Holiday in Pakistan (2): getting there
I’ve done so much foreign travel that I know that, on most trips (especially outside Europe), something goes wrong and one just has to accept this and go with the flow. However, this has been my first holiday abroad when the first major thing to go wrong was before I’d even left the country.
We are flying Qatar Airways. We should have left London’s Heathrow Airport at 4 pm on Friday, but eventually departed at 9 am on Sunday – a delay of over 40 hours! Our original aircraft had a technical fault and was withdrawn, other flights to the Middle East were full because of the end of Ramadan, and so we had to spend two nights in a Crowne Plaza hotel surviving on voucher-covered but very indifferent meals.
Eventually we flew from London to Doha (six and a half hours) and then Doha to Lahore (three hours), arriving at the airport at 1.15 am and checking into it hotel room for 3 am local time on Monday morning. Five of us were in this escapade; the others in the Jules Verne group arrived earlier and started the original programme without us. We will have a separate, curtailed programme for the Lahore part of the holiday before we link up with the rest of the group.