We got out to our gate, which was in a temporary building in the international terminal. When it was time to board, we left the terminal and boarded buses that took us out to a temporary jet way for boarding.
Our flight out of LA left a little over an hour late, so we were afraid we were going to miss our connection to Beijing, but security in Hong Kong went quickly, taking only about half an hour from when we left the plane until we were at our next gate. But when we arrived at our connecting gate, they changed our departure time from 8:10 to 9:20. So this gave us time to look around at the airport a little bit, and I have to say that the international terminal was beautiful.
We got on the plane at about 9:00 and were ready to depart, but then the captain came on the radio and said that there were thunderstorms in Beijing, and there was a huge air “traffic jam”. So we sat at our departure gate for another 2 ½ hours before we got clearance to take off. While we were waiting, the flight staff fed us the dinner that we should eaten in the air. It did help the time pass as we sat there with nowhere to go.
We finally took off a little after midnight on August 14th for Beijing. The pilot was able to make up a little bit of time in the air, but we were so far off schedule that we were sure we had missed our transfer that was supposed to be waiting for us in Beijing. So while we were waiting in the immigration line, Steve found all of our hotel documents, addresses, etc. so we would be ready to get a taxi once we got through.
Immigration was interesting in China. We had to go through a fingerprinting process, where you lay the four fingers of our left hand on a screen for scanning, then you do the same with your right hand, then both of your thumbs. It worked for Steve, but no matter how I laid my fingers on the screen, it would not scan mine. It just kept “yelling at me” to put my four left hand fingers on the glass plate. The immigration officials finally came over to help me, and they couldn’t get my fingers to scan either. It held us up for about 10 minutes, which was getting frustrating. They finally told me to go on without the scan.
When we finally got to the actual immigration counter, they had another finger scanner. He had me do it again on his scanner and it worked perfectly. We picked up our luggage, had it scanned, and then proceeded out to the main terminal.
We started looking around for the taxi stand, and out of the corner of my eye, I saw our hotel transfer sign. I have to admit that I got a little bit teary eyed. We were both so tired at this point, it had been a rough day, and it was so good to see that our transfer was there for us after all, even with our arrival over two hours late. Our transfer ended up being our tour director, Jason, that we would have for the next three weeks.
It took about 40 minutes from the airport to the hotel. Jason gave us a ton of information as we drove, about things we might want to do in the area before the actual tour starts, etc. He also told us that a lot of social websites are blocked in China, including facebook, gmail, youtube, twitter and many others.
We were both so tired at this point that we hoped we would remember at least part of what he said. When we got to the hotel at about 4:30 a.m. on August 14th, our room was waiting for us. By the time we got checked in, it was about 5:00 a.m., so we dove into bed, and never even looked around. After 27 hours, we were really hoping for a good nights sleep.
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