Hong Kong to Beijing, China

Sunday, March 17, 2019               Happy St. Patrick’s Day    Hong Kong to Beijing, China

The Westerdam arrived into Hong Kong at 4:30am and I got up to see it pulling into the Harbor with all the bright city lights. The ship was surrounded by sky scrapers all lit up! What a site! 

Larry and I walked off the ship at 7:00am with a bus transfer to the Hong Kong Airport. It took us about an hour to pick up our luggage, pass through customs, and find the bus. It really went very smoothly.

Our bus ride literally took us from the old airport that had been converted to a very nice cruise terminal to the new airport about 45 minutes away. We enjoyed the sites along the way. The new airport had been developed on reclaimed land. Larry and I still find this to be an engineering phenomenon….open sea that has been converted to land?  The airport was gigantic.

We had breakfast and waited for our airline, Southern China to open up…around 10:00 am.  We got our bags checked and meandered through immigration again and the China Homeland Security line. Then we started the process of going down about 15 moving walkways to Gate 43….we thought we were never going to get there….this airport is extremely spread out!

                             I enjoyed these two cuties who practiced their English skills on me.

Our 1:15pm flight sat on the runway for close to a half an hour before takeoff. The flight to Beijing was 2 hours and a half. The plane circled the city a couple of times before landing and then it sat on the runway for 45 minutes waiting to get clearance. We finally deboarded and processed through customs again going through double finger printing and picture taking.

Our driver met us at the entrance of the airport with a big Larry and Kay sign. It was so good to see him, but he spoke no English. He had a great translating app. He dropped us at our Hotel around 7:30pm where we met our National Geographic guide, Howard. It is funny how many Chinese we have met with American names. He told us he was given the name in English class. He said, “All the good names like Joe and John were already taken.” HA!

We had a great Chinese dinner with eight of our traveling colleagues…. Sam and Suzanne from Iowa, Farida and Ahmed from Wales, Barbara from Northern Ireland, Carol from Scotland, Willie from Ireland, and Irene from Italy but originally Columbia. What a great group of adventurers! We all devoured beef soup, tofu, chicken, shrimp, broccoli, corn, and a few others items that circled on the Chinese lazy susan several times until everything was gone….must have been a hungry group…actually it all was very tasty. We laughed and had a jolly evening.

We bid each other good night and headed off to the hotel around 9:00pm. What a full of day with plenty of excitement! Tomorrow will be even better ‘cause we are heading for the Great Wall of China!