Welcome back armchair travelers! I know your lives have been
incomplete since the last installment of this blog, so back by popular demand
is the continuing saga of the trials and tribulations of your favorite former
blonde traveler!
A long time ago…..OK, a few days
ago:
So I have spent the better part of some 15 hours viewing
every conceivable square inch of the Beijing airport while I searched in vain
for what appeared to be a phantom flight on an airline that does not service
this airport. Head-scratching…. I have a booked seat on Qantas, however they
had no desk here at the airport and neither did Jet Star, the code share
partner who is operating the flight.
After going to several different terminals, repeatedly, which of course
means loading and unloading one’s 80 pieces of baggage on the inter-terminal
shuttle, the fifth person I asked finally admitted that the airline counters
were on the other side of customs and could only be accessed 3 hours before the
flight. Which is at 2:30 AM and means
all the lounges with free stuff are closed! Well, OK, the lounge is open but
she told me I needed a special pass to get in……business class apparently only
means business class on the airplane.
Leave it to me to spend three days getting from London to
Auckland…and have to pick up and recheck my bags at every leg of this
journey. How did I get to a place that
has a massive Pabst Blue Ribbon Happy New Year display in the departure lounge?
Read on to find out….and for those who are disinterested in this story already
and know what’s coming, feel free to skip to the expected fundraising pitch and
donate your hard earned dollars to me via Paypal now J
I won’t bore anyone to tears with
any descriptions of an overlong soul searching processes which eventually led
to the decision to apply to (and thankfully consequently get accepted to!) a
PhD program at a university in New Zealand. I’ll skip to the meat of where that
takes us today and say that I will be conducting research in a subject area of
tourism called Dark Tourism, which is travelling to places associated with
death, disaster, and the macabre. I am
fortunate enough to have found supervisors and a university who are interested
in my research proposal, which, in a nutshell, involves determining the viability,
planning, and sustainability of ‘fright tourism’ development by uncovering the
motivations of tourists to participate in activities that are designed
specifically for scary experiences—and are to at least some extent based on
true events. I will do this by
conducting my research in a location with a plethora of ‘scary’ and hopefully
some ‘true to history’ tourism
attractions, based on the witch trials of 1692—Salem, Massachusetts, USA.
Or something like that.
If you are interested to hear
more, give a shout and I will be happy to discuss further J
So, some six months later, here I
am in Beijing, awaiting my flight to Singapore.
After a battery of invasive medical tests and waiting seven weeks for
the FBI to sign off on the fact that they have no idea what kind of a criminal
I might be, I am starting off on this latest wander across the world, which
will make a pit stop for a few years in Dunedin, New Zealand. I began this journey right before Christmas
when I set off for England to spend Christmas with Victoria (my supervisor in
grad school) and her family and connecting with friends old and new.
Thoughts so far:
- · Even though I have to keep rechecking my bags since all my layovers are in double-digit hours, at least I didn’t turn out to be like the guy in front of me at immigration here in China who apparently didn’t speak Chinese or English. He was being told by the immigration officer that because his connecting flight was more than 25 hours away he was being denied entry into China and had to return to London if he couldn’t find a way to get on an earlier flight—by calling his travel agent on a cell phone that did not get service.
- · For the first time ever, I rented a room by the hour. No, not so I could get a little lovin, but so I could get a shower and some rest since I didn’t smell so good after a ten hour flight and hoisting 50 pound bags around for 3 hours.
- · The Chinese food here at the airport looked and tasted a whole lot like it does at home….if it were not for the 200 pounds of luggage I am carrying, knowledge that the airport is about 25 miles outside of a town that spans 200 miles, and fact that most of my free time would be in the middle of the night, I would have made a break for it to try and get into the city to actually see and taste a bit of China. Will have to save that for a later trip.
- Great opportunity here to practice your pit-toilet skills. Haven’t seen one of those since I left Bolivia!
Anyhoo—I decided to stick with this Blondie in South America
blog because, even though I am no longer blonde or in South America, I am fundamentally
and forevermore the girl whose life was changed by those experiences good and
bad on that continent a few years ago…..a trip that gave me the courage to
attempt things I may not be capable of and perhaps the stupidity to not realize
it. Which is usually the only way one
accomplishes anything in life. So
Blondie in South America rides again!
Stay tuned for exciting updates on what to do during
multiple hours at the Singapore airport, an all-new flight safety video
starring Hobbits, and questions and answers about just how close they let the
cattle get to landing airplanes here in the Southland.
A coupla pix thus far:
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