THE SOUTHEAST CONNECTION
>> Fly another Day

Police and us

An getting a little bored of posing…

On every big trip, we seem to have at least one encounter with the police. This time we arrived at the airport of Balikpapan with (what would turn out to be) falsified tickets. Appearantly, the travel agent we bought our tickets from that morning had deliberately booked us on tomorrows flight, edited the tickets before they were printed and overcharged us for this special service. So we were screwed, as the airline refused to check us in and changing the ticket dates would incur a hefty fee. After some discussion, the staff suggested we’d file a complaint against the travel agent with the airport police.

The police was quite helpful and after explaining our case, half the corps escorted us back to the travel agent, whose face turned pale when we entered his office accompanied by five law officers. The first thing the police did was taking pictures with their phones of everything and everyone. This, however, quickly escalated into a lenghty photo shoot of An posing with every single officer, which was great fun for everybody except for the travel agent who just sat there, undergoing it all.

To cut a long story short, the police did their job and everything turned out fine; we were able to catch the afternoon instead of the morning flight to Tarakan, at the travel agents expense. Why we hadn’t noticed that the dates were missing on our tickets, we don’t know, but maybe the fact that we rather impulsively booked this flight at six in the morning after arriving in Balikpapan on the horror bus, had something to do with it…

2 thoughts on “Fly another Day

  1. Hahaha…
    Toch mooi opgelost van die mannen ;-)

    Doet me denken aan een dikke vrouw in Krabi die me op soortgelijke wijze bijna liggen had. Uit wantrouwen ‘s avond de luchtvaartmaatschappij gebeld en te horen gekregen dat ik inderdaad niet voor die vlucht geboekt stond. ‘s morgensvroeg, toen de eerste nachtbussen met nieuwe toeristen arriveerden, effe wat keet gaan schoppen aan haar winkelke… en na veel geruzie dan toch correcte tickets ontvangen.

    Tja… zo vergeet ge nie da ge op avontuur zijt ;-)

    Have fun vrienden! …and keep posting!

    • Ja ge moet hier op uw hoede zijn, zelfs als ge een vlucht boekt!
      Maar in ‘t vervolg gaan we rechtstreeks naar de luchthaven en boeken we daar, toch als het voor dezelfde dag is, zoals we in Miri hebben gedaan om naar KL te vliegen.

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