Darwin holiday

My best friend and I started planning this holiday back in 2019. So it's been quite a long wait - thanks to Covid!

We had planned the trip for July 2020, but everyone ended up in lockdown.

We postponed it to July 2021, but leisure travel wasn't really feasible with mandatory hotel quarantine. Besides, most of the tourist attractions and accommodation didn't open that year.

We didn't even think about doing it in July 2022, because I was at a critical stage of flight training in PNG.

Why July? Because it's the cooler and drier time of the year. In the wet season (Oct-Mar), many roads become impassable and most of the tourist attractions close down.

Once we had decided to go, booking everything was pretty straightforward. We already had an itinerary and had researched where to stay, so it was just a matter of deciding on dates. We chose to avoid the school holidays, and to be in Katherine for show day.

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The day finally arrived and Jess dropped me off at Hagen airport. I checked in for my 10:00 flight and waited. And waited. And we all waited. Finally a staff member made an announcement - the plane would be arriving at 12:00. I started panicking. My flight from Moresby to Brisbane was scheduled to depart at 1:35. It was almost certain that I would miss it. I asked the ground staff what would happen, they said they would let the people in Moresby know. It wasn't much consolation.

Sure enough the plane arrived just after 12:00. I had resigned myself to the fact that God was in control and there was nothing I could do but wait, and then run once I got to Moresby. We took off from Hagen at 1:00 and landed in Moresby at 1:50. I collected my bag and motored over to the international terminal. The departures board confirmed that I had indeed missed the flight to Brisbane.

There was no queue at the service counter and the ladies set about rebooking my ticket for the next day and arranging a hotel room. But then an idea came. Also listed on the departures board was a flight to Cairns, departing at 5:00 that afternoon. I asked if it would be possible for me to get to Darwin via Cairns instead?

"We'll have to get permission to change your routing. I'll send an email."

I kept my thoughts to myself about how stupid it was to rely on email as a form of urgent communication, especially on a Sunday, and found a seat to wait while God did His thing behind the scenes. A few minutes later I saw some familiar faces walk through the door - a MAF couple who had been visiting Hagen and were on their way back to Cairns! I chatted with them for a while, until the service lady called me over to say my changes had been approved and I could check in.

I checked in and was told I would have to collect my bag in Cairns and check it in again. This made me nervous as I only had 1.5 hrs in Cairns, and Jetstar (who I would be flying with for the Cairns-Darwin flight) closes their bag drop 40 minutes before the flight, even if it's late. Again I just had to trust God that He would work things out.

As a precaution, I checked in for the Jetstar flight online. Uh-oh... I needed to print my boarding pass before coming to the airport. What a joke! But once again the service lady was happy to help me out by printing the pass for me.

To my surprise our flight left Moresby right on time. The plane was only half full, so getting through immigration and customs in Cairns was no trouble and I was out of the terminal with about an hour to spare.

Although the flight to Darwin was delayed by half an hour, I was still scheduled arrive before my friend. To top it off, my new Jetstar ticket had a $15 in flight food voucher included!

After arriving in Darwin I saw that the flight I was originally booked on from Brisbane to Darwin was going to be over an hour late, which meant that my friend would have had to hang around for an hour and a half!

As I reflected on the day I could see God's fingerprints all over it:
- arriving earlier than planned, even according to the original flight schedule
- seeing the MAF couple in Moresby
- not having to worry about whether my bag would make the connecting flight, because I had to pick it up at each stop
- meal being included from Cairns to Darwin
- Moresby staff being willing to print the Jetstar boarding pass for me

It was a humbling lesson in how God was, as usual, able to make good things come out of what seemed to be a bad situation.