China 2025 – April 16
Waiting to board my flight, I reflect that six weeks earlier I had never heard of Xiamen Airlines. Or our first destination Xiamen either, a port city on China’s south-eastern coast just across from Taiwan. Friends wondered aloud if we were wise to entrust our lives to a provincial airline. But Xiamen Airlines ticked a few boxes. It was much cheaper than better-known airlines willing to take us to where we wanted to go. It wasn’t a so-called budget airline: food and baggage were not add-ons to the starting price. And we couldn’t find evidence of a scary safety record. We found a few reports of flight delays, but nothing serious like cancellations. That Xiamen Airlines is not front-page news is another tick in its favour, because such news, especially about obscure airlines, is more likely to be bad than good. Xiamen isn’t a planned destination, but overnight layovers on our way to and from Zhangjiajie, where we are going to spend the bulk of our two-week holiday, will give us a chance to check out the city. And our hotel accommodation in Xiamen is free, courtesy of the airline.
I am anxious in airports. I insist on arriving earlier than necessary, I am impatient to check in our baggage, confirm our seats, have our cabin baggage scanned and pass through immigration. And then I relax a little. I relax a little more once I board the aircraft. I have no fear of flying. Safer than driving, so I’m told. That’s good enough for me.
In a sea of oriental faces in the departure lounge, non-oriental ones like mine stand out. A tall, young, handsome Indian man two seats away from me appears to be travelling alone. He is watching a soccer match on his mobile phone.
We board the aircraft and find our seats. The Indian man is in the same row as mine across the aisle. After take-off I try to watch a movie, but aircraft noise drowns out the dialogue coming through the inadequate ear speakers, and there are no English subtitles for English movies. I cannot play scrabble either as my app requires an internet connection. So I pass the time reading, writing and playing sudoku. The quality of food and drink lives up to my low expectations. In all other ways, the flight is thankfully immemorable.
In the arrivals section of Xiamen airport, the same young Indian man walks up and stands next to me as I fill out a form for incoming foreigners. I wonder if his itinerary is similar to ours. It will be nice to befriend a like-minded traveller, bump into him in the places of natural and cultural beauty we plan to visit. I think of asking him after I have completed the form but don’t get around to it, and that is the last I see of him.
We pass through immigration and proceed to find out the whereabouts of our checked-in baggage. We are told it has to be cleared by a security check for loading onto our flight to Changsha the next morning. We get our first taste of China’s unique hi-tech digital system. We join a crowd of passengers holding up their smartphones to a diagram that vaguely resembles a QR code. We duly try to scan it with our iPhones but get no response. A helpful man noticing our bewilderment tells us that we need to scan it using the Chinese social media app WeChat, which we have already downloaded and set up. The website that comes up requires us to let it read the baggage tag barcodes on our boarding passes. An orange-coloured message indicating clearance eventually appears for each of our bags, enabling us to proceed to the transfer desk in the domestic section of the terminal to get details of our courtesy overnight hotel. From the transfer desk we follow the passengers dealt with before us out of the building to an area where buses are parked. We board the bus that will take us to our hotel which we reach far later in the evening than I’d envisaged.
I don’t get to see much of Xiamen that first night. Bock, my partner and travelling companion, wants to eat something, so he goes out to find a restaurant. He returns in half an hour with noodles and skewers. He is a Chinese Singaporean, and he is fluent in Mandarin and Hokkien.
Gerry Roberts 