How do you plan for the unplanned?

When I promised myself a few months back that I would appreciate the return of travelling like I had experienced my own first brushes of freedom 30 and a bit years ago, I had meant the joys of getting clothes rapidly tailored (in Saigon, check), road trips (to Semarang and KL, check) and buying local coffee (in Hanoi, Manila and Jakarta, check).

I hadn't meant to invoke the ghosts of Filipino brown-outs, unreliable air-traffic control, long waits in the airport followed by a dash for a hotel, any hotel, before starting the process all over again the next day.

I think in the old days I used to sleep on the terminal floor, so some things at least have definitely improved.

But being in one of the flights from Japan that got turned back over Philippines' airspace did bring back some things I had not experienced on a trip for a long time: people on the flight talked to each other, and we all went with the flow.

As soon as the plane turned around, I was chatting to the Japanese lady and her son next to me, who was intending to practice his English before heading to the US for the summer, as the first announcements were all in English, and I did my best to do explain the situation (I wouldn't call it translate - more hand signals than words).

On landing, the space engineer from Sweden who had studied theoretical physics, but loved that his job tracking satellites in the Arctic Circle necessitated getting his hands dirty to fix stuff, discussed his chances of getting back to Jakarta, where he hadn't been since he was two. After that, he showed me pictures of the Northern lights flowing over his tracking station.

The Malay lady who worked for travel operators in Singapore, and had been on recce-ing trips to look for halal or halal-friendly restaurants in every prefecture of Japan, turned out to be a goldmine of information. On her most recent trip, she had taken a gang of Singaporeans who had all fallen in love with riding their Brompton bikes around the island during the pandemic, to cycle across the seven bridges connecting the island of Shikoku to the mainland.

When she showed us these, the American couple nearby showed us pictures of the same bridges, of their recent bike trips around that region, recommending it to us. They both worked with animals: she's a vet, he trains them, currently horses, although he had previously trained dogs that detected illicit drugs at the US border.

As well as fascinating and charming, the American couple put all of our frustrations in perspective, as they were connecting to a cruise from Singapore to Malaysia and Thailand. As the delays dragged on it became clearer that not only would they miss their night in Singapore, but also the cruise departure time. With only a few months to go before their first child is born, that was supposed to be their last big trip without children. All our minor annoyances immediately paled.

All I missed was my last day of making sure The Money Awareness and Inclusion Awards entry submission website works ok (not that I would know how to fix it anyway!), but instead hung out with my family as we chatted to these people and others, all of us trying to work out what to do next. Sitting on the floor of an airport terminal, forced together into a community that celebrated the same small victories (Free brownies! Free Macdonalds - but with a one-hour queue!), while waiting for the same bad news, reminded me of travel schedules of the late 20th century.

It seemed back then that flights between Europe and Asia were priced in inverse proportion to the number of stops times length of layovers: London to Bangkok via Vienna, Moscow and Delhi on Aeroflot, anyone? Flight delays and the resulting camaraderie seemed much more common then.

Instead of a smooth trip, we got an interruption of a night in Narita, at a hotel with a zen garden perhaps even more wabi-sabi in January than at any other time of year, and with pyjamas so nice they had to place a sign banning guests from wearing them into the lobby!

I'm not saying I want to do it again, and I definitely hope the rest of this year goes a little more smoothly than the first day, but the unexpected return of the unexpected return did bring back a sense that I should open my trips up a bit.

More impromptu discussions, more planning for the unplanned, more life. This is what travel should all be about, after all.?