Snaking queues had formed at the departure halls in Jakarta’s Soekarno-Hatta International Airport on Monday as stranded passengers sought refunds and tried to get updates on when they would be able to fly.
Finna, who was supposed to fly home to Jakarta from Malang, a city in East Java, on Sunday morning, described the frenzy at the airport as flights got repeatedly rescheduled.
“It was very crowded because passengers from the morning flights had piled up, while those scheduled for later departures still didn’t know what would happen,” the 46-year-old told BBC Indonesian.
“We were all glued to the flight information screens.”
Not wanting to deal with the uncertainty, Finna eventually spent the night on two intercity trains before arriving in Jakarta at 03:00 on Monday.
“Everyone seems to be racking their brains [figuring alternative transportation options]”, said Jo Shaw, who was visiting Indonesia with members of her conservation charity Save the Rhino International.
Shaw’s team had axed their plans to camp out at Java’s Ujung Kulon National Park after authorities raised its alert level for the Anak Krakatau volcano.
“Being stranded in an airport hotel is a relatively minor inconvenience to be resolved in a few days hopefully,” Shaw said, adding that she was more concerned about the teams working on the ground with the rhinos under such environmental conditions.
A newly wed Malaysian couple who had just spent a week in Bali said they were told that the next flight back to Kuala Lumpur wouldn’t be until 11 September.
“What are we going to do here for another five days? We only prepared enough money for our honeymoon and [were supposed] to go home yesterday,” Amir Hamzah told Malaysia’s national news agency Bernama.
“We thought we would just sleep at the airport for a few hours and then take the morning flight home [on Monday]. We never thought we would end up being stuck here for days,” the 29-year-old said.
On Monday, Indonesia’s Geological Agency had warned that “the probability of further eruptions in the coming periods remains high”.
Volcanic ash reached as high as 6,000m on the Java side of the volcano and 15,000m on the Sumatra side and in some parts of Java’s westernmost province Banten, the meteorological agency BMKG said.
Anak Krakatau sits on the Sunda Strait about midway between the islands of Java and Sumatra.
The most recent eruption occurred at 20:23 on Sunday, according to the agency.
“We cannot ascertain when this will end due to the dynamic weather,” Transport Minister Dudy Purwagandhi said in relation to the temporary closures of the affected airports.
Dudy said on Sunday that authorities across the airports have been conducting tests every 30 minutes “to anticipate whether the ash spread is widening or subsiding”.
