Luckily we never had to wait too long. Had a very nutritious breakfast of chicken kebab and then headed into customs. After we got through customs we remembered that you can’t take more than 100 ml of liquids with you and then had to drink 0.5 a litre of water in the space of about 5 minutes before we went through security. I was pretty full.
While checking in we had our first incident of mistaken identity. In the line, Sandra rolled over a broken piece of someone else’s suitcase and had some Chinese lady speak to her in Chinese to tell her that her suitcase had broken. Sorry lady, no Chinese here.
Mistaken identity count 1.
Flight was good albeit boring – I guess that happens when you have to spend 10 hours on a plane. Steve wasn’t feeling too well on the flight though, not travel sick but he just had a dull headache for the last half of the flight which is always fun. Watched Alice in Wonderland, Aliens vs Monsters. The most annoying part of the flight so far has been the never ending queue for the loo when I had to go. I think it took me 15 minutes before I got in for a pee.
In summary, long flights = Fail, travel snacks = Awesome!
Our flight had a one hour stopover in Shanghai at 7:00 which was pretty crazy. We got told pretty much no information about what we had to do other than we had to go through immigration and then enter the “transit area” before returning back to the plane. So, we walked the 0.5 km of the terminal to the immigration and were chatting with some other confused travellers whom weren’t sure what the deal was and then they showed us these handwritten cardboard boarding passes they’d been given for the connection to Beijing that we didn’t have.
That was bad. So, we turned around, walked the 0.5 km back to the gate just to find that there was nobody there apart from a little Chinese man whom couldn’t do anything to help us. Although it was hilarious have him talk to Sandra in Chinese, and look strangely at her when she didn’t reply.
Mistaken identity count 2.
Traipsed the 0.5 km back to immigration to find that another plane had arrived while we were gone and the queue was now three times as long (oh yeah – another queue). At the immigration desk we asked the lady what was going on and she told us there would be a man with a sign to direct us to our next flight. She was lovely – they had little feedback buttons on each of their work stations. We gave her an awesome : )
We walked out and found the man with the sign. He was conveniently placed between some pylons in a large area, so we actually walked past him at first. He directed us down to the domestic terminal transit area where we approached the airport staff and got asked where our little boarding passes were. Umm....we never got them but here are our old ones! He gave a bit of a “stupid aliens” look, pulled out a massive stack of the boarding passes, filled in two for us and then waved us through. Hooray!
Made our way to the exit gate (another 0.5 km) and, needless to say by the time we got there we were pretty hot and sticky as the local temperature in Shanghai was about 28 degrees. Boarded the same plane we’d just left an hour ago, back into our same seats again for the two hour transfer to Beijing *groan*.
Finally arrived in the big smoke (literally), and made our way from the gate to the luggage area (not quite 0.5 km again but close). Picked up our luggage, I attempted to call our hotel using the international sim card and failed so we just decided to wing it. Followed the crowd out into the main terminal and fumbled our way along to an atm. The first one we tried was an epic fail – Steve put in our card, requested the cash, pulled out the card and...nothing. Nothing at all. We’re assuming that the atm wasn’t happy with international cards (as there were two and we used this one because the HSBC one was busy) but we’re waiting to check our bank account to make sure it didn’t just randomly spit the money out after we left...
Second attempt was slightly better than the first. Put in our card and then realised that it wouldn’t let us access our cheque account and the savings account had a balance of about $50 so had to pull out ye old Commonwealth Bank Travel Money card. Hooray for preloaded cards. Got out our hard found cash and joined the mob in the taxi queues. I don’t think I’ve ever heard as much beeping in a such a short period of time. The term “organised chaos” comes to mind.
Finally made our way to the front of the queue, got in a cab, handed him the hotel address in Chinese (which was totally convenient. Cheers Waz!), and were on our way. Unsurprisingly, the cab prioritised seat covers over seat belts, and proceeded to drive us to the hotel “China cabby” style. Since it was still hot outside (even though it was night time), we had the windows down, so we could take in all the ‘fresh’ smells that Beijing had to offer.
We finally made it to the hotel, and got here just before the reception closed. The lady managed to talk us into becoming VIP members (which gave us even more discount and breakfast for all 5 days). At this stage, we were buggered. It was about 1 a.m. local time by the time we got to bed, which equals about 3 a.m. Hobart time. Finally, sleep....
By the way, hotel room has an internal window into the toilet straight from the bedroom. Class.
Ain't no such thing as seat belts in Asian taxis...
ReplyDelete