The Great Escape

After a couple of quiet days in Pokhara - highlighted by the, err, 'quirky' International Mountain Museum - we arrived back in Kathmandu on the 13th October, with not much left to do before our flight on the 22nd.

A few trips to Thai Airways later we'd concluded that there was no way our flight could be moved forward, everything flight between Kathmandu and Bangkok was booked up until Christmas. On the 16th we decided to role the dice and try to get on a flight by stand-by. We and 20 other people waited for 4 hours only to watch one person get on the flight. A group of 5 people had been turning up at the airport for the last 4 days, sneaking one person at a time onto a flight.

The next day we were down at the Thai office to check if our waiting list flight had come through for that day. The office computers were down, we waited until 11.30 but with no information. The only way to find out was to go to the airport, if our flight had moved we'd lose our booking on the 22nd. A rapid walk back to the hostel for our bags, frantic arrangements, and then taxi ride (fingers-crossed to avoid traffic jams) got us to the airport at 1pm, the flight due to leave at 1.50pm.

We hadn't made the flight via the waiting list and there were 40 people ahead of us on the waiting list, but we thought we'd stick it out for an hour and started chatting with a couple we'd met the day before. The attendant called all business class tickets to the counter, whilst another attendant quietly came round and asked Claire, I and the other couple to approach the counter - he'd recognised us from the day before. Giddy with excitement we tried not to get too far ahead of ourselves. When the bags disappeared out the back, and the boarding pass was in my hand we proceeded through customs and security with gigantic smiles.