D

espite the reopening of Ngurah Rai International Airport in Denpasar, Bali, on Sunday, thousands of Australian travelers remain stranded on Indonesia'€™s top resort island and continue to wait for their chance to get onboard a flight and return to their country.

Ngurah Rai, one of the country'€™s busiest airports, and four other airports in East Java and West Nusa Tenggara, had been closed from Thursday night until Saturday morning due to safety concerns following the eruption of Mount Raung in East Java. The closure led to the cancelation of more than 300 flights in and out of Bali.

The airport was briefly closed down again on Sunday after Mt. Raung'€™s volcanic ash was reportedly heading toward Bali. The airport was finally reopened later in the evening after receiving approval from the Transportation Ministry.

Many Australian travelers, however, found themselves stranded in Denpasar on Monday, as they could not immediately get a flight black to their homeland.

Janine Strang, who had spent a three-week holiday in Bali with her husband and their three children, for example, said that the closure of Ngurah Rai had upended her family'€™s initial plan to return home on an AirAsia flight on Friday morning.

'€œWe have had to wait until this Saturday to fly because the airline said that all flights before that day had been fully booked,'€ she told The Jakarta Post.

Strang said that the flight'€™s cancelation had caused her husband to delay his return to work.

'€œIt'€™s getting a bit frustrating as we don'€™t know for sure when we are going to get home,'€ she said.

Another Australian, Alby Eckel, has also been stranded in Bali since Friday morning. Eckel and his two friends rescheduled their Malaysian Airline flight on Sunday, but again, the flight was canceled because the airport was closed for more than five hours on that day.

'€œWe hope we can again fly soon. We are running out of money,'€ Eckel said at Ngurah Rai.

Two Australian airlines, Jetstar Airways and Virgin Australia Airways, canceled most of their flights on Monday. According to the flight information desk at Ngurah Rai Airport, both Jetstar and Virgin scheduled seven flights each on Monday.

Both airlines had previously cancelled some of their flights to Bali before the airport was closed on Thursday.

Meanwhile, Garuda Indonesia and AirAsia kept flying to Australia on Monday. Garuda, for example, ran three flights on Monday to Sydney, Melbourne and Perth. The three flights brought a total of more than 700 passengers to Australia.

During a visit to Ngurah Rai on Monday afternoon, Transportation Minister Ignasius Jonan said that the government would not impose sanctions on stranded tourists whose holiday visas were running out.

'€œWe have coordinated with immigration about this. We understand that this has been caused by a natural disaster,'€ Jonan said.