Bali airport reopened on Wednesday following a closure of two days due to a volcano eruption that spread ash across the holiday island, Indonesian authorities announced.
The closure had left tourists stranded and created flight chaos.
“Bali’s international airport started operating normally,” air traffic control provider AirNav said in a statement, adding that operations resumed at 2:28 p.m. (0628 GMT).
The reopening of the facility does not mean that the danger of the volcano was over. Authorities downgraded an aviation warning to “orange”, one level below the most serious.
The decision to resume operations followed an emergency meeting at the airport, weighed up weather conditions, tests and data from AirNav and other groups, AirNav added.
Singapore Airlines Ltd said it would resume flights between Singapore and Bali on Wednesday. Australia’s Qantas Airways Ltd said it and budget arm Jetstar would run 16 flights to Australia on Thursday to ferry home 3,800 stranded customers.
A large plume of white and grey ash and smoke hovered above Agung on Wednesday, after night-time rain partially obscured a fiery glow at its peak over the last few days.
Agung towers over eastern Bali to a height of just over 3,000 meters (9,800 feet).
President Joko Widodo implored residents living in a zone around Agung deemed at risk to seek refuge in emergency centers, as winds sending an ash cloud southwest across the island once again halted flights.
He ordered all concerned ministries and agencies, as well as the military and police, to help Bali's government deal with the disaster.
"I hope there will be no victims hit by the eruption," he said.
Earlier, the transport ministry had said Bali’s airport, the country’s second biggest, would stay shut until at least 7 a.m. on Thursday (2300 GMT on Wednesday).
A spokesman for Bali’s I Gusti Ngurah Rai International Airport said as many as 430 domestic and international flights had been disrupted on Wednesday by the closure of the airport, about 60 km (37 miles) away from Mount Agung.
Authorities have told 100,000 people to leave an area extending up to 10 kilometers (6 miles) in places from the volcano as it belches gray and white plumes.
Nearly 40,000 people are now staying in 225 shelters, according to the Disaster Mitigation Agency in Karangasem. But tens of thousands more have remained in their homes because they feel safe or do not want to abandon their land and livestock.
In the village of Tulamben inside the exclusion zone, farmers were seen ploughing their fields with cattle Wednesday, seemingly unbothered by the smoking mountain behind them swelling with orange lava.
For others, there was a sense of urgency.
Some stranded tourists managed to get off the island before the airport reopened, but they faced an arduous journey involving crowded roads, buses, ferries and sometimes overnight waits in yet another airport in Surabaya on the island of Java.
The volcano's last major eruption, in 1963, killed about 1,100 people, but it's unclear how bad the current situation might get or how long it could last. A worst-case scenario would involve an explosive eruption that causes the mountain's cone to collapse.
"An analogy would be the twin towers collapsing in New York on 9/11," said Richard Arculus, a volcano expert at Australian National University. "You saw people running away from the debris raining down and columns of dust pursing people down the street. You will not be able to outrun this thing."
Indonesian officials first raised the highest alert two months ago when seismic activity increased at the mountain.
Indonesia sits on the Pacific "Ring of Fire" and has more than 120 active volcanoes.
