100% Chance!

Well, the airplane situation continues to change but Yeti Air still has not gotten us to Dolpo.

To begin with, yesterday’s plan to drive to Surkeet last night was reversed within an hour, allegedly because the plane was too small to carry both us and our baggage. But the airline assured us that there was a “100% chance” we would go out on the first flight today.

So we packed all our luggage again today and went to the airport at 7am. No plane. At 8am, I joined our guide, went upstairs and talked with the manager. The plane was in Kathmandu overnight and left at 7:45 to fly to Simikot (in the far west) and would come immediately after. We will fly at 10:30am.

We sat and sat, and nothing happened. Finally, at 10:30, I went upstairs to join several other furious group leaders. The story now was that the flight left Kathmandu at 9:45 due to weather delays, has to go all the way to Simikot, stop a few more places, and won’t be here before 1pm. And that’s too late to fly into the mountains where the winds will be heavy and the runway too short. (That last part was actually true.)

At this point, I lost my temper in a measured way. You can’t yell in Asia – if you raise your voice you have permanently lost the argument. But I made it clear that I was not going to leave the manager’s office until he got us a plane. I offered to sleep overnight on the plane, an idea that another group’s sherpa guide thought was brilliant. So I just sat there with him for hour after hour until he stopped making up stories.

Finally his story crystallized that it was indeed too late in the day to fly to Dolpo, so they had diverted the plane to several other airports that had people who needed to get out. It would arrive around 3, spend the night in Nepalgunj and then we would be on the first flight tomorrow morning. “This time I finally have the airplane under my control.” (So why did he tell all the other stories if he didn’t?) To demonstrate his seriousness, he weighed our bags and issued boarding passes for tomorrow.

I continued to shadow the manager. He finally invited Marcia and me for lunch at his house, which turned out to be the Yeti Air company housing back in town. He was actually very nice, serving us dahl-baht (lentils and rice), an omelette and some delicious cucumbers. He turned on the TV and we watched tennis and cricket news on Aljazerra. At the end of lunch, he assured us that the plane was now 30 minutes away from Nepalgunj and would be not go anywhere else today. He did admit that he has four planeloads to take and they won’t all go tomorrow. But our group is small and we were the earliest, so we definitely have the first flight. He instructed us to come to the airport at 5:30 tomorrow morning and we will take off at 6:30am. 100% chance!

Since Yeti Air’s airplanes seem as rare as their mascot, I insisted on riding back to the airport to make sure it was true. Amazingly, two planes landed in rapid succession. The first reboarded passengers and flew back to Kathmandu, but the second was actually the one we had been waiting for. 17 people got off, just as he said, and the pilot did a final check and shut everything down for the night. The plane is now sitting there with its wings tied down, so maybe we’ll have a Yeti tomorrow morning after all.

Meanwhile back in town, it is so hot that even the animals are wallowing in whatever puddles they can find. Marcia and I have our same room with both AC and hot water, and we have high hopes of getting out tomorrow morning. 100% chance!

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