The last country on our BaD Journey to Asia was Indonesia. We were stoked to do a ton of diving, relax on some beaches, and really soak up the last weeks of the trip. But first, we had to get there.

Luckily we were able to fly out of Krabi. Unluckily, the route to Bali (and then Labuan Bajo) was neither direct nor cheap. The flight path we were offered took us through Bangkok to get to Bali. (We would have to go north to then go south.) We could fly from Krabi to Kuala Lampur, and Kuala Lampur to Bali, but only if we booked them as individual, one-way tickets. Since doing that cut the cost by more than half, it was an easy choice. But we did have one main concern: immigration.

In our 3-hour “layover” we would have to go through immigration, get our bags, go through customs, get to the ticket counters, re-check our bags for the next flight, and go back through immigration and security. Would a red flag pop up when two people went in and out of immigration twice in a few hours? Would we make it in time to check our bags? Would we make the flight at all? It was a pretty tight timeline, but we made it — just in time to see our flight was delayed. Awesome. (And one of the weirdest parts was that the ticket agents came through the waiting area and collected our tickets, returning the stubs, before boarding even began. Anyone ever experience that before?)

The next challenge was to get from Bali to an area called Labuan Bajo. This was where booking individual, one-way flights got tricky. We had to use domestic airlines and websites to book this round-trip flight. But they would not allow us to use our US based credit cards while we were not actually IN the US. We tried all sorts of workarounds – including having family in the US try to book the flights for us. All failed. So when we made it to Bali (yay!) at 2 AM (boo!), all we could do was wait for the ticket counters to open at around 5:30 AM. So using our backpacks as pillows, we hunkered down and waited. And we were not the only people doing this. A handful of people littered the sidewalk and slept waiting for their turn to be able to go inside the terminal (or buy a ticket like us).

When the ticket desk we needed finally opened a few hours later, we had no idea if there would even be room on the flight we needed to take. But we got lucky and got on what turned out to be a very full flight about 3 hours later.

It only took around 15 hours, but we made it from Krabi, Thailand, to Labuan Bajo, Indonesia, where we were greeted with this view. The next day, we boarded a liveaboard to dive Komodo National Park and it was without a doubt one of the best weeks of our entire journey.