I’m back in Taiwan. This time for 3 weeks. Going to conduct the Systems Integration Tests (SIT) and User Acceptance Tests (UAT) during this trip. Pray that everything will go smoothly.
My flight to Taipei yesterday was 8 hours long! That’s right, 8 hours. Why? Typhoon! We were about an hour out from Taipei when I noticed on the moving map display that we have made a U-turn. After a while, the captain came on the PA and said that we were diverting to Hong Kong as the Taipei airport was closed. My first diversion ever in my flying "career". In any case, we landed at Hong Kong International Airport, parked at a remote stand and wasn’t allowed to de-plane.
Thank God that I upgraded this sector of my flight to business class. The entertainment system was left on and I watched movies to kill time. But I noticed that economy class people didn’t have any headsets. Oops, must have been collected earlier prior to landing.
After two hours of waiting, captain said we were good to go and we departed Hong Kong at 2000hrs. Surprisingly smooth approach to Taipei and we landed at 2130hrs.
Then the next wait began. After clearing customs and immigration, I was met by a very very long queue of people waiting for taxis. Apparently, all the taxis have left as they didn’t expect any flights coming in yesterday. To make things worse, all the flights diverted were coming in at the same time and the queue just grew and grew. I ended up waiting for about 1.5 hours. And mind you, at this time, I haven’t even eaten dinner.
Finally got into the hotel at about midnight. After checking in, went to 7-11 to get cup noodles to eat first. And after talking to Debbie, crashed. Thank God today has been declared a typhoon holiday. Got chance to rest.
Eventful day indeed. Like I said, thank God I was in business class for that flight. If not, I think I would have been a very irate passenger. Some consolations. I was able to peek out of the door of the plane to take in the view of the tarmac. And the cockpit door was open so I peeked in and caught a glimpse of the cockpit. Quite a consolation for plane nut like me.
Signing off now. Want to get ready to go out and grab lunch and maybe shop around a bit for some stuff. Until the next time, cheers… :Þ