Or should I say, “I shall go to Korea if I can only get through China on the way!”
Eventful day, starting off with another strike in Kathmandu that left all the roads deserted of cars – but not people or rubble (put there by protesters to hamper vehicular traffic). After our Air China flight finally took off, we flew right past Mount Everest, mostly shrouded in clouds, on our way to Lhasa, Tibet. It’s so tall that it pokes straight through the top of the clouds!
We started our descent into Lhasa with warnings about turbulence and then the pilot suddenly announced in Chinese that it was too dangerous to land there so they were going to skip it and fly straight to Chengdu. Many were cheering and I thought it was someone’s birthday, but then they translated it into English. Skipping a layover sounds nice, but that meant we arrived here two hours early and I was left with a total of seven hours to kill without being allowed to go anywhere. I’m not sure how many on the plane were being disadvantaged by the decision, but they were remaining quiet.
Once I arrived in Chengdu, I had to face immigration without a Chinese visa. They were actually very nice about it, but they did confiscate my passport and tell me I wasn’t allowed to leave the airport terminal. At one point I had 5 Chinese officials escorting me around. I get the impression they don’t deal with too many transient visitors. The Chengdu airport is huge and full of empty gates and there are very few people who appear to be using it. Even so, they forced our plane to park way out on the tarmac with 90% of the gates empty and forced us to bus in. I managed to squeeze some Yuan out of an ATM so I could get some dinner after finally finding out how much it was worth so I knew not to overdraw or underdraw my account.
When my passport was confiscated, I immediately expressed concern about how I was going to get it back (as I have never been asked to surrender it before). I was assured by an official that whenit came time to check-in for my midnight flight, the passport would be waiting at the check-in desk for me to pick up and the flight staff would know about the whole situation.
Normally the earliest you can check-in in person is about 3 hours before your flight takes off, so I had to waste many an hour shuffling around the huge empty terminal as it closed more and more shops in the evening. So I finally get my chance to check in and I get to the check-in counter. Of course, the staff know absolutely nothing about it. Furthermore, they are unable to check me in without a valid passport so I was completely stuck. As it turns out, my passport was not at the check-in counter, but sitting in an immigration office about 300 meters away – behind a security zone, which required a passport and a boarding pass to get through, and next to the emigration queue that also requires the same plus a valid visa from the Chinese government.
Nobody at the check-in counter knew what to do about this conundrum until I quietly mentioned that I actually had two passports (which I never disclosed to the Chinese officials, but then again, they never asked). This got everyone excited because it provided the partial solution to the problem: I was now able to get my boarding pass, which allowed me to get through security and closer to the immigration office.
In the end, I was escorted through security by an airline official straight to the immigration office that held my other passport. They were able to get the managing Chinese official to come out and he very nicely went to great lengths to expidite my acceleration through the final emigration line – even going so far as to actually fill in immigration forms for me so I could legally leave the country I was denied access to visiting in the first place. Now my passport has a Chinese emigration stamp even though I was never technically in the country.
I don’t know if I was their first ever transient passenger, but they obviously need to grease the wheels on their processes… But maybe its just the Chinese way of conducting business. Other countries usually provide a last-minute-escape route for transients only there to catch connecting flights which you usually find just before you get to the immigration desks. This just keeps you in the emigration holding zone in the airport and allows you to circumvent the issue – although I have heard Canadians complaining about having to go through U.S. customs when trying to simply go south of the USA.
Everyone was always very nice, polite, and respectful in this episode, as you always are when dealing with government officials, and nobody ever suggested or even implied that I had ever done anything wrong, but…. what a circus!
Fortunately, I made it into Seoul as scheduled and was able to negotiate the extensive train and subway network with my luggage to find my hotel.
