Instead of being back home, I’m sitting in the Vancouver airport on what appears to be a gloomy and frigid day outside. I’ve been here nearly three hours, after a flight from Tokyo, after spending a full 25 hours at the airport there. Why spend so much time at the airport? It certainly was not by choice.
Turns out, November 23 is a public holiday in Japan and as such public transportation operates on altered schedules. [It should be noted that Tokyo’s public transit is nuts to begin with; they have three subway and seven train networks that are all operated by different organizations, each having their own fare structure and scheduling policies.]
A trip that should have taken me less than hour, took 2 ½ hours. By the time I got to the airport and found the right desk of the right floor of the right wing of the right terminal – all while lugging 49 kilos of baggage around – my flight had already taxied into the queue for take-off. F.
And so it goes. A wonderful Air Canada employee (who spoke exquisite English)helped sort out my options:
- Book it across town to Tokyo’s other airport and catch a midnight flight direct to San Fran for $3,944 Canadian.
- Snag a seat on an early morning Delta flight from Narita to SFO via Honolulu for only $3,860 Canadian.
- Re-book my current flight for the following day – same time – for a change reservation fee of $170USD.
Seems like a pretty obvious choice, but I must admit that I nearly plunked down 4k just to get the hell home.
Ultimately I made the responsible choice and settled on option three, leaving me with an entire day kill at the airport. I burned through Carl Hiaasen’s Basket Case (a remarkably quick read for 400+ pages), edited some photos, tried to sleep and waited.
However, such events are not exactly unexpected. It’s become something of a tradition for things to go wrong on the homeward leg of my international trips:
- Flying home from Paris after nine months of travel and study in Europe, I misread my flight info (damned military time), missed my flight, had a sleepover in Du Gaul, then got stranded in DC the next day as it was the same day as the whole “liquid explosives” debacle in London.
- In transit from Thailand to Australia a family tragedy caused all travel plans to change and I spent the better part of a day shuttling around STA offices and the Melbourne airport to get a flight home.
- Returning from La Paz, Bolivia was a complete nightmare.
And now this gem. Good news? Mishaps like this really no longer phase me. And especially this time…I camped with a banana muffin, a grande chai latte and Christmas music blaring in a Starbucks for about six hours, which isn’t too shabby.
But here’s the kicker – when it finally came time to board the plane, the flight was delayed by over an hour. Had this happened the day before, I would have had plenty of time to make the original flight. *sigh*
Sidebar: I’ve slept in my fair share of airports overnight, but Narita’s system is be far the best (mostly because they have a system at all). There’s a designated lounge to sleep in that’s constantly manned by a security guard (even though the whole airport is shut down anyways) and each overnight passenger registers their passport so security knows who you are if you choose to wander around.
