Bali Belly

We’re a little behind on our posting here. We’ve been in Bali for about a week now and had every intention to post all about it when we got to Yogyakarta today, but things didn’t go exactly to plan. It appears we’ve both come down with a nasty case of what folks here refer to as “Bali Belly”.

The long and the short of it is that we must have eaten or drank something we shouldn’t have, though who knows what that could be! We’ve been pretty good about water, only drinking bottled water and juice, and have avoided restaurants that leave the food sitting out pre-prepared. Rachel thinks it may have been the cream and I think it was the “juice” we ordered which was more of a smoothie that I think had ice in it.

This morning we were supposed to get up early and take a taxi to the airport to fly to Yogyakarta. Instead, we each got up earlier than expected to take turns in the bathroom. It was clear that our bodies wanted to be completely empty. We managed to pull our stuff together and only had to make one emergency stop on the 15 min taxi drive to the airport.

When we got there we found the ticketing counter for Lion Air and were told that our flight had been canceled.  We hadn’t heard anything about this via email and were skeptical when the lady at the ticketing counter said the Yogyakarta airport was closed.  We had read that some of these discount Asian airlines will sometimes “cancel” a flight then re-sell tickets on that same flight at a higher price.  After pushing to get an explanation that the lady couldn’t seem to translate she simply wrote down the alert from her screen which said “Yogyakarta airport closed due to ma guar volcanic eruption”.

Oh… Well that’s a pretty good reason.

So, we stumbled over to the airport restaurant to drop our bags and take turns running to the bathroom.  I ordered a Gatorade, which I drank most of since Rachel couldn’t hold any down, and set about canceling our hotel reservations in Yogyakarta and contacting the company we bought our tickets through to get a refund then finally had to find a new hotel in Kuta since the one we’d been at was full.

Now, we’ve spent most of our day in our hotel, which is very nice aside from the rock hard bed and lack of windows, trying to recover.  By about 5pm I felt just well enough to walk the few blocks to get some safe beverages and some food to have on hand when we were ready to eat.

It’s been hard to get any useful information about the eruption or when the airport might be open again. The Yogyakarta airport website still shows our flight having landed on time today and is showing no delays, but I think we can both safely say that we’re glad we’re not there right now breathing in all of that ash.  We reserved this hotel for 2 nights and will have to make a call by then on what to do.  If the airport opens again we may head into Yogya and continue as planned or if not we may have to just skip Java altogether (the Bandung airport is also closed) and go straight to Malaysia.  Hopefully by then we’re both back in shape and holding down food.

http://www.wbur.org/npr/276836240/massive-volcanic-eruption-in-indonesia-blankets-region-in-ash