Hong Kong was a very wet place – pouring down in great torrents and with the a/c going full blast in the building, it meant that all the windows were totally fogged up – funny not to be able to see a plane! Came in behind a mob from mainland China, right off the farm types and standing there much in awe of the new terminal -goodness knows how they were going to cope with HK. They had had great difficulty in completing the immigration forms of course, even though they are in Chinese and English – poor young tour leader was trying to get them all to fill in their inbound flight number in the right box but it was defeating most of them – felt I shudda given a hand. HKG airport is so friendly that when you come around the corner to the baggage claim area, there is a guy there with a line of carts all lined up facing the right way and wishing you a nice day as a bonus. Sure know you are not in La Guardia !

Dragonair, going from HK to Beijing, is a very organised and sooper polite gang – all smiling young crew would not dare come near you without using your name. Only about half full A330, so nobody had to make any contact they didn’t want to. Watched the slobby business man on the opposite aisle seat give his drink order without once taking his eyes off his newspaper – the girl might as well not have been there – such are the cultural differences around here.

Have my Chinese health form to complete – of course it’s going to be a challenge. I’m required to confess if I have any of the following: Fever, cough, mental psychosis (OK I’ll put down YES), STD, other diseases, vomiting, AID and active pulmonary tuberculosis. They also want to know, among other things, if 1 am bringing in animals/animal products/animal carcasses/blood and then a rather confusing bit splitting out plants and plant propagating materials and plant products, not to mention soil and finally ‘waste clothing’. Now some of the t shirts I have are pretty shot, as I often dispose as I go along and buy colorful new ones, so is this ‘waste’ or not? Oh, they do make my life tough.

OK – now at least 2 days later – time seems to go into a blur around here – it’s all too much – so many people in Beijing -13.5 million the last time they all signed on (and a floating population of 4 million just to pad things out), so there is just an awful lot of them and they all seem to be out there the whole time. And in case they all get hungry at the same time, there are now more than 500 McDonalds here in Beijing! Just pushing your way through the meeters and greeters at the airport needs a battering ram – there is a sea of bits of paper being held up for those who are meeting a “big nose” which is the translation of what they call ‘us’. Fortunately, MY meeter and greeter is an old mate, so he was standing quite happily at the back and I saw him and he saw me and that was that. I suspect that the airport is swept later of all those who failed to meet their guest and are still found wandering around, clutching dogeared signs, looking for Herr Schmidt from Lufthansa and Mlle Leblanc from Air France.

Anyways our gang is all here and in various states of jet lag, along with the general senile dementia that goes with traveling with us. So far, no real ball busters, but it is early days yet. There is one Brit specimen who seems to be a total misery and already whines too much. Happily there are no less than 18 who have been on the jet programs and are already spouting away to the new ones as to how wonderful they are. We are setting off on a trip “Beijing to Moscow, by Private Train”.  First half on a fancy Chinese train and then a boarder station many days away, we shall do a sort of exchange of prisoners, as there is another trip going the other way, and we take over the Russian train. So it is all worked out to be very straightforward.  We shall see.