After some debate, I think we've decided the first mistake was my asking, "So, is United Airlines any good?"
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| Titin helps Doris' daughter Carmen make a grab for Bre. | |
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| Twenty hours later, a very busy United Airlines counter at Narita. | |
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| Sylvia and Doris' hubby Andy await the return of our harried agent. | |
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| Bre and Titin chill out at Narita as our travel itinerary is untangled. | |
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| Traffic on the way from our transit hotel back to Narita airport. | |
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| Our chariot awaits. Malaysia Airlines gets eight thumbs up. | |
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| Traffic on the way from the Narita airport terminal to the runway. | |
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| Video screens in coach, offering movies, games, and taped TV. |
So, I was curious. It was a casual, small-talk question. Bre, one of the interns flying with us, was a United loyalist, so she proudly answered, "I love United. I've never had a problem with them. No cancellations, no delays, nothing."
Perhaps if we were listening carefully, we could have heard the fates chuckling.
The early signs weren't good. After meeting up at the office downtown, we headed down to Merchant Street to meet the two vans I'd reserved the day before. There was a limousine waiting.
A limousine for four people would seem reasonable, perhaps. Were we not traveling with nine 70 pound footlockers, on top of our own check in luggage. (Some early morning math determined that, by sheer weight, there was easily twice as much stuff as there was us.) So the poor frazzled driver tried to stuff what he could into his limo (the hula dancer and bobble-headed dog on his dashboard wiggling away), then argued with the dispatcher over the need for another vehicle. They finally found a van trapped in traffic on Nimitz highway on his way to a fare in Waikiki. Suffice it to say, we commandeered it.
On the way to the airport, we chuckled about how our morning could have gone better. (Again the foreshadowing.) Of course, we ruined a few other mornings as well, including a skycab who had to transport our massive monument of luggage from where the taxi company dropped us off (about two hundred yards away from the correct spot), and the poor check-in agent who likely had second thoughts about her career path after wrestling with excess luggage and excess baggage fees, passports from three different countries, and a traveling group that wasn't really a group. (Doris, for reasons to complicated to go into, was bringing her husband and daughter, but had to arrange their travel separately.)
We got to the gate on time, fortunately, but unfortunately, our airplane's departure was somewhat delayed. Two and a half hours late, in fact, as apparently there was a problem with air pressure regulation and the seal on one of the doors. Even as we boarded, they were still working on it, and frankly, I didn't need to hear the words "try" and "almost" in the conversations between flight crew members in regards to the work being done.
"It's okay that we're late," I said. "We had a four-hour layover in Narita, and I hate Narita, so this means we just rot in hell for fewer hours."
Eight hours pass. I read "Memoirs of a Geisha" in its entirety. I decide United service is pretty much comparable to Northwest.
Then.
As we approached Tokyo, there was a fair amount of turbulence. And, as the captain explained, a fair amount of "traffic."
Basically, Narita was backed up. Too many planes, too few runways. We circled the airport. Again. And again. Out the window, now and then, we could see other jets, mostly Northwest, spiraling in frustration too. Lost in thick grey clouds, bumping along, we rose and fell, banked and swayed. (By the time this already infamous leg of our trip would end, a couple of air-sickness bags would realize their full potential — surprisingly not through me.)
Forty minutes later, the captain came on. "Finally," someone groaned.
"Things aren't getting better at Narita, and unfortunately we're low on fuel," he informed us. "We have to divert to Haneda."
"That's not good," Sylvia said. And she was right.
Our flight path as marked in red on the cabin screen finally escaped its little circle offshore and straigtened out, aiming southwest. Maybe half an hour later, we made a rough approach, and had an even rougher landing (complete with a runway bounce) at Haneda Airport.
We taxied in the rain for a bit, and came to a stop far from any buildings. People in the back of our plane — apparently a giant delegation of mainland Chinese — hadn't understood the captain's update (nor the translation, which was only into Japanese), and caused a bit of commotion when they started to march up the aisles with their bags. The United crew yelled over our heads, "Sit down! Sit down! We are not at Narita!"
I was only slightly happy to hear that.
We sat, and sat, and sat. The absense of news was maddening. Then, the next announcement over the loudspeaker was not with information, but with a request for anyone who was a doctor or with medical training to identify themselves to the crew.
"That's not good," Titin said. And she was right.
The announcement for a doctor came a few more times, then stopped, which I can only hope meant a doctor was found. Then, finally, another update.
"United has no facilities here, but ANA has been gracious enough to agree to fuel our plane," the captain said. "However, we're in line for the fuel truck, and they're saying it'll be maybe 40 to 45 minutes. We appreciate your patience and understanding."
I hadn't offered either, but wasn't going to argue.
The 40 minutes stretched to a little over an hour. Then, another update: they needed to file documentation for the fuel — I think they said "customs forms" — and that would take another 10 minutes.
Twenty minutes later, we were back on the runway. It was 4:50 p.m., Tokyo time.
As we took off, our flight from Tokyo to Singapore was probably roaring down the runway at Narita at the same time.
We touched down at Narita just before six. Counting from the moment we left the office, we'd been traveling for twenty hours (meaning we'd been awake for over a day).
The airplane crew was happy to inform the passengers (United calls us "customers," actually) that connecting flights to Hong Kong and Beijing had been held. We, clearly, were out of luck.
We disembarked and searched for answers, as I chanted, "I hate this airport, I hate this airport, I hate this airport." After confirming our plane had left without us, and a few wrong turns, we found United's counter, and a long line of other unhappy, stranded "customers."
For whatever reason — my colleagues suspect it was because I was Japanese, and looked like an easy fix — an agent from another desk pulled me (and thus my companions) out of line to help us. Suffice it to say, as he ran himself ragged over the next three hours sorting things out, he regretted picking me out of the crowd.
The problem? We had tickets from Honolulu to Singapore via Tokyo, and were going to purchase our reserved tickets to Kuala Lumpur while staying overnight in Singapore (as the flight to Kuala Lumpur leaves Singapore before the flight from Tokyo arrives).
If United helped us only as far as they had to, they would get us to Singapore the next day. That would mean an overnight stay, and getting to Kuala Lumpur a day late. (Not to mention the overnight stay in Tokyo we were already looking at.)
"This is not good," I said.
The solution, after lots and lots of phone calls and running around (mostly on the part of the hapless agent), was to buy new tickets from Singapore to Kuala Lumpur right there, meeting United's requirements, then having them — through JAL, through Malaysia Airlines (yes, that's a fourth-party arrangement) — get us straight to Kuala Lumpur from Tokyo.
Even after coming up with the plan, it was another three hours before it could be finalized. (Again, the multiple nationalities and semi-split groups in our party proved to cause much confusion.) We finally got our new tickets and hotel vouchers, and headed out into a rainy Tokyo night to catch the very last hotel shuttle. Our host for the night? The Excel Hotel Tokyu, a giant, drab, but surprisingly clean and well-managed place just ten minutes away from the airport.
After a late-night dinner of voucher-paid teriyaki steak and french fries (disappointing for Bre, for whom the layover was a first-ever visit to Japan, let alone Asia), we retired to our rooms.
The rooms were small, but neat. Double beds, down comforters, and a weird solid-state clock-radio control panel thing in the nightstand that was connected everything in the room. It looked like a set piece from a Get Smart episode, with old-fashined nobs and steel toggles. The bathroom was the strangest part — it seemed to sit in the room like an orange rubberized module out of the Mir space station.
Still, the water was hot and the water pressure was good, so I was happy. I got a pretty good night's sleep, apart from waking up every 80 minutes or so after 3:30 a.m. (my body still clinging futilely to the Hawaii time zone).
This morning, as we reconvened in the lobby, we decided that things could have been worse. (We then knocked the hell on wood.) After all, we avoided having to get right onto a six-hour flight to an overnight in Singapore (where we'd have to claim our two tons of check in baggage and sleep with it, then check them in again on the next, unconnected, flight). Instead, we got a good night's sleep in Tokyo and a complete connection straight into Kuala Lumpur.
Malaysia Airlines flight number 98. That's where I am now.
And I'm liking it.
I've never been on MAS, either, and I wasn't sure what to expect. I wasn't sure if I was looking at something like JAL (good), or Korean Air (bad). It turns out that MAS is at least JAL caliber. And for a steerage-class regular like me, it's the best-appointed plane I've ever been on.
It's a fairly new Boeing 777-200. Sitting here, with my laptop on my tray, I have maybe six inches of clearance between my knees and the chair in front of me. It's not a wide-open meadow, but compared to most economy class seats, it's luxurious. The seat reclines extra far (maybe 40 degrees), and the headrests bend up so you have something to lean against. The dinner wasn't bad, and the crew came by later with ice cream for dessert. Beer is poured as freely as water (too bad I can't drink), and the towels were extra hot.
Most impressively, though, is that we all have personal video monitors, with "over 70 hours of entertainment to choose from." Movies, Nintendo games, taped television broadcasts, the works. I watched "Behind Enemy Lines" (and regretted it) and put on "The Royal Tenenbaums" as background noise.
All this, and the plane's less than half full, and there's an empty row and a pile of pillows calling my name.
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