Saturday 29th July 2017 dawned and “China 2017” was underway. A quick taxi ride to Blackpool North train station. A train to Manchester Airport, which got delayed and then terminated at Manchester Picadilly. We’d left plenty of time so just waited for the next train and we got to the airport about 20 minutes later than planned.
This year we flew with Hainan Airlines. So rather that flying via one of the Arabian Gulf states this was a direct flight from Manchester to Beijing. That’s a long flight…stated as 11 hours on the schedule but in reality only about 10 hours. Hainan Airlines were pretty good, especially as they were about £300 cheaper per person than the gulf airlines. Good points were enough leg room for me (well built and 6ft2in) and the food was pretty good for plane food. Bad points were that the film selection wasn’t too good. There was also a lot of turbulence pretty much all the way to Beijing. Not the airline’s fault but it did mean it wasn’t the most comfortable of flights. Not much sleep considering it was a red-eye flight – leaving Manchester at about noon and arriving in Beijing at 05:45 the following day.
Arriving in Beijing before 6am. It was quite hazy, partially from the ever present smog and partly from a grubby window. We were in China, but still many hours from our final destination.
Our plane that carried us from Manchester to Beijing. It looked pretty small to me for such a long flight but I guess my perceptions were wrong because it did get us there.
At Beijing we had to clear immigration and customs. Immigration wasn’t too bad. It seemed we were the only flight landing at that time so with 10-15 minutes of queuing we were through without any problems. We then had to collect our bags and go through customs which again didn’t take too long. We then had to walk about 15 minutes from Terminal 2 to Terminal 1 for the internal flight to Nanning. Unfortunately you don’t get checked-in all the way through in the UK, so we then had to join long queues to get checked-in. This wasn’t helped by the fact that there were queue touts working…get someone to stand in the queues then you can pay the tout to become a colleague of the queuing person and jump to the start of the queue. Eventually we got checked in and found our way to the gate for a 3 hour wait until our flight to Nanning. That flight was pretty uneventful and about 3 hours after leaving we were greeted by family and friends (He Li Ping, Xiao Wei and Qiao Li).
After a quick stop at McDonald’s at Nanning Airport for lunch we set off on the final leg of our journey, a 2 hour drive to Laibin. Xiao Wei was our driver and once we got past some confusing road junctions, apparently made more confusing by the Chinese satnav, we had a quick snooze before arriving in Nanning.