Part Two: "It's always interesting..."

Turns out my fears were unfounded. Well, those specific fears were. Generally, in my experience, getting a phonecall before 7am isn’t ever a good thing, so when Colin passed me the phone at 6:17am, I was somewhat worried. As I’m sure you’ve guessed by now, it was Simon, calling from the airport. He’d been to check in for his flight, with plenty of time before it closed, right check-in desk and everything, but had encountered a slight problem. Along with his passport, he was asked to produce the credit card with which he had paid for the flight. Ah. Would that happen to be the Australian credit card that he had destroyed a mere day ago when he checked out of the hostel believing it was no longer required? Er, yes. That would be the one. And if you can’t produce that, there ain’t no way you’re getting on the flight. (And all week, Simon had been preparing the speech he was going to make to the check-in girl in the hopes that he could sweet talk her into upgrading him; ah, the irony.) She did attempt to console him by saying, “it’s ok, you can just pay for another flight and get this one reimbursed when you get back, as you won’t be using it, you should get almost a full refund” to which Simon replied “it’s not ok – I don’t have any money to pay for a new flight!”

So he, or rather we, had two options: I could either a) scoot on down to the airport and pay for a new flight on my credit card (which was fortunately in my purse, not the bin); the ‘helpful’ stewardess had discovered one leaving at 8:45am which Simon could get on in exchange for three hundred and fifty six of my English pounds, OR b) he could come back to town, I could pay for a hostel and we could sit it out until my parents transferred some emergency money (thus further delaying the day when Simon could get back into the world of employment and start paying people back).

I was dressed and out the door in 20 minutes.

In my haste to buy a ticket so that I could board the train that had already pulled into the station, however, I pressed the buttons too quickly and ended up with a single instead of a return. Hmm, real smooth. Funnily enough my brain isn’t really what you’d call functional at 6:45am, 28 minutes after I’d opened my eyes. Cursing myself all the way to the airport, and repeatedly counting the last coins in my purse, hoping that the seventeenth time I counted them they would add up to the amount required for another single ticket, I found Simon (looking very dapper in his ‘I’m-just-the-kind-of-sophisticated-guy-to-whom-you-want-to-give -an-upgrade’ custom-made suit, it has to be said) and we headed for the Air New Zealand check-in desks. As I thought they might, the oh-so-observant chaps at Air NZ pointed out that Simon didn’t have a ticket for their flight and his name was registered against a Singapore Airlines flight (though in Simon’s defense, the Singapore Airlines lady did tell him she’d reserved him a place and he should go and pay at check-in). Cue lots of explanation attempts to clarify why he couldn’t get on that flight, how she’d booked him on this one and we just needed to pay. Which they agreed with. But you can’t do that at check-in. Oh for God’s sake! So off we both hurried to the other end of the airport (time was beginning to tick by this point; the flight we needed to pay for only took off 45 minutes after the one Simon wasn’t allowed on…) and after more explaining and phonecalls to Singapore Airlines lady, I was finally able to hand over my plastic and pay to get Simon out of the country. Hurrah! Back to check-in, where they looked mildly surprised to see us – clearly the first time they thought we were crazy and that we wouldn’t be back (or maybe they just hoped…) – and then to the security door where I instructed Simon to “go straight to the gate – if you miss this flight because you’re buying a bottle of Hennessy in duty free, I am not coming back!” We’d already done the grand farewells the night before and were both pretty knackered not to mention hungover, so after some muted goodbyes, we went our separate ways.

And that’s where the fun part of my morning really began. Not being smart enough to buy a return ticket and not having enough money to buy another single for the Airport Express (‘the fastest way to and from the airport’ posters kept informing me – oh how right they turned out to be), I trudged towards a noticeboard headed ‘Buses from Chek Lap Kok Airport’. You’d think that the area of Kowloon being closer to the airport than Hong Kong island would mean that there would be a tidy little sum of buses all waiting, engines running, to take me back to my bed and some sweet blackout curtains. But no. The only bus I could find that looked promising (i.e. was going somewhere I recognised the name of) went to Island Harbourview, which is the complex across the road from our new apartment. Our new apartment for which we don’t yet have the keys – d’oh! Still, it was at least only one MTR stop away, that seemed good enough to me. Though it wasn’t seeming quite so good when I had to wait 20 minutes in the 30 degree heat for it to arrive and it was only 8am!

Simon had warned me after his jaunt on the airport bus the previous evening, that the bus would take about an hour – which I figured wasn’t too bad, I could just sit there and do some of that attractive public transport dozing, where you wake up to find you’ve drooled onto the person next to you – what I wasn’t prepared for was a journey of TWO HOURS AND TWENTY MINUTES just to get back to Olympic, from where I still had to get on the MTR and back up to the serviced apartment!! On the bright side, I did see a lot of Hong Kong (mainly the New Territories I have to say) but these are places I hadn’t even seen on the map, let alone planned to visit! Needless to say, there was copious amounts of sleeping on my agenda for the rest of that day.