Day 11-12: Tokyo to Hong Kong

- STILL WAITING ON SOME BETTER INTERNET TO UPLOAD PICS =[ -

Catching planes really sucks. Especially catching this one.

The boarding of the plane to Beijing went very swiftly, as you would expect when boarding in Japan. No customs waiting time, no waiting going through security, very much a case of just checking in and getting on the plane.

The Chinese, it can be said, do not quite excel in the organisation fields in the same way as the Japanese. We got off the plane to be greeted by a woman from Air China showing distinct signs of dismay. "Connect to Hong Kong, come me with now fast", she said as she turned and started to jog through the arrivals terminal. We were unaware that we were in a rush to catch the next plane. By our watches, the website we booked through and the airports display boards there was an hour till the next flight. Apparently not. Turns out the flight had already boarded and was pretty much ready to go, an hour ahead of schedule. How that’s possible is beyond me, but here we were running at an increasingly alarming speed to the transfers and connecting flights security area. Shockingly there at the passport checkpoint there was quite a substantial queue. The woman we were following went through and stood waiting for us on the other side, looking increasingly alarmed. The two guys behind the passport desks were clearly in no rush. It wasn’t that they were doing their jobs well, examining each passport carefully, and then scanning it in the system. It was more a quick glimpse at the picture, a grunt, then going into slowverdrive, moving as painfully slow as possible to scan it, before turning to a random page in the passport and issuing a stamp, also at a horribly slow speed.

I cannot for the life of me stress how slow these people move. We would later brand the population in general as two speed, the two speeds being slow and stopped.

Once we had passed through the passport checks we had to once again go through a full security check, where our hand luggage would be x-rayed again. It will not surprise you to know that there was once again a terribly long queue of people waiting to go through. The woman we were following was having none of it, this time leading us to the front of the queue until she was stopped by one of the security team where she had to explain for five minutes that she worked at the airport, was trying to get us on the plane and was in a desperate rush. It’s not like there was a language barrier! Both these people were Chinese and yet she still had to explain for so long what was going on. They finally agreed to slip us to the front of the queue, much to the disgust of the people queuing. It might be worth noting as well that the Chinese are not an incredibly patient people. In fact the concept of queuing seems lost to them, it’s like being at Alton Towers and having a bunch of kids push past queue jumping, incredibly annoying but at the same time there is nothing you can do about it. The difference being that in China it is apparently the done thing, every man for himself.

Through the x-ray machines we went, running to catch the woman up who had got a head start. She was running pretty fast in fact which isn’t really comforting when you’re trying to catch a 650 quid flight that’s departure is imminent.

We got to the gate finally and boarded only to find a cocky prick in our seats. "Bit late were we guys", he said as we requested he move. By appearance he was clearly an arrogant bugger and given the fact I had just spent the last 25 minutes running around to board a plane that wasn’t supposed to leave for another 35 I decided I wouldn’t comment on his remark. Instead I was just glad to be on the plane. That was until Captain America who had been resituated in front of us put his chair right back. This wouldn’t be a problem if my legs weren’t already wedged between the back of his seat. People don’t seem to realise that when they put their chairs back it does actually cause a reasonable amount of pain, mainly because the frame of the chair tries to cut my knee caps in half. In the past I've tried asking people nicely if they would put the chair up and they either look at you in a very disapproving way or move the chair forwards ever so slightly. Luckily for me I have perfected a technique to manipulate the position of leaning chair backs. Wait for them to stand up, lean forwards or in a later case just do it while they are sitting down and just push the chair with a decent amount of force. In some cases you can make it go more upright than it originally was and the inhabitants of the chair don’t even realise in the slightest. Just shows how much you really need the chair back you inconsiderate gits!

That wasn’t the worst of it. When we arrived in Hong Kong we found that we had no bags. This was after we waited half an hour by the carousels before realising they just weren’t going to come. We headed over to the baggage handling desk and told them our bags hadn’t come out. Apparently they already knew this; they didn’t have time to transfer them to the other plane in Beijing. We filled out some forms and were told our bags would be delivered to our hotel and that they would ring us when they were delivering them.

Reluctantly we made our way to our hotel which turned out to be on the 3rd floor of a building in the Tourist area of Kowloon. We were a bit dubious about the hotels location; it seemed that the area of the street where our hotel was was also the area for all the people who couldn’t get real jobs to try and sell "COPY WATCH BOSS?" or "TAILORED SUITE SIR".

Our bags were meant to be arriving on the 9 o’clock flight from Beijing so we stayed up waiting for the phone call to go and collect our bags. That call never came and by 1am we gave up waiting and went to sleep.