Surprisingly, even Hong Kong airport seems to sleep. The downside of arriving at 5am is that the free shuttle bus to the Novotel City Gate hotel doesn’t start until 6am. Hmmm. I chose this hotel as it’s 5 mins from the International Airport, with a MTR station beneath that can get you into the city centre in 10 mins. I hadn’t bargained on a 75 min wait for the first shuttle bus, and no taxi wants a 5 minute fare L. Never mind.
I’m also departing at an ungodly hour, twenty to one in the morning after I arrive, which gives me about 18 hours in Hong Kong before boarding the next flight to Paris. I decide my time is best spent having breakfast, a nap, lunch, a gym workout and a swim rather than wandering around the nearby mall.
Or I could spend 20 minutes waiting to check out of the hotel at 10pm at night. For some mad reason, the hotel works on a combination of computerised and manual paperwork – which simply seems to mean that there is a lot of peering at screens and scrutinising of printed materials. And no, my name isn’t Mr Ren and no that’s not my credit card imprint. Nearly 12 hours after I had lunch in the restaurant, the front desk is none the wiser. Utter lunancy in 2013.
And let’s give thanks in 2013 for free wi-fi at HK International Airport and Dropbox. For the first time in more than 15 years, I’ve been asked for the e-ticket of my next flight so that HK can inform CDG immigration that my ticket isn’t one way from Hong Kong to Paris (it is, but I have a SAS flight from CDG to Oslo that Cathay Pacific don’t know about). So much for integration of passenger systems 🙂
