Homeward Bound

We sleep in. As we are packing up our belongings, the phone rings. I answer it and am told that the guide service headquarters is on the line for me. They want to assure me that everything is fine and that the guide will be there on time. I thought this was a bit strange.

Until they tell me, "No doubt, you have heard of the local plane crash that happened this morning". Uh...what? How am I feeling, they ask. I'm fine. How was your trip to Nepal? Did you enjoy your stay? It was great and yes, I enjoyed it immensely. They tell me that the guide will be at the airport at 12:30 as scheduled and hang up. I'm a little taken aback by the way they slipped in the whole thing about a plane crash. Like it's an everyday thing.

After a quick breakfast, our airport guide shows up and I ask him about the crash. He says that it was one of the Everest mountain tour planes. They are not sure what caused it as of yet. He believes it had to do with some rain and strong winds from the morning. The plane went down while coming in for a landing; Nobody survived the crash. Our guide's friend was the pilot. Seems that this specific airline has been operating that same tour for 12 years. This is their first incident. I guess, in the long view, that is a pretty good track record.

If we had been playing by the rules and not moving things around, our Everest flight was supposed to be this morning. You read that correctly. According to the tour, this morning was to be our attempt. But, because we made it clear to our guide that we all wanted to do this, he wanted to give us as many attempts as we could get to make sure it happened. On this trip we have missed an Earthquake, a hospital bombing in Agra (while we were in Agra) and now a plane crash. Raj had said that we were lucky that we got to see some of the things we saw. I guess, as a group, we are luckier than he thinks.

We take the trip to the airport and say our goodbyes to the guide and crew we head in to catch our flight. Of course, the check in counter for our airline (SpiceJet) doesn't open for another hour, at least. So, we park it in the tiny Kathmandu airport waiting to check in to our flight. After we get checked in and through security (three sets of pat downs, one x-ray, two wandings, and one physical bag search) we wait in a small and overly crowded departure lounge.

There is an earlier SpiceJet flight to Delhi that has been delayed and is still sitting on the tarmac. It had to have been sitting there for four or five hours already. Come to find out from another passenger in the lounge that it had a bomb threat on that plane and that's why it still sits there. In retrospect, I'm not so sure that was actually why it was there. It eventually took off. It may have just been bad weather.

We sit and wait for our flight to get called for boarding. If everything went off according to the schedule, we had almost 2 hours before boarding. 3 hours later we are told that nothing has been happening in the terminal because there is a small plane stuck on the runway. We talk amongst ourselves and are pretty much about to volunteer to go out on the runway and push the plane out of the way: no charge. Shortly after that we start hearing planes take off in rapid fire. Our flight number is called and we rush to the get into the land of 'no personal space'. An Indian guy with a large belly saddles up behind me and basically dry humps me, he's so close. His belly is pressed into my back. I want to start throwing elbows. Onto the plane, down the runway and into the air we go.

We land in Delhi for our transfer to our Air India flight. We are forced to fill out immigration forms to enter the country. Even though we don't intend on leaving the airport. I leave the address while staying in India blank. The immigration guy doesn't give me any real guff about that after telling him that we are just there for transit. We have to pickup our bags and then check into our outgoing flight. The problem is that they require a printout of the ticket information for each person to be let into that section of the airport. I have mine printed out, but, we don't have one for Barbara. I can't tell you how many people I argued with about this. They won't let her in unless she has a printed ticket (apparently, an email with your itinerary is a valid ticket to the idiots acting as security) or a boarding pass. I tell them that I don't have one, how can I get one. At the check in counter. Great, but, they wont let her go *to* the check in counter without it. They do not see the problem with this catch-22. I finally am told that she has to wait outside the check in area while I go in and try to get someone to get me a printout. More arguing at two different counters and I get someone to print out a piece of paper with some flight information and Barbara's name on it. What an entirely pointless and frustrating experience that was.

We get checked in to the flight and head towards security. Oh, and I now have to fill out departure immigration forms. I do have to explain to this immigration official that I never left the airport and therefore do not have an address that I stayed at while I was in India. I have been in the country a whole hour and a half, at most. He approves our departure. I mentally spit on their backwards bureaucracy. We go through multiple levels of security. We even have to go through security again right before our gate. How about doing security once and doing it correctly instead of doing it several times? I am still a little frustrated at it all.

We take off from Delhi on our 14ish hour journey. Barbara and I watch several movies and get some fit full sleep. We land in Newark. I am not happy with this, as we should have landed at JFK. Seems that JFK had some fog and the pilot redirected us. He didn't even get the right STATE! The announcement comes that we have landed in Newark and they hope that we can catch our connecting flights from here. WTF? Right, I'll just call the airport and have them send my connecting flight here to pick us up. We sit on the jet way. An hour goes by and we are told that the crew is in touch with their home office and they are trying to determine what they are going to do. Another hour goes by. More wishy-washy announcements. Another hour. Then another. We are finally told that we have refueled and will be flying over to JFK. We'll only be about 5 hours late. Nothing to worry about. I sure am glad that I purchased the cheap ticket option that forced our layover in JFK to be almost 11 hours. We should be able to get through immigration, customs, terminal change, check in, security and a lunch stop without any problems. Our friends Ann and Don are not so lucky. They miss their connecting flight by a couple hours. Looks like the next probably flight for them to get home is tomorrow at 12:30am.

So, here I sit at Gate 10 in the JFK airport waiting for our flight. There's another hour before boarding. Instead of waiting to see how things turn out, I am going to presume that our flight leaves on time and is a nice, smooth flight. We've had enough delays on this trip home. We deserve a nice, smooth flight. By the time we hit our homestead, we will have been travelling for almost 48 hours. A shower and bed awaits us.