Here I sit in Beijing airport and I’ve been having fun and games with my dear friends, the Chinese.
Flew up here happily on the very efficient Dragonair from Hong Kong. When checking in, the poor girl was so befuddled by the fact that I wanted my bag not to reside in Beijing but for it to continue unhindered to Ulaan Baatar, the capital of Mongolia and what with it being grossly overweight to boot, she forgot to observe that I did not have a visa to transit thru China. In all honestly, even I did not realize that the book says I need this, just for the thrill of landing on Chinese soil. I had my nice Mongolian visa for getting in there and in reality, in one of my other passports, I have a double entry Chinese visa, which is sked for use later on, so I did not want to blow it on a rotten little transit.
So I gets off the plane, in the bleak ever-present winter greyness of Beijing Airport (it really does make u feel depressed from the moment you land) and I bounce off an Air China girl and I say which way to Ulaan Bataar and she sweetly says I have to go through immigration and re-check in upstairs – oh no, says me – me no go immigration, me go Mongolia. She says you go immigration and I say I don’t. She wins. I go to immigration – great search looking through my passport for a Chinese visa … where it is ? me no having … crisis. Dragonair girl summoned – where is my visa (it was starting to get circular already and I expected many others to arrive to start with the same question). Dragonair first suggestion was that I return to HK and obtain. Oh NO says me – I go Mongolia. After much conversing in corners and looking at my ticket (with many other strange flights and destinations coming up and the passport being much scrutinized), I was informed that I would be fined the equivalent of USD300 … now look here says I – not my fault – Dragonair girl starting to get pushy but I can push back …. informed her that if they had spotted this in HK, that was different, but they hadn’t and therefore the onus is on them. By brazening them down, Dragonair now may be paying. Dragonair girl not happy.
I had a nice chat with the immigration guy, who spoke good English, while all this happening and I should think that had I been alone in a room with him, I cudda donated $50 to his personal inheritance and the whole thing wudda been solved. Then a whole new immigration shift turned up, it being 12 noon. I said l supposed they had started at 0500 or the like and he laughed, saying they had started at 1200 noon YESTERDAY – a 24 HOUR shift !!! But we get 3 days off he said – I said I’d need it. Then he confessed that they have a whole dormitory out the back, where they kip all night, so I suppose it’s not all that bad. Thought u should know this in case u planning a career change to Chinese Immigration and they forget to tell you at the interview.
Anyway, with a few hours to kill, I had a terrible, just TERRIBLE sandwich in the coffee shop – described as ham and cheese, it turned out to be white bread, possibly dipped in a weakened egg solution and hardly heated through, with a sliver of ham in the middle – with a Chinese Tsing Tao beer, the cost was $13 and a rip off. But what the hell, it’s China and they don’t improve. At least they speak English now and sometimes surprising well too. And they have built a new terminal which is a vast improvement on the old one, where you could die of hypothermia in the winter.
The Mongolian International Airlines Transport (better known as MIAT- which also stands for ” Maybe I Arrive Tomorrow”) B727 was sitting there and I stationed myself by the window to watch for the baggage loading, as I wanted to check my bag was there. Fortunately, it is a) large and b) bright red so I was more than relieved to see it almost buried under a mass of shall we say, unusual Mongolian baggage. In flight, the flight attendants donned little frilly aprons, very much a la chinoise and offered a grim looking tray, which I thought better of but I did have a Mongolian beer and it tasted just like beer. And they have a wonderful uniform headpiece (it’s a lot more than a ‘cap’). Traditional Mongolian theme, with upturned wing flaps and a sort of Thai temple spire in the middle … all totally unique. Anyway, we survived a 2 hours flight – over increasingly desolate, flat, bleak, godawful terrain, which slowly became increasingly snow covered and somehow even more forbidding looking. A full moon was rising to make it look a bit more spooky. Even in a heated plane, it did not look welcoming.
More to come ….
timothyvalentinestravels 