In the last 24 hours, I have managed to get a little bit lost in three different major international airports. Not sufficiently lost for it to be a real problem, just lost enough to wander around reading all the signs with a determined expression and a little bit of a hasty step (particularly in those airports that are big enough to house an indoor marathon).
The most panic-stricken part of the whole journey was probably at the beginning. I know what everyone says and that it’s supposed to be relatively simple to get through check-in, customs, security, etc. and get on the plane. In fact, for most people, I think the plane ride is probably the most annoying part. I think this is partly because they have either forgotten or were too young to remember their first experiences of the terrifying bureaucracy. I hate doing this sort of thing for the first time – when I don’t know what I’m doing and I am terrified of something going wrong. Yes, I’m paranoid. The marvellous friend who took me to the airport just about had to push me through the door.
Once I was on the plane I was fine. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a window seat for the first stretch. I am very partial to a window seat. But I was on the aisle and Emirates has a wonderful entertainment selection, so I happily whiled away a good eight hours catching up on movies (Madagascar 2 – finally – and duplicity) and various series. Oh, and good food. And wine. I tasted foreign wines. In the duration of the trip, I tasted an Australian Chardonnay and a Chilean Chardonnay and a French white, the name of which is lost in the mists of time-zone changes. I liked the Australian.
Landing at Dubai was a pleasure, if rather warm. I found myself wandering into the terminal humming ‘hot in the summer’. And then down the stairs. And round the corner. And up the stairs. A bit of a round-about route to get to the departures area when you’re in transit there. That said, Terminal 3 at Emirates is beautiful. It has a beautiful water-feature, elegant design, sunning, high ceilings and beautifully etched windows reaching from floor to roof. All they need to do to make it perfect is get rid of at least half the shops and most of the people. I’m not particularly interested in shopping when in transit. I suppose really, it’s that the thing I love about airports is their emptiness and elegance, and masses of people spoil the effect somewhat. I spent quite a lot of the 3-hour lay-over at Dubai wandering around looking at the building and out of the windows and being looked askance (skeefed out) by slightly more seasoned and shopping-approving flyers. Things became more exciting when I missed an announcement that my gate had changed and returned from my wanderings to find no-one there. A frantic hustle (through the crowds) to the departures board sent me racing from a gate in the 200s to find one in the early 100s. Those who have walked the length of Dubai airport will perhaps understand that this did require some racing. Ok, it probably wasn’t that bad. I was disappointed, however, that I ended up racing past so many of the fascinating and bizarre other sights without being able to take the time to really look. The rest of the airport seems to have picked odd over spacious and elegant, but perhaps that was just my rushed impression.
Having checked my bags right through to destination (again, thank you Emirates), boarding was easy. Although, they do that silly ‘boarding by zone’ thing the Americans do. I’m absolutely unconvinced that it speeds things up in any way or makes them any more efficient. Given that this time I did have a window seat, as well as an empty seat next to me, I got over it quickly. This second flight left Dubai (a whole 15 or so minutes late) at around 3:15am local time. Flying from Joburg to Dubai had eliminated 2 hours (as far as I could figure out) so it was sometime around the middle of the night. It was also sometime around the middle of the night after quite a lot of stressful anticipation and a day of customs and SAA ground staff (my first flight was a code-share), so I was pretty destroyed. Luckily I can sleep on planes. I did. For two whole hours. At which point the sun came up and they woke us up for breakfast. My body was still trying to convince me that it was 3am in South Africa in winter, so it took a few befuzzled moments to figure out what was going on. At which point I got to watch a stunningly beautiful 33 000ft sunrise over the very edge of the Indian subcontinent. Sometimes travelling is amazing.
Once the sun had risen, unfortunately, the airline staff insisted that all the window blinds be closed. This irritates me no end – partly because I’m slightly claustrophobic, mostly because I like watching the pretty world go by below, and a little because staying awake from sunrise while travelling East seems to me to make sense. When they finally let us open the blinds again – I lose track of how long that took because I was fast asleep – we were flying over China. The second amazing sight of the day, partly just for the bragging value, was watching a huge thunderstorm front develop over China and the Yellow Sea. If you’ve never flown through a thunderstorm that is developing, you can’t imagine the magnificence of the anvil-shaped billows, the light and shadow playing around the edges of this incredible force of nature.
The descent into Seoul (Incheon airport) was quick and steep but not quick enough to prevent my stomach knotting itself into knots of terror. Not because I am scared of landings – and in fact this wasn’t a bad one – but because of the more bureaucracy. In fact, the immigration and customs points were almost disappointingly quick and boring. Almost, not quite. The most entertaining part was a particularly overzealous security guard at immigration who kept moving people from one queue to another to make them get through more quickly. Which was fine but whenever the immigration people sent someone back to be checked through the security point (which was to one side before the counters), this over-enthusiasitic security guard would shout at them in Korean and try and make them get back into the queue. I giggled quietly to myself and exchanged amused looks with the British girl in the queue in front of me and tried not to laugh out loud in case it offended someone and jeopardised my chances of getting into the country.
Incheon Airport feels like it is designed to keep you inside forever (cue sinister music). Seriously – and keep in mind that I’d lost many, many hours and not had much sleep by this stage – we arrived and went along a corridor, along a travellator, down two escalators, into an underground train (Incheon airport has it’s own subway system) and up the steepest, longest escalator ever which makes you feel as thought you’re ascending into some sort of upside-down underworld (c.f. Various world belief systems that think heaven is underneath). Eventually through immigration and baggage collected – perfectly in one piece without wrapping pierced at all – and through customs, you emerge into the less sinister and worrying arrivals area – with actual doors to the outside. At this point, I headed off to find the domestic check-in area to get ready for one more flight. Perhaps I should say at this point that Korea is not really an air-travel-addicted nation. At least not internally. They have a super express and almost-express train system, I am told, as well as regular buses, and the country is actually quite little (smaller than the UK – the South, I mean). So they don’t fly that often. Which means that there aren’t very many domestic flights. It does not mean, however, that there aren’t many check-in counters/areas/black-hole-like-expanses. Because Incheon is a popular transit airport and Koreans generally fly to get overseas – the land route requiring transition through the North and the rest being sea – there are many, many international flights leaving from there, so it is a bit of a needle-in-a-haystack situation to find the one small area dedicated to the few local flights. Particularly when at least 65% of the signs are not written using Western characters – never mind in English.
Standing around looking lost works wonders, however. The friendly staff were able to speak English and point me in the right direction. Eventually I boarded my last flight for the day, this one a Korean Air flight from Incheon to Daegu. It was a 737, which always makes me happy. I realise it’s a bit odd to have a favourite aeroplane but I’ve just spent so much time flying on 737s that it’s become my happy-plane. I was rather tired by this stage and thought I must have dozed off because after what felt like a ridiculously short time, I opened my eyes and we were on the ground. Turns out we hadn’t taken off yet. I began to wonder if we were taxi-ing to Daegu. By the time we landed, about 35 minutes later, I wondered if it wouldn’t perhaps be less costly and air-polluting to have done so. Daegu airport is about the size of PE but has three sky-walks and is all glassed in corridors – which appear not to do much other than force you to walk the perimeter of the airport to get to the one luggage carousel (ok, smaller than PE). There is also a military base there, apparently, which would explain the large and army-looking helicopter I noticed on the way in.
Daegu was the end of a rather long and tiring, but largely hassle-free trip to Korea. I’m now here and looking forward to a good long sleep in a non-moving bed – with no midnight stops in the Middle East to change planes