A

We had been very happy to learn about Angel Airlines from Jan's brother Dave and had readily plunked down our money to buy a return ticket from Hong Kong to Bangkok for our two week vacation.

We were due to arrive in Bangkok in the early evening of Friday and had arranged to spend the night there before heading north to meet up with Dave and Jhap. We had a busy time before getting to the airport. First we had to get from Shenzhen across the Chinese border to Hong Kong (a border like the Berlin wall, designed to keep people in, rather than out). It was a familiar and therefore easy process. Once in Hong Kong we had various chores to do, including mailing a package to England to take advantage of Hong Kong's much cheaper and much more efficient postal service. Our last stop was at the bank to verify that our Chinese client had paid the next installment of our consulting fee and arrange to transfer it to our U.S. bank account. Another familiar and therefore trouble-free process.

Finally, then we were ready to head over to Pedder Street to catch the bus to the airport. All went well, and we arrived in Hong Kong's still new Chek Lap Kok airport in good time. We checked in and waited to be called to the gate. The call didn't come and didn't come. We asked what was going on and finally were told that the plane was delayed. We ended up sitting there until almost eight o'clock in the evening when the company finally admitted that the flight had been cancelled. We were unhappy but resigned and after hanging around for another hour just in case, we glumly walked over to the bus station to catch some kind of courtesy shuttle to the hotel the airline was going to put us up in.

We could hardly believe it when the shuttle bus didn't show up and were just about to go back into the airport to give Angel Airlines a piece of our mind, when a young AA rep came running up to tell us that there was another flight to Bangkok that we could go on if we wanted to. Apparently Angel had bought some surplus seats from Emirates on their 10:30 pm flight. We immediately agreed, rushed back into the airport and through customs and finally on to Bangkok.

We arrived at 24:30 Bangkok time and happily took a taxi from the airport to the hotel we were booked into in Bangkok, the White Palace. We were happy to learn that the airport has taxi dispatchers that record customer destinations and registered taxi numbers to expedite any problems. We encountered this system in Colombia, where security from kidnapping is definitely desirable. By 1 a.m. we were happily in bed, too late to call Dave, but confident we could do so in the morning. All is well that ends well.

The return journey proved much less eventful, but we don't think that Angel Airlines survived for very much longer.