Russian Far East 2014 24

The final leg of the trip home at the conclusion of one of my travel adventures is usually the most exciting step personally but the least interesting to write about. And so it is for this trip to the Russian Far East. There are not many ways you can make sleeping on a plane into a riveting read.

I spent my long hours in transit at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport very productively catching up on e-mails (the backlog totaled 338), and catching up on some significant news stories about which I had heard nothing while in Kamchatka. I didn’t even have the time to do much plane spotting, as I usually manage to do when I pass through airports. Sheremetyevo Airport is no longer the fascinating place that it used to be when it was dominated by Tupolevs, Ilyushins and Antonovs, although Aeroflot’s beautiful colour scheme (which is the predominant livery seen at Sheremetyevo) does make the airport a beautiful place to behold for an aircraft enthusiast.

My flight to Guangzhou was on a China Southern Airlines Airbus A330-200, and it departed punctually as the final traces of daylight were fading at 10:15 pm. My flight of 8 hours and 20 minutes was smooth and comfortable. While still short of the high standards of Asia’s best airlines such as Singapore Airlines and Cathay Pacific, China Southern’s level of service has improved markedly over the past few years, and I was quite impressed.

I was especially impressed when I arrived at Guangzhou’s Baiyun Airport, not because of the humid 34°C heat, but to discover that I (along with the other seven passengers with connections to Australia) was being offered free hotel accommodation because of the length of the transit stop. We didn’t need to request it; the airline staff approached us with the offer. They offered to re-tag our check-in luggage without our having to collect it, and then we were provided with rooms at the Pullman Hotel, a 5-star hotel across the road from the terminal building.

As I had been travelling for about 24 hours by that stage, and had almost another 24 to go, I was very grateful for this gesture, which meant I could catch a little sleep in a comfortable bed and refresh myself with a much-needed shower. It was a great way to finish travelling in the Russian Far East, even though it was totally out of character with the rougher nature of the travel and hotels over the previous three and a half weeks.

Well - not quite the finish of the trip. There was still the final leg to travel, from Guangzhou to Sydney. This flight turned out to be the most delayed of the trip, arriving in Sydney three hours and twenty minutes. Push-back of our new (just two months old) China Southern Airlines Airbus A330-300 was an hour and 45 minutes late for reasons that were not explained, and then we sat in the aircraft waiting to get on the runway and take-off for a further hour and 45 minutes. The reason for the extended delay to take-off was that there was a typhoon off the coast of Hong Kong, so when we eventually took to the air, we had to make a wide diversion around the storm. Not ideal, but totally understandable and forgivable.

Day 24 - Moscow to Sydney

Thursday

24 July 2014

this photo is courtesy of planespotters.net