To confirm our first impressions of the hotel, as we checked out, the desk staff tried to charge us for a bottle of the water – which we had not had. Karen was all for paying the extra, just to save Leo having to deal with the hassle, but he and I both said definitely no. We eventually made it stick. I did ask Leo when he got on the bus if he had paid it himself after I left, but he was adamant he hadn’t. Good.
As we were walking across the parking lot to the bus, which was again parked too far from the entrance where we came out, a typically impatient Chinese driver in a BMW turned too tightly around us and briefly caught Karen’s suitcase under his car. He only stopped and let her pull it free when she shouted and banged on the car. She and the bag were unhurt, but she was rightly pissed off. The ride to the airport was uneventful, the traffic light. The flight to Beijing was only an hour and a half. The lay-over before our flight home was about the same. We were met on the tarmac in Beijing and taken in a bus directly to the terminal where we would board.
Once more, we ended up with the short end of the stick on seating. We were in the middle section again (with one aisle seat). But some couples in our group got seats on the window side in a bank of three, with an empty seat beside them. (The plane was far from full.) Karen had had a cold most of the trip, as had a few others. Many more were sick by the time we got on the plane, most of them sicker than Karen had been. The fellow sitting directly behind me, one of the smokers, sounded to be on death’s door, with a deep, hacking cough. He coughed constantly, so my chances of escaping without catching whatever he had were probably slim to none. Poor Karen, about half way through the 12-hour flight, started experiencing symptoms of Beijing Belly – not pleasant with six hours in a cramped germ-ridden plane ahead of her! She still had it the next day.
The charter bus Cathy Basile had arranged pulled up within 20 minutes of our coming out of the baggage concourse. It was a school bus, with slightly upgraded seating (and not painted yellow). I didn’t find it terribly uncomfortable, but I know Karen did. We stopped at the Kitchener enRoute, ostensibly for coffee. It was really a pretext for the smokers to get out and light up, which they did, holding us up for almost ten minutes. Karen, meanwhile, was desperate to be home, and who could blame her. As we were driving the rest of the way, I was thinking that I didn’t feel too bad, just a little tired and scratchy-throated from 12 hours in a plane. If I just drugged myself as soon as I got home and could sleep for 12 hours, I might even be fit to play hockey the next day. What an optimist!
We did finally get home, or rather to Cathy’s home in Byron, the bus’s second and final stop in London, and good ol’ Rob Turner was there with our car, which we’d parked at his place before we left. We dropped him and went on home, to Karen’s great relief. We did sleep, but nowhere near long enough, and I woke with a full-fledged chest cold – the after effects of which I’m still feeling as I write this, four weeks later.
Would we go to China again? Sure, if we could afford to hire our own guides and stay in self-catering accommodation, and stay long enough in each place to properly see it.
Would we ever go on a group tour again? Maybe when hell freezes over.
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