan Bajo.
On the way to the plane, we couldn’t help noticing that we passed our pile of intrepid baggage sitting on a small unregarded baggage cart out in the middle of the tarmac. Once we were on the plane, we sat and debated nervously with each other about whether we thought they might be thinking of loading it.
Eventually my nerve broke and I got off the plane and started running back across the tarmac. I was quickly intercepted by airline staff who demanded to know what I thought I was doing. I said “Baggage” a lot and pointed. They insisted that everything was okay, there was no problem, and that everything was under control. I persuaded them at last to come with me to the baggage cart standing in the middle of the tarmac. With hardly a change of beat, they moved smoothly from assuring me that all our luggage was on board the plane to helping me actually get it on board.
That done, we could finally relax about the baggage and start seriously to worry about the state of the plane, which was terrifying.
The door to the cockpit remained open for the duration of the flight and might actually have been missing entirely. Mark told me that Air Merpati bought their planes second-hand from Air Uganda, but I think he was joking.
I have a cheerfully reckless view of this kind of air travel. It rarely bothers me at all. I don’t think this is bravery, because I am frequently scared stiff in cars, particularly if I’m driving. But once you’re in an airplane, everything is completely out of your hands, so you may as well just sit back and grin manically about the grinding and rattling noises the old wreck of a plane makes as the turbulence throws it around the sky. There’s nothing you can do.
Mark was watching the instruments in the cockpit with curious intensity, and after a while said that half of them simply weren’t working. I laughed, a little hectically, I admit, and said that it was probably just as well. If the instruments were working, they would probably distract and worry the pilots, and I’d rather they just got on with what they were doing. Mark thought that this was not at all an amusing observation, and he was clearly right, but nevertheless I laughed again, really rather a lot, and carried on laughing wildly for most of the rest of the flight. Mark turned and asked a passenger behind us if these planes ever crashed. Oh yes, he was told, but not to worry—there hadn’t been a serious crash now in months.
Landing at Labuan Bajo was interesting, because the pilots couldn’t get the flaps down. We were quite interested