Think Air Travel is Stressful Where YOU Live???

On 29 July my alarm rang at 5am and I was disappointed to hear a soft rain outside the hotel window. Great omen for the day.

I had done quite a bit of shopping and stocking up on things to bring back with me (things you can only get in Vila or Santo) and wrestled with all my heavy bags and boxes, arriving at the check-in counter in Domestic Departures at 5:45am. The weight limit for my flight is 10kg of checked baggage, plus one carry-on. I checked a total of 18kg and had two carry-ons (one of which weighed at least 10kg) and I didn’t get charged. I must be REALLY cute at six in the morning. (Unfortunately, this was my only piece of good luck of the day.) I think I got through easily because I was slightly early. Check-in is usually either 60 or 90 minutes before the flight, but for the 7am flight, people like to show up at 7 and expect to get through check-in like they’re royalty.

We took off at 7:10 after waiting for a few of these people, and had no problems during the flight until we got to Santo. Apparently, it was raining so hard in Santo we couldn’t land. We literally flew around in circles for half an hour until the rain let up and we were able to land at 8:30. The baggage guys held open umbrellas for us as we got off the plane to make our run across the pavement (such service!!) and then I hung out in the airport cafe for a while with coffee and toast, listening to the rain.

My next flight was scheduled to leave at 11:40. It would be that plane’s third flight of the day, as it first had to fly to Ambae and back. It was raining so hard in Ambae, however, that the flight was delayed two hours, then got stuck there for a while before it could come back to Santo. My flight finally took off a little before 3pm, after we’d been sitting in the Santo airport literally all day.

Before we continue, some background info: the outer-island planes are really small here…. I think they’re called “Harbin Y12 IV,” if you want to Google them… I’m not sure if there’s an accurate image or whatever. There are five rows of three seats – one on one side, two on the other – and the back row has two more seats. Usually half of the seats are full of luggage and there are less than ten passengers. There are no flight attendants. There is no safety speech. There are no stairs to the door – the airport worker rolls the stairs to you (think of the podium for a marching band drum major). There is no door between the passengers and the pilots – you can see out the windshield, you can see the pilots, and if you’ve got a good seat, you can see the radar.

That said… we took off from Santo in a steady rain. Usually the radar screen is a map and it’s cool to have the bird’s-eye view of where the plane is going. On this particular day, however, it was more important to watch the weather radar than the map radar. The screen was pretty much a solid green with pockets of yellow and red. At home in Michigan, I would find this super cool and go to the window to watch for the impending storm. While flying in a very small airplane, I did not find it quite so cool.

I found it even less cool when I noticed that one of my pilots was reading the newspaper. I can’t make this crap up. I don’t necessarily mind the idea of “autopilot” on a big Boeing international flight, but this was a bit much.

The plane eventually stopped flying straight north, rather, we started flying around these pockets of red. Once in a while it felt like we were in an earthquake which was, of course, impossible, as we were flying through the air. They flipped back to the map radar as we approached Gaua, which was to be our first Banks stop. Unfortunately, we were actually really far southwest of Gaua, way off the usual route. The airport is on the northeast side of the island, but we had already descended too far to fly across the middle of the island (which is an active volcano whose last major explosion was approximately 18 months ago) so we had to fly around it. This was actually kind of cool, because the southern and eastern coasts of Gaua are lots of cliffs with waterfalls and such, and there was some good scenery… when we didn’t have enough turbulence to make us seasick. It literally felt like a carnival ride a few times.

We were able to land in Gaua, which was surprising because grass landing strips tend to be sketchy in rainstorms. The flight from Santo had taken almost an hour instead of the 40 minutes it was supposed to take. The airport worker negotiated with the pilots and got every passenger on the plane at once, changing the day’s flight from Santo-Gaua-Sola-Gaua-Santo to Santo-Gaua-Sola-Santo. She was worried that they wouldn’t be able to land the second time.
My boss happened to be on my flight and flicked on his cell phone for long enough to find out that the weather was clear in Sola, a 15 minute flight away. Of course, as soon as the plane landed there (after no problems) it started raining. I was tossed (with all of my bags) into the bed of a truck and mi swim long ren (had my shower in the rain) on the ten minute drive to my house, where I was dumped out soaked to the bone around 4pm.

And now I remember why things must ALWAYS be packed in Ziplocks when traveling in Vanuatu.