Day 15 (Wednesday)

We made it down to JH. It was a bit of an adventure getting here (and not the fun kind of adventure) but we made it.

Our flight from LJ to here left at 8pm and was supposed to arrive at 9. I was even telling Lindsey about how this would be a nice quick flight compared to all the others. The flight down to JH was pretty bumpy and the pilot took a lot of hard corners. We think he was new. He flew all the way down to JH, started to go down and then at the last minute pulled up and kept flying. They came on the announcements and said the weather was too bad to land so we were flying up to the provincial capitol.

There is a concept here of saving face, and it is the idea that people will do just about anything to not be embarrassed or embarrass others about things. What we think happened is that the pilot missed the runway, and instead of trying it again and everyone knowing he missed, he decided to blame it on the weather and fly an hour and a half out of the way. I know it sound ridiculous, but considering we almost landed and there was no rain, it was probably the case.

So we landed in the Capitol, got off the plane, stood around confused for about 30 minutes while they decided if we would fly or stay the night (while there was lots of yelling in Chinese), and then got back on the plane where they fed everyone weird sandwiches before we took off, and then made the 45 minute flight down there. We landed at midnight.

Other than the delay, it wasn't all that bad of a trip. We spent the day going around with one of our friends, caught up on what has been happening down here, and ate some good South Asian food. We spent the afternoon at a coffee shop talking about helping with planting. We were also able to roast some coffee. Tonight we went to the night market and looked around for a while It has been a much slower pace down here than it was up in LJ.

Tomorrow we will catch up with another friend and see the ag work that he is doing here. Then we start heading back on Friday.