Geneva-London-Hong Kong-Jakarta

My itinerary: Geneva-London-Hong Kong-Jakarta

But who said getting there was going to be easy...

Nowadays unfortunately, it is often not as simple as just getting on an airplane to get to the other side of the world... I started off in Geneva airport where my mother dropped me off on the French side, convinced that British Airways did their check in on this side. .. to only find out I had to cross back over the border to Switzerland (invisible line in airport), go down some stairs and down some empty corridors until I popped out into the arrival hall, as if I just got out of an airplane and had to go through passport check to get out into Geneva, all this lugging my heavy bag around with me. How I was even allowed to do this is beyond me and makes me doubt the usually famous Swiss rigour...

Finally checked in and relieved my bag was exactly 22.6kgs (allowed only 23kgs) and thinking that that painful week of packing and repacking and selectively taking one tiny item out and re-weighing was useful after all – I saw on the departures screen that all flights to London were either seriously delayed or some even cancelled! The 2 inches of snow which fell in the UK was enough to paralyse the country for the last 3 days (wasn’t I watching the news?) and delays upon delays resulted in cancelations... The horror of being stuck in Europe any longer, or worse, bumping through an ice storm while flying, crossed my mind. But miraculously, my BA flight to Heathrow was the only one which wasn’t cancelled and was just 20 mins late! That would allow enough time for my connection... Phew!

I got to Heathrow’s impressive new Terminal 5 and was pleasantly told at transfer desk that I had been bumped up one class to Executive World Class or something! That great news, plus the 2 mg of Valium (the result of flying for 2 years in DRCongo...), the upbeat phone conversation with friends before flying out and the wide seats and personal TV with lots of movies got me up on a Valium high! We happily taxied to the runway and just as we revved the engines up, we just stood still... the pilot embarrassingly announced that the flaps on the right hand side of the wing were not working! He said safety was first with BA especially for him as he had a wife and three kids... I wondered if they were told to say that during their customer sensitivity training... But hell, I agreed.

5 hours later, we were still in the airplane and about to take off with a brand new motor for the right flap that the best engineer in the airport had put together in the few hours – during which the poor lot in Economy class were sweating like mad as they had to turn off the air-con at the back of the plane...

So I was definitely going to miss my connecting flight in Hong Kong to Jakarta so I just hoped they’d put me up in a hotel and fly me out the next day. As could do with a break after being 16 hours in this plane! Of course that’s what happened! Hurray! So called my 3 friends in Hong Kong and managed to see even 4 of them...

I met up with Alex the HK (Hong Kong) salsa on-the-2 King for a few mins at the central station – He left the UK scene about a year ago and just radically changed his life around, moved to HK and now runs the only on the 2 salsa dance school in HK! And he is doing just great! Then Christine, a UWC (Singapore) friend took me to diner in a 24 hour place in the centre, where Wendy (another UWC person) joined us and we laughed and giggled about the good old days.

Then off to one of the hippest RnB clubs where we met up with yet another class mate (Left, photo me, Avi, Christine), after having walked through the urban jungle of drunk “Guilos”, red-faced Chinese, and stumbling tourists in HK’s hottest night spot. We unfashionably queued while the fashionistas cruised on past us... Inside it was so packed and tight and people dangerously waved cigarettes in your face while trying to move their hips even an inch to the RnB beats.

Left by 3 am back to my airport hotel which had a grand hideously kitch fake-marble lobby and a luxury SPA but no free Wi-Fi! ?*£%^!@~#

Did I mention how shocked I was at HK’s clusters of tightly packed sky-scrappers dangerously bordering on the sides of the sea shores!? This place in un-real! I am finally in ‘culture-shocked awe’, very contrasting to the type of awe I experience back in Congo...