Travel

The only good thing about our journey was that at least the plane was actually due to leave. If we had been booked the day before, we wouldn’t have gone anywhere. Pakistani airspace closed with tensions between Pakistani and India. Somehow all of the other airlines managed to reroute flights but athai Airways couldn’t manage to do so until the next day having negotiated with China to fly over their airspace. This meant that the flight was two hours longer and with all of the processing of passengers left over from the day before, the flight ended up being delayed by three hours. Of course all that meant we missed our connection to Luang Prabang and spend another 3 hours in 3 different queues while the airline chaotically sorted out the mess. Tempers were getting frayed with a few people queue jumping because of course there was no queue management system, just a free for all. They were simply overwhelmed and had not worked out an effective system to deal with hundreds of stranded passengers. We only just managed to make a flight which left around six hours after we should have left, and of course our bags didn’t make it. They have just turned up the next day, thankfully. Not a great start to our holiday!