Season 8 - Return to Antarctica

While Michiel is off to Palmer Station, after failing to get a job there as well, I am returning for Season 8 at McMurdo Station. This year, the new company I work for agreed to fly me from Amsterdam to Christchurch, New Zealand for onward travel to Antarctica.  Normally, I have to buy my own ticket to the States and the company flies me from there.  I thought this would be a great improvement, but here's the story of how it all went:

Thursday, September 28  18:00:  Bonpa (my father-in-law) drives me to Schiphol with plenty of time to check in for the first China Southern flight from Schiphol to Beijing.  I am unable to check in electronically, as they would like us to do.  The check in agent insists that I need a visa for Australia even though it is clear I will be immediately transferring to New Zealand (I had no idea how “immediately” that would end up being).  The manager is called and I am correct.  No visa necessary, but the flight is delayed one hour, she can only seat me in a middle seat and she cannot issue boarding passes for any of the other three onward flights.

I remember that I want to add a frequent flier number to the itinerary and the customer service desk sends me to the priority line.  That agent adds my number and is able to issue a boarding pass for the Beijing – Guangzhou – Brisbane flight.

I visit the Rijksmuseum branch in the Schiphol Airport and get a 10 minute chair massage before they close for the night.  There are a lot worse places to have a delayed flight than Schiphol!

I go to the boarding gate and get a first glimpse of the other passengers on the 9 hour flight to Beijing.  They are almost all Chinese, with the exception of 10 or 15 westerners.  I sit and try to read but am distracted and by the spitting and throat gymnastics of the people sitting all around me.  A feeling of doom descends.

Boarding doesn’t officially begin, but the swarm of Chinese passengers rush the security line so that they can wait again on the other side of security (In Schiphol Airport, it is common for the security to be at the gate for flights outside of the Schengen zone of the EU).

We board the plane and I attempt to get comfortable amidst the chaos of people milling around, talking loudly to others several rows away, and passengers attempting to shove their duty free cigarettes and big Albert Heijn shopping bags into over-stuffed overhead bins.

The flight attendants feebly attempt to get the passengers to take their seats, but it seems fruitless.  Who knows how the purser did a head count with all of the people moving about?  Finally, the plane really is about to move and the attendants individually address everyone still standing.

We’re up in the air and the lady in front of the person sitting next to me puts her seat back to its full reclining position.  The man sitting to my left doesn’t care for that very much and he starts shoving the seat.  Loud debates break out and several people sitting around me get involved.  Her seat is broken and has only one possible position – fully reclined.  The flight attendant hears the commotion and comes to investigate.  She solves the problem by moving the man on my left to another seat in the plane.  “Great”,  I think to myself, “now I have a bit more space.”  Not only did I have more space, but the guy sitting to my right decided that he would have more space, too, so he started using the fold down tray to my left.

Drink service

China Southern Flight Attendant (in barely intelligible English): Something to drink?

Me:  Do you have gin?

CSFA (looking irritated):  What?

Me:  Gin?

CSFA (looking more irritated)?: What? No.

Me:  I will have a red wine.

CSFA:  Water?

Me:  Red wine

CSFA: What kind wine?

Me: Red

CSFA proceeds to pour me a white wine.

This dialogue is a sterling example of the kind of interchange I would have with almost all of the flight attendants on that flight and the flight to Guangzhou and with all of the ground staff and information personnel (transfer desk, security, etc.) at Beijing Airport.

Sometime after dinner service I put on my eyemask and fall asleep.  The sensation of something dropping into my lap wakes me up.  A female passenger, who has decided to sleep in the empty seat next to me has, not so gently, removed the blanket from “her” seat and dropped it on me.

With the help of modern chemistry, I get some hours of sleep, watch a bit of one film (which crashes halfway through) and somehow make it through 9 hours.

The disembarkation announcement in English suggests that I have to collect my bags and re-check them in at the transfer desk.  I leave the plane and avoid stepping into the vomit that someone left on the air bridge.  From here, I follow the signs to transfers.  There is a sign for international transfers but China Southern Airlines, is not listed there.  I proceed instead to the domestic transfer desk, where I attempt to ask where to go to transfer and whether I need to collect my luggage.  I can barely understand what the lady is trying to tell me, but she gets very angry when I don’t understand and ask for clarification (in as simple a way as I can think of).  I go down to the baggage claim/transfer area and see my bags on the carousel.  This concerns me and makes me think that I, indeed, need to pick them up and re-check them in.  I put them on a cart and wheel them towards the “Transfers Area”.  As I’m wheeling through, I hear a “Hello, hello!!!”  Oh, they mean me….I stop.  The customs agent tells me that I need to bring the luggage back and go upstairs.  I couldn’t find any way to go upstairs except for going through customs and that just didn’t make sense to me.

Oh, how naïve I was…..trying to make China make sense.  The way it works, apparently, is that all bags go on the carousel and then a couple of guys look for tags that have other airport codes on them than PEK and they pull those off and load them elsewhere for their respective onward journeys, while the passengers exit the area, pass through customs and immigration (always uncertain of which cards to fill in) and go upstairs to the general departure terminal.  At the general departure terminal, one goes through customs and immigration again after which I was told to proceed to gate 50.  Figuring all of this out, required asking at least 5 people – all of whom gave us different answers.  I use the word “us” because by this point, almost all of the westerners on the Amsterdam – Beijing – Guangzhou – Brisbane itinerary were getting pretty friendly in our shared frustration and misery.

I stand in a very long line at the entrance to gate 50 for about 30 minutes before a security person approaches, rips the boarding pass out of my passport and points to the other area that I was supposed to be in.  I stand in THAT customs line for about 20 minutes until I reach an agent who tells me I need to be at gate 50, you know, the first line I had been standing in.

When I return to gate 50, the line is now at least 100 people long.  Luckily, one of my new western friends lets me join him in the middle of the line.  We wait at least 40 minutes to get past the one security official and scanning machine for 3 international flights.  This gives me time to get to know the Romanian refugee who now lives happily in Brisbane.  Together, we laugh about the absurdity of the situation.

We are supposed to have a 4 hour lay-over in Beijing, but after arriving one hour late and fumbling around the airport, walking in circles, trying to get answers and waiting in lines, we end up having only about 15 minutes to wait before boarding the bus that takes us to the plane. Before board the bus, we are issued clear plastic boarding cards.  Amateurishly, I think that these will be used in Guangzhou to allow us to re-enter the plane after we make the stopover.  Wrong.  These are submitted immediately to the lady standing on the tarmac at the bottom of the stairs up to the plane.

The plane has arrived from somewhere else and is already nearly full.  With our complement of mostly westerners, we quickly fill the seats hoping we can leave nearly on time.  We leave the parking spot fairly promptly, circle the apron several times but then sit parked on the tarmac for an hour waiting for air traffic control to clear us to take off.

That flight is pretty uneventful but the plane is less modern than the first and has only central movie screens, rather than on-demand, seat-back sets.  Unfortunately, this is the plane we will continue on for the 8 and a half hour Guangzhou to Brisbane leg, as well.

We arrive one hour late in Guangzhou and assume that the 1 hour 10 minutes we have before boarding will be plenty of time to stretch our legs - maybe in any other domestic transfer situation in any other country in the world.  As we disembark the plane, we are each individually given a new boarding pass with handwritten seat number and a green sticker.  Naturally, there is only one person doing this job and blocking the egress for anyone else who isn’t on the continuing flight to Brisbane.

In Guangzhou, we have the pleasure of going through another customs and immigration line.  By this time, many of the westerners are starting to lose it.  I wonder aloud, “how is it possible that this country is considered to be the new super power of the world with such inefficiency and bureaucracy?”  Someone else muses, “How did they ever manage the Olympic Games?”

With just 10 minutes to spare, I pass The Exit of Cancelled Flights – sounds like a special kind of hell – and reach the gate in time to line up again and start boarding.

As with every queuing situation involving Chinese people on these flights, if I hesitate in moving forward in order to wait for someone to get out of the aisle or put their luggage in the bins above, the Chinese person behind me will push and hiss.  At several times during this journey, I consider sticking an elbow or something pointy into the next person who shoves me.

I return back to the same seat and have a nice chat with a young Chinese man who now lives in Brisbane.  I ask him how it feels to return to China after living in Australia.  He responds, “It’s another world.”  I get it.

Somehow the time passes and we arrive in Brisbane an hour late. This seems to be the standard for China Southern.  As I wait to disembark, I hear the announcement asking for people transferring to Christchurch to make themselves known to the ground staff.  We have 40 minutes before the flight is scheduled to depart.  An airport representative gives us priority access to security and radios ahead to the gate to notify them of our arrival.  At that moment, the scan belt stops working and my laptop and backpack are trapped inside the scanner.  The security agents attempt to fish them out with a cane while the ground agent grows more and more impatient.  Finally, we make it through security and are escorted to the transfer desk to receive our boarding passes.  With courtesy, smiles and friendliness, I receive a boarding pass, get my frequent flier number added and make my way through the clean, comfortable and stylish boarding area to my gate.

It is an absolute delight to be on this Virgin Australia flight.  I have real black coffee (China Southern’s coffee is milky and deathly sweet), an empty seat, friendly and cheerful flight attendants and fellow passengers.

We arrive early in Christchurch and I am greeted by my good friend, Christine, who now works as the greeting staff for the US Antarctic Program.  I proceed to the shuttle for a short trip to the hotel and calculate the number of hours in transit…36 in total.

When I arrive at the hotel, I remove my backpack from the trailer and the driver offloads my red duffel bag.  As the shuttle pulls away, I realize that the duffel is not mine and run frantically after the driver.  Fortunately, he sees me in his side view mirror.  Bags are swapped and I check in.  It is September 29^th at 4:00 PM.