The One Hour Flight (or so they said)

Sabai dee from the People's Democratic Republic of Laos. My journey from Chiang Mai to Laos was much longer and more tedious than expected. For starters, I boarded a flight bound for Luang Prabang and ended up in Vientiane. No, I didn’t get on the wrong flight, but my flight was re-routed due to weather over Luang Prabang. Not only did I end up in the wrong city, we were delayed to begin with. I was originally scheduled to take off at about 3:00 but didn't get airborne until 7:30. In Chiang Mai, we were waiting for the plane - they said there were 'technical issues' and that it would be arriving shortly. It was raining in Chiang Mai when we left – the rain was coming from the tropical storm off the coast of Vietnam - but it wasn't too bad. After about 45 minutes in flight, they announced that we were going to be landing in Luang Prabang. We started to descend and the landing gear was put down. I remember looking out the window and seeing the landing gear illuminated by the flashing beacons from the bottom of the plane. It was definitely an eerie sight. The plane was a prop plane and the landing gear came out from under the prop. As we descended, the plane began to bounce around we were hit with a good bit of turbulence. It was fairly intense, but I don’t think that it was too bad - I figured the extra bouncing could be attributed to the small size of the plane. We continued to descend and the city came into view. I saw the temple in the center of town which sits up on top of the mountain. There was a green light coming from the temple and in the stormy light, it looked very (again) eerie. We were very low over the town when all of a sudden, I felt the plane start to climb and bank sharply. After a few minutes, it became apparent that we weren’t on approach for landing anymore. Shortly after the cabin lights were turned on again, another sign that we weren’t going to be landing. At this point we hadn’t heard anything from the crew yet. Finally, they informed us that we were going to be re-routed to Vientiane instead because of the weather. It took about 40 minutes to get to Vientiane and we finally landed at about 9:40. We took off at about 7:30 for what was supposed to be a 50 minute flight. We were supposed to take off at 3:05. It was a long day. And it didn’t end there. We walked off the tarmac and entered immigration still unsure as to what was going to happen. We weren’t sure if we were going to be left to our own devices or if we were going to be flown to Luang Prabang or what. We all went through immigration and I got my Laos visa and stamp and then walked out into the baggage claim hoping to see my bags but saw only an empty room. There were no bags waiting or helpful airline personal. I walked out without my bag and through customs, which was empty. I found the Laos airlines office and they started to explain what was happening and told me to not worry about customs – it was taken care of. We were booked onto a flight for the next morning and then were bussed to a hotel where they put us up for the night. After the waiting and confusion earlier in the day, we were finally being taken care of. We checked in and I bought a few cans of Beer Lao, promptly consuming those and fell asleep. I wasn’t in Luang Prabang, but I was in Laos – finally.