Flight to Chungqing

The morning after touring the terracotta warriors and Xi'an, we boarded the bus for the airport. Visibility was very poor, Rainbow called it a "sandstorm". Though I'd more call it a dust bowl. (That's not my photo, by the way. But it's pretty similar to what we saw.)

Our original itinerary had called for a later flight to Chungqing, but that flight had turned out to not have room, our tour director said. It made me wonder why it hadn't been booked 6 months ago when we had paid. So we had to get up quite early to catch an earlier flight.

This was our second of three internal flights in China. For these, the checked luggage was picked up at the hotel in a truck, and dropped off at our new hotel after the flight, so we didn't check them in ourselves. However, my daughter and I had deliberately packed so as to have only carry-on items. We routinely do this to avoid lost luggage, and extra time waiting for bags at the luggage carousel, though that wouldn't matter in these internal flights.

I had gone to a luggage store before the trip and purchased a "international carryon-sized" bag that turned out to be a couple of inches taller than it really should have been. I was quite miffed at the vendor for selling it to me, but I only discovered the problem when I went to SFO to begin the trip, so there wasn't a lot I could do about it. However, I had no problems taking it aboard, even though it had
to be turned sideways to stow in the overhead compartment.

That is, I had no problems until we got to the Xi'an airport.

Before the security checkpoint, there was a roped gate with a guard. Our group got the word to go, and began to filter through this gate and into the security checkpoint, but the guard pointed at me and waved me over to the side. Quickly, the rest of my tour group disappeared, including my daughter. In the meantime, I'm standing there with no idea what the problem was, and not enough understanding of Chinese to figure it out.

The guard pointed to a sign and a carryon sizer. I presumed that my carryon bag was too big, but what should I do now? I didn't know the name of the airline, or where it's counter was, or how to ask to check in a flight. And why had it been ok to carry aboard earlier flights, but not this one? My paranoid fantasies took flight.

I had approached the guard from an angle that might have suggested that I wasn't a member of the tour group, but an American businessman traveling alone. Was this some sort of odd shakedown? Put me in a vulnerable position, and extract a few extra bucks from the rich American businessman? I don't know, I'll never know.

Eventually, Rainbow showed up, and took me over to the correct counter and my bag was checked. We hustled and caught up with the rest of the group, or at least, the majority of the group. This airport loaded directly from the tarmac, and you were transported to the aircraft from the terminal by shuttle busses. There were no loading ramps to shield you from the weather, much like a few terminals at the San Jose airport, though the ones in San Jose are within walking distance fromt the terminal. In any case, my daughter had already got on one of the shuttle busses, and I had to wait for the next one.

She doesn't like crowds much. She doesn't like getting split up from her group all that much either. In fact, she takes medication to deal with her anxiety. We had had trouble in the Forbidden City. In part, this was because the approximately 12-hour time change threw her off her medication schedule. And now she was separated from me, and her meds, as well as the ones I had brought to treat my high cholesterol, were in checked luggage. Not just any checked luggage, but luggage that had been handled via a different path than the luggage of the rest of our group, and was just asking to fall through the cracks.

I was worried.


I got on the plane ok and found my daughter. Check. Our next "hotel" was in fact a Yangtze River cruise ship. The cruise was to have departed from Chungqing, but the water wasn't high enough to bring the ship that far upstream, so we had a three-hour bus ride ahead of us that evening. So, I had all day to worry about whether the bag would arrive. But it did.

On our last internal flight, I checked through the carryon bag while retaining the medications on my person. For the flight home, I pulled out a laundry bag, put some dirty laundry in it, tied it up and checked it through. That left more room in my carryon for stuff I had purchased in China. But it meant an extra 20 minutes at SFO waiting for that laundry bag. But still, losing it wasn't going to be a big deal.

In most other ways, flying in China was about the same as flying in the US. Same checkpoints, same safety presentation (in English and Chinese), same drinks (but no ice), and different (cabbage and rice) but still mediocre food served. In a strange way, it was quite reassuring.

Nobody in our group lost a piece of luggage. But then, there were no complicated plane changes scheduled, which are the real vulnerabilities. All the flights we were on seemed pretty full, but with 47 of us in the group, we could fill most of the smaller aircraft we were on, which were Airbus and Boeing short-hop craft.

Anyway, I think they've got the airport-luggage-flying-thing down.