‘Where are we?’ Flying in developing countries leads to unexpected landings

May 21, 2026 — 5:00am

The plane is about to land and I have no idea where I am. My ticket says Bangkok to Paro, but the pilot mentions some other city’s name.

I ask my neighbour if she knows where we are; she shrugs, as confused by my English as I am by the pilot’s mumbled announcement.

Google Maps is offline, so I flip through the inflight magazine in futile search of a route map. As a last resort, I pore over the maps stored in my brain. Am I in Myanmar? Bangladesh? I draw a blank.

Despite the world’s manifold uncertainties, the airborne traveller always knows where they’ve come from and where they’re going. Notwithstanding an emergency, a flight’s departure and arrivals points are fixed resolutely to the map.

It’s profoundly dislocating, then, to lose one’s way mid-flight. I first encountered this compass-spinning phenomenon years ago on a flight from Johannesburg to Kilimanjaro in northern Tanzania. More than halfway through the journey the plane banked to the right.

“We will be making a detour,” announced the pilot.

I peered over the man in the window seat and saw below the beginnings of a city. Emerald forests became a metropolis of scuffed soccer fields and bitumen freeways and tin-roofed houses beside dirt roads. Touching down, I saw international carriers lined up outside the terminal.

“Welcome to Dar es Salaam,” the flight attendant said.

I strained my neck for a better look. This was my first time in Tanzania’s biggest city, but my porthole offered few clues to its personality.

Like any other airport, workers loaded and unloaded luggage and zipped about in buggies. The snapshot whetted my appetite. Disembarking hours later at Kilimanjaro International Airport, the flight attendant explained: Dar es Salaam was officially the second stop on this route, but a group of politicians bound for that city had persuaded the pilot to drop them off first so they could attend an important meeting.

Years later, as I made yet another unexpected pitstop on a flight from Paris to Cotonou in Benin, the plane’s tiny window filled with coppery dust. Once again, my ticket hadn’t hinted at this stopover, and I’d failed to grasp the city’s name when the French flight attendant hastily announced it. This time my neighbour helped me out.

“Niamey,” he said. “Capital of Niger.”

The man was an American USAID worker and had lived here for several years. The gritty miasma was the harmattan, a seasonal wind that carries great clouds of sand inland from the Sahara Desert.

“It gets into everything,” he said, before disembarking.

Taking off from Diori Hamani International Airport, I felt bereft at the fading sight of yet another unexplored city, of the Niger River coursing through the Martian landscape and houses quivering behind the veil of sand.

Now, adrift somewhere between Bangkok and Paro, I lean into the mystery. The river below yields to freshly ploughed fields and houses encircled by palm trees. It’s 7.30am and the temperature on the ground, says the flight attendant, is 32 degrees.

Taxiing towards the terminal, I see rows of IndiGo planes and a tanker with “India Oil Corporation” written on its side. And then the sign: Lokpriya Gopinath Bordoloi International Airport.

Ah, I’ve got it! I’m in Guwahati in Assam – one of the north-east Indian states separated from the mainland by the creation of Bangladesh during partition. The river I’d seen, the mighty Brahmaputra, is nearing the end of its own circuitous journey through Tibet, India and Bangladesh.

Soon I will depart for my final destination, Paro in Bhutan, after meeting – momentarily – a place whose disjointedness thoroughly mirrors my own.