With exactly thirty flights in eight months under our belts with never a cancellation or major delay, you could say we had it coming. The gods of justice conspired to make our very last international flight of this epic year the one with ALL the fun and games.
When the international airport gets bombed, I suppose you should expect some of the airlines to get a little jittery, and Cathay Pacific reacted instantly – pulling their entire service out of Colombo. We strongly suspect however that they were looking for an excuse to cut the Colombo – Bangkok route … it was delightfully if unprofitably empty on the outbound leg. We muttered curses about their lightweight attitude. After all, Air Lanka, Thai and Singapore were showing loads of bravado and still flying out – even though Air Lanka had their entire fleet destroyed the last time the LTTE had decided to target the airport. Cathay Pacific? Pah. Blinking wusses.
By contrast you’ve almost got to admire the LTTE’s guts. They managed to cobble together two aeroplanes without anyone noticing (though UFO sightings had been going up in Northern Sri Lanka for a couple of years …doh) and fly themselves 400 kilometres down to Colombo, unnoticed, drop a load of bombs next to the airport, ermmm … noticed, and then turn round and get home – uncaught. Somehow the Sri Lanka government hailed it a success (?!!) because no aircraft, military or otherwise, were destroyed. Okay, that’s one way of looking at it I suppose.
But Cathay were out of there like a rat down a drainpipe. We would never have known if I hadn’t absentmindedly flicked through a local paper, which mentioned it in passing. Joe went into organisational overdrive: we contacted our travel agent Trailfinders, who assured us Cathay were flying. We contacted Cathay, who assured us they weren’t. 1-0 Cathay. Could they tell us what they were going to do about it? Nah. Cathay Pacific, nil pointes. Joe suggested they might reroute us, which they thought sounded like a good idea. He faxed them. Phoned them. Phoned them again. He’s as tenacious as a leech once he gets going. They asked if we could come into the office on the 5th. No, says he calmly, we will instead spend the day on the magnificent beach of an entirely different country. Joe and the clerk finally agree to meet up at the airport on the day we return from the Maldives before 8pm. All will be sorted, and she’ll have provisionally booked us onto a different flight. The amount of time they talked and faxed, we expect it to be like an old friends’ reunion.
So our 5 day mini break within the major break was spent in blissful relaxation and a state of wirelesslessness, gorging ourselves on delicious food like recently released prisoners and totally happy in the knowledge we (or should I say Joe) had done all we could to pin down the next leg.
Alas, the leg broke free.
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