September 2nd
Greetings to the blog of our trip to the Southeast Asian nations of Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand. We hope that you enjoy it!
First the hard part - getting there. We've got a 14-hour plane flight to Taipei, Taiwan followed by another 3.5-hour flight from Taipei to Hanoi. But first, I've got a riddle for you. We are meeting our friends Chris and Mark from Toronto in Taipei. They are leaving Toronto tomorrow (September 3rd) yet are scheduled to arrive in Taipei 45 minutes ahead of us. How is this possible? I'll tell you the answer later.
We catch an Uber to San Francisco, make it through security and to our gate in less than 90 minutes - must be some kind of a record. This leaves us with a long time to kill before our flight. First things first, is our plane there? Yes it is:
Beth sits down to read, but since I've got nearly 18 hours of sitting in my near future, I take a walk around. There are several pieces of art nearly:
Since this is a long overnight flight, we've elected to upgrade to business class in the perhaps futile hope that we will actually get some sleep. We are in the hurry-up-and-wait mode but finally it is time to board our flight. The good news is that we are in boarding zone 1 instead of 57 so there will be overhead space for our stuff! Preboard was a little amazing - there were 20 people in wheelchairs. It wasn't clear whether these were people who could not walk or just older people who couldn't stay on their feet for long periods of time, but it was inspiring to see so many older people willing to travel - we will be in that category before too long!
Business class on Boeing 777's is a little weird. There are four seats per row and seven rows. But in order to fit the space, the seats are oriented in little cubicles oriented at 45 degrees to the aisles. The bad news is that I can't even see Beth even though she is sitting next to me. One major debit for business class.
At our seats there are several bags waiting for us, and we kill the time before takeoff trying to figure out what they are. One is a pair of slippers. The other larger one appears to be a sort of blanket or quilt. It is quite warm in the plane so it will be a while before we see if we need that. On my right cubical wall, there is a controller for the TV screen which folds out of the left wall of the cubical, a light, charging ports for our electronics and about a million buttons which appear to control the seat. That will take some work to figure out. I'm hoping to sleep so I've left my Kindle in my backpack and only taken out a thermos of water. An aside about the thermos - we are going to places where the drinking water is not safe so Beth found thermoses with a carbon filtration and micropore system that gets rid of 99+% of water pathogens. There are two tops to the thermos, the bottom one is where you pour the water in. The top one has a small drinking port that you drink the purified water out of - a very clever idea!
Airlines keep trying to make the flight safety notifications more interesting so that people will pay attention to them. EVA (the primary Taiwanese airline) is currently running one that is spoofing James Bond show with an older and very Asian looking guy playing Bond. It was all in Mandarin Chinese, but it did have English subtitles.
Finally it is time for takeoff and we are on our way. It is a really weird sensation for me to not be pointed in the direction of the plane, but everything else goes fine. Our flight is projected to go almost to Anchorage, Alaska, along the Alutian islands, east of the Kamchatka peninsula, over most of the southern islands of Japan and down into Taiwan.
So, did you figure out how Chris and Mark could arrive in Taipei ahead of us even though they are taking off a day after us? The answer is that we are both taking off at close to midnight, they are in the Eastern time zone so it is already Monday there while we are taking off just before midnight, so it is still Sunday here. But it also has to do with spherical geometry - the shortest distance between two points on a sphere is a great circle and the great circle from Toronto to Taipei is not so much longer than the great circle from San Francisco to Taipei and much less than Toronto to San Francisco and San Francisco to Taipei.
But one mystery, at least to me, is how many hours did our September 3rd have? We took off at about midnight, but since we were traveling west and the sun is also moving west, each hour is longer than an average hour if you were stationary. In addition, as soon as we crossed the international dateline somewhere over the Aleutian Islands, we immediately began September 4th. My guess is that we spent no more than 6 hours in September 3rd.
Why is it that every airline feels like they have to feed you shortly after takeoff no matter when that is? As expected, after we'd been in the air for 90 minutes or so, along came dinner. For the foodies in the audience, here is what mine looked like:
As you can see, I went for a vegetarian meal, and it was really good although I had no idea what several of the items were (like the little round thing with the red items on top in the left picture).
With dinner out of the way, it was time to get some sleep. The good news is that since we are going to spend most of the next 14 hours in darkness, they kept the cabin lights off for most of the flight. After a lot of trial and error pushing the many seat adjustment buttons, I managed to recline my seat almost to the point where I was laying down. While there was room at the end of my cubical for my legs and feet, there was not a lot of room, so it took some doing to adjust the height of my feet to fit into the small space at the end of the cubical without banging them against a wall. While I was only comfortable enough to stay asleep for about 1-2 hours before some part of my body objected to my position and woke me up, I did manage to get 5-6 hours of sleep. This was pretty good given that I usually get perhaps half that amount on most of the long flights we've taken in coach.
September 4th
It was still dark when we arrived in Taipei. Here is a bit of art that we saw when we arrived:
Our business class tickets gained us entry to the EVA lounge in Taipei, so we went there to wait for Chris and Mark to arrive (their departure from Toronto had been delayed). While food is free for people in the lounge, we were in it for the charging ports. Beth charged her watch and hearing aid while I charged my cell phone. I had been tracking Chris and Mark's flight and knew when it arrived, but an hour later, they had still not arrived. We finally located them and found out that instead of showing their boarding passes for the Taipei to Hanoi flight and going into the transfers line, they had gone out through security and had had to come back in again. We had enough time for them to get a cup of coffee before we had to head for our gate.
At our gate, we found this cool chart on the meanings and writing of traditional Chinese characters:
This is a big deal in Taiwan because they still use traditional characters which are a little more intricate than the simplified characters that are used in China.
Our flight to Hanoi was uneventful. The Hanoi airport has one really long runway. At one end is the domestic terminal and at the other end is the newer international terminal. In between are the concrete buildings that look like they house Vietnamese Air Force planes. On our way to baggage claim and customs, we are met by a woman who sent by our tour group to help us get through customs as soon as possible. I don't know how this is done, but we are directed to a line that is normally used by important people like foreign diplomats. It takes us 30 minutes while the line for everyone else is at least an hour long if not more.
It will take a while to describe the rest of our first day in Vietnam so I will leave the story here and pick it up in the next installment.
No comments:
Post a Comment