Well the first part of the trip is over. I flew from Brisbane to Guangzhou on China Southern airlines, an A380 I think, a huge plane, with a seating capacity of 503. I was right at the back, row 62 and there were another 4 rows behind me, most rows with 8 seats across. We had a good flight, although were 90 minutes late taking off as the plane was late coming in.
They had a luggage allowance of 30 kgs which is much more than usual, so at first I expected to be well within my limit but I was asked to take stuff over and I ended up with 32.5 kg check in, and my 5 kg carry on ended up being about 8 with a computer bag stuffed with what was left over.
As we passed through the tropics we threaded our way around quite a few huge storm cells. They were great mushroom shaped clouds, black in the ‘stalk’ middle, lots of cumulous clouds round the bottom and across the top it was like a plate, flat with a silky looking top, very unusual.
As we came into Guangzhou (said Gwon joe) the cloud seemed to go forever. We were descending for about 15 minutes in thick cloud, and it didn’t clear til we were close to the ground, but the pilot put it down as if it was a feather, wonderful flying.
Guangzhou airport http://www.guangzhouairportonline.com is enormous. It is absolutely huge, massive, monstrous, etc. We had a 15 minute taxi once we touched down then a ten minute bus ride to the right part of the airport. Then we went through two customs checks and on into the building. Because we were 90 minutes late taking off, I had only just enough time to do all that and get to the domestic area for take-off for Xiamen (said Shar-min). Once finished with customs we were driven by a sort of large golf buggy to the wing with our departure gates.
The flight from Guangzhou to Xiamen was really bumpy, again the first ten or fifteen minutes were climbing through cloud. But we arrived safe and sound, and in my case, exhausted…I had been up since 5 am and by now it was midnight.
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