A Little Bit Louder

This morning I started my 24 hour journey to HK… it started in a bit of a panic though. As I was about to leave at 8am, I checked the Air China website to see if my flight was still on time. To my shock and amazement, the site listed my flight as flying at 8:45! I tried calling the Air China office in KTM, but they weren’t open yet, so I rushed off to the airport as fast as I could, praying all the way.

Traffic was amazingly light and I made it to the airport in about 20 minutes. To my relief, the flight was actually at 10:45 as scheduled. Problem was, in my rush to leave, I left my printed eticket on mark’s table…. more praying… I hand the check in counter my ipod, where I had copied my itinery and conf #’s for this exact event. They looked at it a long time, then decided to accept it and give me my boarding pass.

At just a bit past 11, I was off, flying along the Himalayas… even more magnificent than the last time I saw them as we got much closer. In fact, we were flying through a gap in them to Lhasa before continuing on to Chengdu. There’s no words to describe how majestic those mountains look,... and trying to capture pictures through a plane window won’t do it any justice…. just trust me, it was amazing!

Lhasa was my next hurdle. Even though we were just stopping to drop off a few passengers and picking up a few more, we had to get off, clear customs, and get back on the plane. Problem was, I did’t have a visa, and was told that I didn’t need one as I was in transit. So I told the customs guys this, and they asked to see my ticket… so again, I handed them my ipod, and again, it was accepted after much studying of my text file itinery… all this while i sat there freezing. It was 6 degrees outside… and i’m sure it wasn’t much warmer inside. Plus we were at 12000ft… cold… the terminal had no heat at all. So half an hour of freezing and basically walking around in a circle, I was back on the plane, in a different seat, but happy that I had an official stamp that said i was legally allowed to be in China for up to 24 hours… which meant I got to leave the airport in Chengdu.

In Chengdu, I picked up my bags and went through another screener… to this point, I had gone through 6 security screeners/pat downs/bag searches/passport checks… where they decided i couldn’t bring in the Gurkha knife that I was given by Joshua’s father. If I had just bought it in Thamel, I would just leave it, but receiving one from an actual Gurhka soldier is different. So I told them that I wasn’t staying in China, but in transit through to HK… and asked if i could just pick it up on the way out of the country… they agreed…only if i had a ticket to leave tomorrow… wanting to see the ticket, I showed them my ipod… and again… accepted!

So there I was… in arrivals… and no clue where to go. I hadn’t made up my mind yet as to whether or not I was going to overnight in the airport, or try to find a cheap hotel. Everyone I talked to spoke very little if any english, or cantonese. But I did find some girls working at the car rental place that were nice enough to help me find a hotel in town for 380 Yuan ($68 CAD)... mostly I just wanted a clean/safe/secure place to sleep, and international departures at the airport was closed so if I were to stay there, I would have to sleep outside the secure area… something I didn’t want to do. So now I’ve got a room at the Sichuan Hotel… part of the crown hotel chain… pretty nice… small room though, but I don’t care… i think the bathroom is almost as big as the room….

I definitely need to read chinese though, or at least speak mandarin fluently. I went to a restaurant after dropping off my things and ordered something to eat. I recognized the chinese character for beef so I pointed to that and also got a bowl of congee. It turns out the characters beside the word “beef” meant “burn your face off hot”...

Well, it’s been an incredible day of travel… flying over and along the Himalayas, being incredibly blessed in all my encounters with officials, customs, etc. I have a 5am wakeup call tomorrow so I’m off to take a long hot shower and then to bed. Thanks to everyone who has been praying for me through this trip. It continues to be more challenging and amazing than I had ever thought.

I went to the weekend market today… or the JJ Market as the locals say… it’s nuts! I hear it’s like 14000 vendors/stalls all in one area… it was packed… and hot… so i spent a lot of it drinking back fruit smoothies… i figured i should be a little healthier than I had been… prices at this market were better than the night bazaar and Phuket/Krabi as well… though I really wasn’t in the mood for shopping… but when am I ever?

I also met up with my friend Dan againtonight. His wife Art was in some sort of Thai variety show down at the university so I went down and watched it… It was rather fun… reminded me of some productions back at SCBC... I didn’t understand much in this one… that includes the English songs… though it was entertaining and there are some incredible voices here…

Afterwards we went out for dinner… well second dinner… we at tons…12 dishes… 14 of us…and paid 2400 baht (80 CAD)... Man I love this country!

Today we went Kayaking… we didn’t go very far… just around this island and through some mangrove forest… it was really neat to see stuff like that up close… there were monkeys everywhere… some that seemed quite bored of yet another group of tourists, and another bunch that seemed quite interested in the fruit scraps we had in our boats.