The holiday started pretty uneventfully. We made it in good time to the airport, so there was, thankfully, no flapping. This continued for the next nine hours, until we reached Beijing.
We were only due to touch down here for an hour, so a few passengers could alight. It came as quite a surprise when we got ushered off the plane, and had to queue for a visa, to the confusion of all of the passengers. All of our hand luggage was x-rayed, and we had to pass through metal detectors, have our passports and our boarding passes stamped, and a 24 hour visa for China issued. Fred kept on saying how it was a good job he hadn’t offered up our boarding passes as rubbish during the first half of the flight.
We were then ushered up to a waiting area, before being ushered back on to the same plane about 40 minutes later. The plane was late taking off, but that was OK, since it seems in China, departure times are more of a guideline than a rigid plan.
Another uneventful flight to Guangzhou followed. Upon arrival for our layover here, confusion reigned, as we were ushered from pillar to post, run through the airport, and then told off because the woman making us do the running had scurried through a line reserved for diplomats, so we all had to go back out of this roped line, and enter through the next one.
Brisbane - where we wanted to be...
We were hoping to be able to eat something that was not airline food, but this was not to be, as we had then to queue for an exit stamp, which nullified the visas we got in Beijing. After quite a lengthy queue, and more stamps in both passport and boarding pass, then we had to go straight to board the plane for Brisbane. The system was efficient, but who knew that there was a nation that liked it’s unfathomable bureaucracy more than the Dutch?
