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Published: September 24th 2013
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electricity hell
our state of the art 3 star room electricity Precruise Day One Another overseas holiday begins today with a 6am wake up and a short work to Central train station in Sydney to catch the airport train to the International airport. We stayed at The Great southern Hotel on George St, which is a great heritage listed hotel right in behind China town.
Arrival at the international airport required a long walk to the farthest ticket counter to board our flight with China Southern airlines to firstly Guangzhou and then on to Beijing.
Modern well fitted out plane, but as usual with things Chinese some things don't work and that's that, take it or leave it. This pretty much describes the service or lack of it for the flight. Personal viewing screens worked for only half the flight, luckily I had a good book to while away the time.
Drink service was fabulous if you wanted water, they came around constantly with bottled water and cups, but there was only one wine service for the entire 9hours flying, and this white wine was ceremonially poured into 100mls glasses.
You could get beer if you asked but it was never offered,
translation
very handy as random pushing just does not work and practice your mime skills if you lack Mandarin, cause you are gonna need it!!!
We arrived in Guangzhou, everyone enthusiastically stood up to get off and there we stood for 30minutes waiting to get off with no word of explanation.
And then the farce began with less than 2 hours for our connecting flight to Beijing, customs to go through (minus luggage which was going through to Beijing) and a change from international to domestic needed in a huge sprawling mass of terminal, corridors, tarmacs.
We found some other people also going on the cruise we are going on and we kinda banded together and tried to help each other.
We all had to fill out a custom form, most of us did not get this on the plane as they ran out. The usual line up, perfunctory stamp and through hurdle number 1
Hurdle Number 2 follow the domestic departure signs and through the small screening area, 2 conveyors, 50 people hanging around doing the usual very little and a very slow process.
Hurdle Number 3 We were loaded onto a golf cart with capacity for 15people with 1 man perched on the luggage rack. And then a very fast ride through 3kms of tunnels and alleyways at a very fast clip.
Thinking this was the ride to our gate we jumped off and started to follow a pink-sashed young man.
Hurdle number 4 follow this man at least a couple of kms up and down escalators, through halls, past gates, going at a fast trot until we arrived at our departure gate, at least 30minutes late with many of the eldery people also going on this cruise struggling with the pace.
Hurdle number 5 get on the bus, travel a couple of kms around the airport, get on the plane and sit and sit and wait and wait. Finally off!!!
And the final hurdle catching a taxi at the airport to the hotel. The taxi touts were out in force at midnight, one man with passable English approached with a professional looking card, quoting ¥380-450 to get to the city.
We lined up for the real taxi and equipped with the address in Chinese we arrived with a metered price of ¥137.
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sharon07
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