Vietnam and Cambodia
Getting There
I'm off on another adventure! So where to this time? The first photo is the starting point for the longest flight I have ever taken, while the second is where that flight ended—over 16 hours later!
This is Los Angeles and that is fog over the airport on the left. From the clear evening skies over Los Angeles, we descended into the murk as we approached LAX—and then the engines roared and the nose pitched up and we emerged out of the goo back into those brilliantly clear skies. I didn't see any ground and neither did the pilots! Uh-oh. Will we have to go somewhere else? I started thinking about long bus rides back to LAX from Burbank or Long Beach or wherever they may need to divert. Not too appealing. But LAX has a pair of south runways (the 25s) that extend maybe a mile farther east than do the pair in the north (the 24s), so we'd shoot an approach to one of the 25s before we'd give up on landing at LAX. Sure enough, that little easterly offset of the ends of the 25s was just enough to be able to see the runway before the fog extended all the way down to the ground. We landed on our second try.
A few hours later, I had moved myself to another plane, this one much larger and longer-legged than the plane that had flown me from Tucson to Los Angeles. The airport was still shrouded in fog, but in the very early hours of the next day we backed away from our gate and inched our way back to the 25s. Finally, the engines roared and we ever so slowly accelerated through the fog. This flight was going to take over 16 hours, and that requires a lot of fuel, and that fuel weighs a lot, which made the acceleration sluggish, and yes, I understand all that and trust that the pilots had done their sums correctly, but is this beast going to get off the ground? Way farther down the runway than I had expected, we lifted off and lumbered into the sky. Phew! Some 16 hours later, we arrived at this flight's (although not my) destination—Hong Kong! At sunrise! We landed there, but 2 hours later I got back on the same airplane and flew onward, this time to Bangkok, Thailand. But I wasn't finished. In Bangkok, I boarded yet another plane to my final destination—Hanoi, Vietnam! Total trip time from Tucson to Hanoi was about 35 hours.