What a long day. Today we left Melbourne for Taipei via Hong Kong. We made it, but quite a few things went wrong! Here is a summary.
First, my booked taxi went to the wrong address in the morning (due to bad GPS positioning when I booked via the taxi app).
There was a massive queue of cars at Melbourne airport, I think there was an accident or a tow truck or something in front of departures.
We couldn’t seem to check in from our phones online and ended up in a queue that took about half an hour to check-in and drop our bags.
The service assistant checked me in for the first flight, but not the connecting flight and said I had to find the transit desk in Hong Kong, but I later found out that everyone got both boarding passes at once.
While Chris and I waited for the others to check in, the queue for security grew from about 20 people to over 100 in a very short time.
The conveyer belt at security broke just before our bags went through.
The queue for customs was also really long and we were cutting it really fine for our departure time. Once we were through customs, a security guard stopped Chris and I to randomly check our passports but was then friendly enough to chat about where we were going, what we were looking forward to the most and a bunch of other stuff that we really didn’t have time for.
We finally got to our gate (a bit stressed and late) and the flight was delayed anyway so we ended waiting there too.
Once we got on our flight, there was a little turbulence, but a good supply of food and movies to keep us entertained, the only thing that went wrong on this flight was that I broke my headphone adapter I was using to be able to plug my good headphones into the plane, but we macguyver’ed a solution for that with a food wrapper.
By the time we arrived in Hong Kong, we were really late for our connecting flight.
We got off the plane and there was a staff member holding a sign with all our names on it.
Her name was Rebecca and she already knew that one of us didn’t have a boarding pass and that we were running late for our next flight. She then got us to run from the gate to the transit desk, I got my boarding pass and then she ran us to our next gate which was really far away… Rebecca was fitter than all of us. To get to the gate we had to take a train, which also broke down and the lights went out, making us even later. Eventually some staff came over to manually open the doors of the train to let us out and Rebecca took us to our gate to wait for the flight.
The next flight was OK and we finally arrived in Taiwan, we got a quick snack and boarded a bus that goes to the main train station in Taipei. From there we were supposed to get a train, but we were too late for that and the trains had finished for the day (it was about 1am) so we caught taxis to our hotel, checked in and went to sleep!
It was a long day, but we made it!