Trip report - to Toronto via Hong Kong
CX156, a flight from Brisbane to Hong Kong, is not really the start of the most direct route to Toronto, I grant you, but this flight is with my home airline alliance, and thus lounges await; and it isn’t via the US which is another important thing. Air Canada was my only real other choice, but this flight’s cheaper and much more exciting, and Air Canada is really not a very good thing especially if you don’t have status - you get chucked right in the back, in the middle, and… eurgh.
I get into Brisbane Airport ten minutes before checkin opens (I hadn’t considered that checkin wouldn’t open earlier). It’s an impersonal affair with some machines that don’t work very well (screens that aren’t very good at knowing when someone has hit a button on them). I ask for a printed boarding pass, and it gives me an error message, but there’s nobody to see and I have a boarding pass on my phone anyway.
The flight leaves at 23:55 - at least, it’s supposed to. It doesn’t. The plane was 22 minutes late to arrive, and this is blamed for our delayed departure (27m late, as it happens).
I thought that this was the first time on this flight for me. It isn’t. I’ve done this sector three times before - once with Qantas, and twice with Cathay Pacific (once as a BA codeshare). I’m on B-LRI, an eight year-old Airbus A350-900, and I’m in economy seat 42A. I notice it isn’t a BA codeshare any more for some reason.
Excitingly, as I board, the system gives me a sound of sadness. I wonder if this means I have an upgrade? I do not. Just a passport check. 42A for me. Though I do have a Platinum Phantom next to me - something that wouldn’t happen with Air Canada, I can assure you.
An uneventful (and relatively sleepless) eight hour journey later, I find myself next to the Pier first class lounge in Hong Kong airport, which I think is the best OneWorld first class lounge in the world. I work in the “bureau”, then have a memorable breakfast in the dining room - Dan Dan Mien noodles (promised to be spicy, which they were not, but what a breakfast!) I then slowly wander down to The Wing, and then slowly walk back to board my next flight - and it’s a long one, a 14h 52m flight to Vancouver. B-LXA has been flying for seven years. It’s all fine.
The hotel in Toronto was only tangentially “in” Toronto, really - it had a good view of Toronto, but it was surprisingly difficult to get to anywhere really, other than a ten minute walk to something called Liberty Village, a re-gentrified area the other side of a train line and elevated roadway.
I’m a sucker for old building signs, and random old infrastructure like this big chimney. The Brunswick Balke Collender company owned a factory and a boiler house here on 40 Hanna Avenue, and made billiard tables and bowling alleys. Here’s more on that, including that this yellow brick is very Toronto, apparently.
On the way back - checking in with WestJet WS 723 for the first leg, and the WestJet machine gives me one boarding pass, not the two Cathay Pacific flights I’m taking after. A bit annoying. I have to talk to the man in the Priority Service desk, and he spends ten minutes peering at his computer screen trying to understand why he can’t get my boarding passes. He finally gets them all.
Checking in my bag fills me with confidence, with the system not knowing my flight number, and welcoming me onto %AIRLINE_NAME%.
The flight is late, due to a combination of a late inbound plane and staff coming from other flights. We spend 53 minutes on the ground before finally taking off, and we land 50 minutes late in Vancouver.
In YVR, my next complex task is to find the Cathay Pacific lounge. This is not as easy as it could be. I start by searching the internet for where the lounge is. Gate 66 is the furthest away but I needed a walk, and eventually get all the way there to find nothing looking remotely like a Cathay Pacific lounge. I slowly walk back, keeping my eyes open, and see if I can find anything.
The Plaza Premium Lounge blinks in the distance, and it has a Cathay Pacific logo as one of their airline partners, which is disappointing but okay, so I wander in, only to be told that this isn’t the lounge at all. “But there’s a Cathay Pacific sign outside?” “Ah, that’s wrong.” I’m sent off to gate 71.
Gate 71 is the Skyteam lounge. I look carefully at it. It isn’t for me either. I wait to ask them though, and while I wait I look around at the dismal offerings of closed retail outlets. Over there is one with shutters down; and that one next to it looks like it’s just an empty shell, a large black surround with a dark gold logo on it saying… ah, Cathay Pacific. I’d walked past it twice. It’s almost invisible, especially from one direction with a green cherry-picker totally hiding the signs.
And I’m glad I found it, for Dan Dan Mien noodles and a relax. It’s smaller but just as nice.
A 14 hour flight next. I’d been careful to check, and 42A did not have anyone listed in 42B, so this was good, I’d have space to stretch out. Except the plane we boarded was the nine year-old B-HNR, a different configuration to what was on the Cathay Pacific website, and 42A was right next to 42C, which was right next to the toilets. Not great, though I sleep through almost all of it, being occasionally woken by some impressive turbulence. If there were meals, I certainly didn’t see any, until the breakfast, which came surprisingly close to the descent into Hong Kong.
Getting into Hong Kong at about 5.30am, my next flight was just after midday, and so I decided that it was a sensible plan to get out of the airport and go into Hong Kong. And so I did.
I love Hong Kong. I got on the Airport Express, and as it shot into Kowloon, I suddenly realised that I hadn’t paid and had no idea how to. My iPhone was telling me I could buy an Octopus card on the phone, but then it said I didn’t have any payment cards which was weird. It turns out that there’s an app for non-HKers, where you load a virtual Octopus card with one of your foreign cards in your own currency, suspiciously. Still, it worked; and with my Octopus card on my Apple Watch I was able to also jump on a tram (and pretend to drive it from the top deck), and also catch the regular MRT too.
Hong Kong is as I remember it, though much quieter at 6.30am. The city feels as if it never sleeps, but as I wandered around a bit of the city, I saw a few night clubs kicking out, some dressed-for-a-big-night-out couples wandering unsteadily home. I went to the mid-levels escalator, intending to go up the hill, forgetting that it runs the other way in the morning.
Where the signs displayed English first, and traditional Chinese script second, that order has now been reversed. From the tram coming into Wan Chai there was a large and quite nice English-style pub, now there is a Chinese restaurant. Times Square seems to focus more on Chinese brands than European ones - though there’s still a Marks and Spencer in the same obvious place in Central.
I disappear back to the airport, and walk to Cathay Pacific’s Pier First Class lounge to scrub off the heat of the morning, and for Dan Dan Mien noodles number three of this trip. And then my final flight.
I try to stay awake for this one. It’s 8 hours and it’ll land in Brisbane at 10.30pm, so I’d like to arrive and get a good night’s sleep. It’s a good job I want to stay awake - a few very excited children spend much of the flight shouting at the tops of their voices, as I busy myself trying to fix a knotty problem with a website that I’ve not looked at for the last 5 years. I eventually get that fixed, but it is a good four hours of peering at dusty code and ancient libraries.
As we start descending towards Brisbane, I ask the senior FA - who’d given me a Platinum Welcome eight hours ago - whether they had given out any landing cards, the silly yellow things that Australia still insists on. She turns pale and stammers at me “only Chinese ones left”. “Did you give any out?” I asked again. She looks at me in abject terror, before running away and coming back, quietly, with a few in English. The rest of the entire plane - including the Chinese family in front of me - were left to fill them out at the airport. Tut tut.
Home, in a pre-booked Uber. The Uber rebooking system seems to think that if you land at 10.25pm then you want a car at 10.25pm, which seems not to fully understand how immigration works at international airports.
This was certainly the longer way round - and I can’t help but have looked a bit wistfully at the direct flight to Brisbane from Vancouver. There’s no doubt it was more comfortable - and more interesting.
