Well…. We wanted an adventure and the trip from Beijing to Siem Reap lived up to that
It started with a small trip through the Beijing subway! Yes, it’s exactly what you imagine but it’s cheap!
After the fiasco getting into China we decided to get to the airport earlier. Luckily it wasn’t needed as the Asiana checkin crew did a good job of making that painless. Chinese security on the other hand was interesting. For some odd reason they feel the need to run you through 3 different lines so they can stamp every square inch of your boarding pass.
Once at the gate, we ate some cheap airport noodles and waited, and waited and waited… Which normally wouldn’t matter on our trip but this is one of 2 short connections on our whole trip. Our connection time in Korea was already short (55 minutes) . I asked the gate agent and he assured me that we’d be ok.
I pondered the odds he understood what I asked while drinking ice cold 1$ Tsing Tao airport beers out of a vending machine. Hey, don’t judge, I had to do something with all those RMB’s
While we were flying I broke the news to the girls that Asiana only flys this route 2x per week so if we missed the flight we’d be in Korea for a while. Of course I knew they’d rebook us on another airline but it was still fun to watch that thought process with them 😃
Turns out they moved our seats to the front of the plane to help the transfer time. We landed about 45 minutes late which should have caused us to miss the connection but that wasn’t to be. Today was our lucky day and as soon as we exited there was an agent holding a sign with our names on it. We pointed, she said “follow me quickly” and we were off to the races! If you’ve never had the chance while wearing a backpack to try and keep up with a tiny Korean lady running in flats through the Seoul airport, I highly recommend it! It was literally amazing race style, she’d weave in and out of crowds of ppl, move ppl over on escalators and just flat out move while we tried to keep up! She said about 10 Korean words to the security checkpoint guy and that was that, we went right to the front of the line, right past the first class passengers, the handicapped, everything! They put our whole bags through the scanner without making us do the dance of taking everything off and separating our electronics etc etc. “ok, looks good” then off to the races again
When we got to the gate I was surprised there was still a bus ride involved! We met 2 other passengers on the bus and then the driver was off, I think he learned to drive in Beijing! He got stuck waiting for a giant jet to cross the road so he backed up and went around! About that time he went around a blind corner (on 2 wheels) and whizz another bus comes within inches of hitting us!
We made it to the plane in roughly 18 minutes by my count!
All in all it was kind of an amazing day of travel
We logged 17k steps and 8 miles of walking!
ការលាក្នា lea
Love this! While reading, I imagined going through all that with David…omg…no!
What a Fantastic adventure you are having. In the US you would have just missed your plane. :) :)
I would have paid money to see David’s face through that airport… It probably matched Ashley’s!
I laughed as I read through your recount. I wish you had had time to video it. =)