A 27 hour trip from Calgary to Phuket, Layovers in Seattle and Beijing
On
January 16, 2013, at 6:00 in the morning, LuckyStar and I got on an
Alaska Airlines flight bound for Seattle. By the time we got there, she
was thoroughly airsick, I was half-way between sleep and confused terror
(it was a very turbulent flight), and we both were considering just
moving to Seattle instead of getting on our trans-Pacific flight to
Beijing.
A five hour layover where we managed to get some sleep
in the extremely uncomfortable seats left us both refreshed enough that
we got on our Hainan Air flight with only mild trepidation. Luckily, it
was completely undeserved! Hainan Airlines is amazing!
I am not
even going to lie to you—I've only flown Alaskan Air, Air Canada (God
bless them, because no one else ever will), and WestJet before, and
Hainan blows all of them out of the water.
On
the Hainan flight, they gave us hot wet towels to clean up with and
then served us fresh, hot vegetarian food within an hour of take off.
Their flight attendants were impeccably dressed and at the very least
bilingual (Chinese and English), and I honestly admire the designer of
their uniforms. They looked like they walked straight out of the part of
the sixties that wasn't horrible.
The entertainment was equally
impressive. Each seat had a small television, with offerings in Korean,
Russian, Chinese, Japanese, French, German, English, and at least three
or four other languages that I couldn't identify. There were
informational travel videos, games, and television shows offered, too.
Personally, I chose an English subtitled Russian film called "Live!"
because when was I going to have this opportunity again? Good film, by
the way. I recommend it. Not much in the way of a sound track, but the
atmosphere more than made up for it.
That having been said, the
flight was eleven and a half hours long. The flight path followed the
North American Pacific coastline up to Alaska before crossing over to
Russia (which was either extremely cloudy or impressively snowy—possibly
both) and heading back south toward China. I fell asleep in the middle
of a Chinese film about a sharp shooter who rescued someone who might
have been American from a burning plane and then took him to a teahouse,
and woke up with LuckyStar using me as a foot rest.
Before we landed, we got the fancy hot towels again, and another full vegetarian meal. Yay Hainan Air!
Heading
west for so long meant that even though we took off from Seattle at
about one thirty, we arrived in Beijing at about three in the afternoon.
Longest day of my life, I swear. Beijing was surrounded by a layer of
smog so thick that we couldn't see the ground, and the setting sun was
huge and a brilliant pink-red from the amount of particulate in the air.
The sky itself was a pinkish-milky grey, which is exactly as strange as
it sounds.
Once we landed, we were ushered out into what felt
like a nearly empty airport—it was huge, and there was no one there but
the people from our plane. Beijing was different from Seattle in that it
required us to go through security again to get to our next flight. I'm
really glad we checked the international transfers desk, because we
would have been so lost if we hadn't.
The last flight was also
through Hainan. This time, we weren't on the fancy Airbus plane, but a
Boeing 747. Still nice, but no televisions in the backs of the seats on
this flight. That having been said, I was so tired that I slept through
90% of the six hour flight, so I assume it was good. We still got two full meals (vegetarian!), and the seats were even more comfortable than the ones on the airbus.
Landing
in Phuket was an enormous relief. We were dragged out of the massive
customs line to the beginning of a new one, skipping what was looking to
be a really long wait. I assumed it was because we were literally the
only non-Asian people on our flight, and they were sending us over to
someone who spoke English, but at no point was there ever verbal
communication going on. Basically, you can get a really long way in
airports just by handing people your passport and looking at them
hopefully until they stamp it or hand it back to you.
We wandered
into the baggage claim area and found our bags in short order, then ran
the taxi gauntlet outside. It wasn't as bad as in Mexico—people seemed
more bored than desperate, and no one tried to sell me a timeshare. We'd
arranged our taxi ahead of time with our hotel, Le Piman,
and so we just had to find them. Our taxi driver was waiting outside
the doors, holding up a large sign with my name written on it, so that
wasn't as difficult as it might have sounded.
I still feel kind of
guilty about the taxi ride. Lucky and I were both completely wiped out,
so the entire 45 minute ride was conducted in complete silence. For
informational purposes, the ride cost about 800 baht, or $26. Kind of
expensive—the taxis here are, especially compared to how much everything
else costs—but worth it for not having to find our own way to the
hotel.
We got out of the taxi, signed in, and were in bed within
thirty-ish minutes—I think. This is the point when my memories start
breaking down into a hazy film of sleep desperation. At that point, our
hotel could have been the worst rat-trap tin shack in the world, and I
would have called it not bad—luckily, though, it wasn't!
-Geogirl
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